Room, with a view

The balcony is the latest necessary luxury in cruises. The pricey extra is surging in popularity, but what you get can vary wildly.

By ARLINE and SAM BLEECKER

© St. Petersburg Times,
published September 16, 2001

[Times art]

Once, the only objects you could count on to cling to the flanks of a cruise ship were barnacles. Nowadays, it's balconies.

And they are increasingly alluring to passengers. Take Crymes Pittman, for instance: The Mississippi attorney sails several times a year on luxury Silversea Cruises, but he would not dream of booking a cabin that lacked its own balcony.

"It's just like sitting on your back deck at home," he croons.

Pittman may perch on the other end of the economic spectrum from most passengers, but he shares their wish list when it comes to balconies.

"Balconies are probably the single most in-demand feature today," says Rick White of White Travel, in West Hartford, Conn. "Once passengers get a balcony, they're hooked."

"It's a one-way street," concurs Joseph Farcus, the marine architect who has designed 17 Carnival ships and currently is working on eight more, including some for Carnival's Costa brand.

Farcus believes this has to do with the romance of the sea. A balcony "gives you a window on the ocean," he says. A guy who cruises more often than most mortals, even Farcus was impressed when he watched whales from his balcony on a recent Alaska sailing.

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Virtually everyone we interviewed about balconies offered numerous explanations for their appeal -- from being a sanctuary, to being the place for dinners by moonlight and breakfasts at sunrise, to being a convenient place to smoke. The last also permits cruise lines to allocate more smoke-free cabins, as balconies provide the means to smoke elsewhere.

Passengers also can gauge the weather outside without dialing the purser's desk, enjoy drinks al fresco and privately entertain other guests they meet on board.

"They want to be able to open their door and sleep with the sound of the ocean," notes Brad Ball of Renaissance, a line whose seven, 700-passenger ships each have at least 233 balcony staterooms.

Additionally, "As (cruise lines) go to places where people want to see where they are -- Alaska and Europe, for example -- passengers love sitting (on their balconies) during the sailing in and out of port, versus wandering off to another deck," says Mark Kammerer, Holland America's vice president of marketing.

That line introduced balconies with its Statendam in 1993, and it has had them on every new ship since then.

Until now, though, the minimum category cabin you could book with a balcony on Holland America ships was a minisuite. However, the line is increasing the number of balconies on its next five ships, beginning with Zuiderdam, which will have 461 of them, more than any other Holland America ship. This stateroom category is called "deluxe veranda outside," and it effectively confers balconies to standard outside staterooms.

And the luxury category cruise line Crystal, bringing out its first new ship in nearly eight years in 2003, will nearly triple the number of balconies on its two existing vessels.

Ironically, more passengers want a balcony "to get away from it all" -- even as they take a cruise vacation that by definition packages people who want to, well, get away from it all.

The surge in balcony popularity coincides with the advent of the megaship. As ships get bigger, carrying from 2,100 to 3,500 passengers, truly private space becomes more precious.

Timothy Dacey, president of the Steamship Historical Society of America, of Providence, R.I., points out that having a balcony cabin on a behemoth vessel means you don't have to mix with thousands of others at breakfast or worry about securing a deck chair.

And travel agents, cruise lines and passengers all views balconies as added value. Thus, the passengers are willing to pay a premium for them, says Bruce Good of upscale Seabourn Cruise Line. "Essentially, balconies are just another denomination of currency used in the assessment of value by agents and consumers."

Holland America's Kammerer sums up the balcony's allure this way: "Do you want to see (the ocean) and feel it?"

[Photo: Sam Bleecker] Passengers stand at the railings of some balconies aboard the Grand Princess; the views from here can include those relaxing on the lower-deck balconies.

A downside to outside?

But for some passengers, price could well be the spoiler. When asked where passengers are today in terms of balconies, travel agent White says, only half jokingly, "They want them, but they don't want to pay for them."

Prices for balcony cabins range widely, from line to line and ship to ship. But you won't have to hock the family heirlooms to book one. Because of pricing oddities, there often are opportunities to get a balcony cabin for the price of a regular cabin, White says.

Nevertheless, there are some disadvantages that you may want to keep in mind before negotiating for a balcony. For instance, while privacy walls might keep you from seeing your neighbors on their balconies, you are likely to overhear them. And vice versa.

Similarly, ships that have multiple decks of balconies are often designed so that passengers standing on balconies on higher decks can see balconies below and to the sides. For passengers who might have been planning to get that overall tan, this lack of privacy is worth considering.

Further, some balconies are so narrow as to be negligible. Historian Dacey describes those on Royal Caribbean's Monarch of the Seas and Majesty of the Seas as "basically a door (from the cabin) with almost a clip-on veranda."

