Cruise Docs

This is an experimental project to catalog various cruise dailies, notices, menus, and other documentation given out to passengers. Many people who enjoy cruising use this information to make decisions about booking, pre-cruise planning and onboard activities. Some examples:

• Knowing what the entertainment schedule is on a similar sailing allows people to make an educated guess about dining reservations
• Having details about menus, including pricing, permits better budgeting and allows tracking price increases and decreases over time

While this information can often be found on various forums and personal websites, it is often not easily searchable, or locked behind a Pinterest-style registration gate. The goal is to tag, categorize and make this information accessible in a way that can both be picked up by search engines, and is easy to browse for interested cruisers.

Images are stored in three high-level categories:

• Dailies, which are the newsletters/daily programs detailing activities and venue hours of operation. Different cruise lines will have different names for these, eg: Celebrity Today, Carnival Fun Times, Norwegian Freestyle Daily. This category may also include children’s program schedules.
• Notices, which are generally non-promotional in nature, and contain useful or necessary information in regards to shipboard or port operations. You might find tender information, disembarkation procedures, or announcements about port changes that were made on the relevant sailing.
• Other, which contains promotional material, price lists, and uncategorized documentation.

If you are interested in contributing to this project, consider emailing your content to jake@jakebillo.com. In your message, indicate if and how you would like to be credited (full name, website/social media).

If this gets popular, at some point in the future there will be a full set of terms for submitting images, but for now by doing so you agree that you are the creator and owner of any content sent and you give me an irrevocable right to store and display it.

This website is being built in a slightly different way than some of my other projects. So far I’m using the following technologies:

• Hugo (static site generator)
• Geekdocs Hugo theme
• GitHub Pages (with GitHub Actions to publish)
• GitHub Codespaces

GitHub in particular allows viewers to propose edits to pages by clicking the “Edit Page” button in the top right. If you’re familiar with the pull request model, I welcome contributions!