Over the past few months, Beth Fletcher, a 39-year-old photographer in Derbyshire, England, has built a small following on TikTok by recapping and analyzing the British reality show “I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!” When the most recent season ended in early December, Ms. Fletcher lost content because, he said, “we don’t have a good reality TV show until the summer.”
Then the TikTok algorithm delivered: a video of Brooklyn Schwetje, a graduate student and influencer, who shared a day in her life with Ultimate World Cruise, a nine-month long, round-the-world cruise with Royal Caribbean. Ms. was immediately happy. Fletcher. “I had never been on a cruise, and the idea of a nine-month voyage blew my mind,” he said. After finding more videos from other cruise passengers, someone clicked: “Maybe this is our own reality TV show, but better.”
Since the ship’s launch from Miami on December 10, TikTok has been flooded with posts from voyeurs on land, dissecting videos shared by cruise passengers and speculating about the ship’s potential as a floating arena for high-level drama. Some have declared it a “nine-month TikTok reality show,” where passengers become accidental celebrities.
Videos with the hashtag #UltimateWorldCruise have had over 138 million views on the social media app.
This isn’t the first time that TikTok creators — competing for views with millions of other accounts — have mined videos posted by others to create their own genre of online reality TV. In 2021, the University of Alabama’s sorority rush became an internet fixation known as #BamaRush (and later, a Max documentary). But as with reality TV, the truth behind the content may seem beside the point.
With a 274-night itinerary, the Ultimate World Cruise is the longest cruise offered by Royal Caribbean. Fares for the entire trip — which stops in 65 countries — start at $53,999 per person and can go as high as $117,599, excluding taxes and fees, according to Royal Caribbean’s website. The ship, called Serenade of the Seashas a capacity for 2,476 guests, although a Royal Caribbean representative could not confirm how many are currently on board.
From England, Ms. Fletcher started posting videos of himself talking about the cruise, introducing passengers he met through their TikTok accounts as “cast members” and sharing tidbits about their life on board the ship captured from their videos.
More cruise-focused accounts have popped up: A creator refers to himself as TikTok’s “sea tea” director, updating his followers with “breaking news” (said to have leave the cruiseand another had tested positive for coronavirus). Another TikToker made a virtual bingo cards with predictions like “petty neighbor drama,” “a wedding,” “stowaway” and “pirate takeover.” That bingo card video got more than 300,000 views and hundreds of comments like, “This is the new Hunger Games,” and “This should be a social experiment.”
Ryan Holland, a 28 year old posting regular about the cruise, people say they are “curious how people can afford it” and “how people can tolerate being on a boat for so long.” He sees two possible outcomes for trending fixation. Either “it dies,” he said, “or it changes the future of reality TV.”
An unlikely star of #cruisetok is Joe Martucci, a 67-year-old recently retired from St. Cloud, Fla., posting from a ship that already holds @spendingourkidsmoney. The four children of Mr. Martucci to post video updates on TikTok, which he had never used before. His first video had almost half a million views.
“It’s not what we’re trying to be famous for,” said Mr. Martucci, who now posts daily with her husband, refers to themselves as “Cruise Mum & Dad” and opens each video with a cheeky, “Hi, kids.”
Mr. Martucci, who now has more than 69,000 TikTok followers, said the attention has been mostly positive, but he worries about fan accounts dedicated to drumming up drama. “I think they’re trying to do something,” he said. “They’re in it for the views and for the followers.”
Another passenger, Lindsay Wilson, a 32-year-old teacher from Phoenix, said the attention was “very weird.” He and some of the other passengers who gained new followers on TikTok connected in person and talked through group chats about their overnight stardom.
Apart from some grunts about passengers of different customer levels being treated unequally, some actual drama has yet to emerge. An exception, however, is a video (currently at 2.5 million views) posted on December 17 by Brandee Lake, a Black content creator and cruise passenger who said she was mistaken for a crew member, once by a passenger and another time by a staff member. Ms. did not confirm. Lake or Royal Caribbean if they have been contacted about the issue.
Despite TikTok’s cruise fix (and hope for drama), most of the videos coming from Serenade of the Seas became more mundane than gripping. Ms. described A typical day at sea looks like this: Zumba class, breakfast, coffee at Café Latte-tudes and an activity like doing a team puzzle or making gingerbread houses. After dinner, he will occasionally engage in evening programming, such as a silent disco, but usually he just retires to his room. “I’m trying to figure out where this drama is,” said Ms. Lake. “What am I missing?”
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