Cruise Docs

Simple site with cruise dailies, notices, menus, and flyers from a variety of lines and sailings.

View various cruise dailies, notices, menus, and other documentation for passengers. Cruise enthusiasts appreciate 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 cruisers to better plan their daily activities and specialty dining reservations
• Having details about drink menus, especially pricing, permits better budgeting and allows cost comparison over time
• Food menus are often the same between sailings of the same length, so you can choose your favourite items ahead of time, or decide to skip the main dining room and go to the buffet instead
• Even purely promotional flyers can be interesting, indicating which day has a specific sale or which “free” charms might be offered

While this information can often be found on various forums and personal websites, it is usually not easily searchable, or might be locked behind a Pinterest-style registration gate. Cruise lines also sometimes make these details available in their apps, but they might only be available for booked passengers, accessible only when connected to the ship network, show only one day at a time, and disappear once the cruise is over.

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 and documents are stored in 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, or Princess Patter. 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.
• Menus, for food or beverage venues on the ship, or from related shore excursions.
• Other, which contains promotional material, price lists, and otherwise uncategorized documentation. Docs in this section may be moved to different categories in future.

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!

Eventually I expect this site will exceed GitHub Pages’ maximum limits (1GB bundle, 10 minute build timeout, 100GB monthly bandwidth) and will have to be published somewhere else.