All That Happens Before And After You Disembark A Cruise Ship

How long the 1,200 crew members onboard Royal Caribbean’s Mariner of the Seas have to spruce up the entire ship — all 1,557 staterooms and public areas across 15 decks, including this pool deck.

This happens on the twice-weekly Turn-around Day, when the ship docks at Marina Bay Cruise Centre for guests to depart, and later on the same day, welcomes new guests who will embark on a three- or four-night cruise to destinations such as Penang and Phuket.

In between, the crew races against time to get the ship — which has a capacity equivalent to two towers of the Marina Bay Sands Hotel — spick and span in about five hours. Needless to say, it’s a gargantuan task.

Housekeeping, of course. It starts from 7am when guests vacate the rooms. Public areas such as the shopping promenade and restaurants have to be freshened up by 11.30am to receive the new guests who are ushered to lunch before checking in at 1pm.

Weight of laundry (including towels, table cloths, linen and crew uniforms) generated from a three-night cruise, and which needs to be washed and ironed in three days. In line with the company’s green policies, laundry in the six washers and two dry-cleaning machines is only done at full load to ensure efficiency in energy and water usage.

Just one room entirely dedicated to dirty laundry to avoid cross-contamination.

Laundry master Zhang Jinming demonstrating how clothes literally get straightened out in less than one minute, thanks to industrial steamers.

We’d be this happy doing our own ironing too if we had one of these flat presses at home.

This wonderful doodad irons out bedsheets then folds them neatly into piles. We want.

Real ice in the ship’s ice-skating rink. But did you know that the ice is recycled from another part of the ship: the water captured and distilled from the steam in the ships’ laundry.

40-foot containers containing food items that are loaded with enough food to feed up to 3,800 guests for a three-night cruise. The grocery list looks a bit like this: 10,400kg of beef, 13,108kg of poultry, 12,60kg of pork, 8,210kg of fish, 2,222kg of cheese, 54,000 eggs, 8,935kg of fresh veggies, 21,270kg of fruits and 2,200 gallons of ice cream.