There is a social-philosophical factor, too: The vaunted solitude a balcony confers logically keeps passengers isolated from one other. The balcony, Dacey says, "limits the sociability of a ship.

"Once, passengers used to meet on boat deck for (sail-away) parties, or they met friends when leaving port. Now everybody's on their verandas, having their own separate social event."

Dacey recalls sailing through the Panama Canal on the old Rotterdam as the Crystal Harmony -- a luxury vessel with 260 balcony cabins -- was transiting simultaneously: "Everybody on our ship was out on deck, but everyone on Crystal was out on their own balconies in their bathrobes."

Perhaps that's why another Silversea passenger, Jane King of Newport Beach, Calif., would never consider a balcony. "I cruise by myself and, if I'm too comfortable (in my cabin), I'm liable never to leave it and then I'll stay cruising by myself."

Balconies burgeon

Nevertheless, even the lower-priced cruise lines are rushing to add balconies to their new ships. For instance, 80 percent of outside cabins on the Carnival Spirit and Carnival Pride will have balconies -- a staggering 682 per ship. Princess Cruises' new Golden Princess, like its twin the Grand Princess, has more than 700 balcony cabins. And when NCL's Norwegian Star debuts in November, nearly half of its 1,100 cabins will have balconies.

As big a boom as balconies are now, they seldom existed on resplendent liners of the past.

"The philosophy behind the old days of cruising was that your shipboard accommodations didn't matter because you didn't spend too much time in your cabin," notes Brad Ball of Renaissance.

To the degree that balconies existed at all, they were mostly in lieu of a lack of air conditioning and were reserved for the wealthy. After World War II, public rooms were air-cooled, and, by the 1950s, air conditioning blew in, leaving a big lapse in balcony building.

Sporadically, a number of ships were retrofitted with balconies, added to the existing superstructure. On the Queen Elizabeth 2, for example, in the late 1970s, 10 balconied cabins were grafted onto the top deck forward of the funnel.

If there was a seminal moment in balcony building, it was 1984, when Princess' Royal Princess became the first "purpose-built" ship with balconies, according to Dacey. It sprouted 150 balcony cabins, in all categories -- standard, deluxe and suites.

The industry never looked back.

Princess' 10-ship fleet now offers more than 3,000 cabins with balconies. Nearly 4,000 balcony cabins will be built on the line's next five ships, available from standard accommodations up to suites.

Even ultra-luxury Seabourn recently retrofitted its balconyless Pride, Spirit and Legend with what the line terms "French balconies" -- sliding glass doors that open onto a 24-inch deep sill.

But do not look for balconies on small expedition ships (except for the Clipper Odyssey, with nine balcony cabins) or on ships to, say, Antarctica. In open seas and on trans-Atlantic liners, balconies are not nearly as convenient as, say, in the calm Caribbean.

Not all are created equal

On any given ship, balconies fore and aft can differ considerably from those at the ship's midsection. And suite balconies differ from those on standard cabins.

Indeed, the range in balcony size on a given ship can be substantial. For example, those on Royal Caribbean's Nordic Empress range from 25 square feet to 222 square feet, and on Crystal's Symphony, from 45 square feet to 1,065 square feet.

Configurations vary as well. Aft cabins on Carnival's supersized Destiny-class ships, for instance, have sweeping balconies with both rear and side exposures. Similarly, on some Holland America ships, one category of balcony cabin includes two with hugely oversized balconies -- for the same fare.

Carnival designer Farcus discloses that, because Carnival Spirit's superstructure zigs in and out, balconies at the narrowest part of the ship are actually wider -- by approximately a foot -- than other same-category balconies.

And because balconies on Carnival's newer ships are not part of the metal wall of the hull, their protective railings are of clear Plexiglas rather than of solid steel, so passengers can view the ocean even if reclining in a lounge chair.

That is, if there is a lounge chair. Balconies may have minimal furnishings -- Seabourn's French balconies are too narrow even to accommodate deck furniture. Then again, balconies appended to some suites on Celebrity's Galaxy seem as big as Rhode Island.

According to White, the hands-down most fabulous balcony will debut on Norwegian Star: The ship features a pair of "garden villas" -- each with three bedrooms, a large living room, dining room and luxury bath -- that together will open onto a 4,446-square-foot "garden complex" (the balcony). This comes with hot tub, lounge area and a rooftop terrace.

One of those villas (with approximately half the balcony space) will set you back about $10,000 per person for a week's cruise. But that does include port charges and taxes. And third, fourth, fifth and sixth passengers in the suite can sail for as little as $179 per person.

Few passengers could opt for anything so lavish. But maybe booking a balcony boils down to this: Like some things in life, just having one is more fun.

- Arline and Sam Bleecker frequently write about the cruise industry.

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