I received an email from one of the members asking me about whether we had any articles about working on the cruise ships and how to do it.
Whilst I don't think this would sit well in the articles section, as it's more experience than fact, I thought it would make a good post on the forum and that it may encourage discussion from other hairdressingworld.com members.

As somebody who spent 2 years traveling the world as a hairdresser on cruise ships from the age of 19-21, I think I have a fair background to be able to share the pros and cons.

How you get an interview for the job

First off, don't waste your money on these so called "agencies" or books that promise to get you work on cruise ships. If you are a hairdresser, beautician, fitness instructor, masseuse etc. you can go directly to the companies who run the on board health spas. There are 2 of them: a)Steiner and b)Harding Bros.
You DO NOT contact the shipping companies direct as they have nothing to do with the employment of the health spa staff. Only the 2 companies I have named already. Their contact details are the bottom of this article.

Everything I write in this article is with regard to Steiner (as that is who I chose to work with (they have all the best and most prestigious ships)).

Before you apply for the job, you obviously need to be qualified. You will also need to have some good references from your employers. Funnily enough, the references need to be more about how you are as a team player than your technical skills - Steiner don't want to stick problem people who cannot get on with others out in the middle of the ocean insulting the passengers.
So, if you don't get on with any of your previous bosses, I would recommend you 1. Buy a book about getting on well with your bosses, and 2. Go to work in another salon for a year putting into practice your new social skills before you apply for the job. Seriously, if your references don't say what a lovely person you are; you may as well forget it.

So if you're confident that your boss (and your previous bosses) would give you good references (and yes; they will be asked...Steiner are very thorough), then it might be time to apply for the job.

Now at this stage, I can really tell you what they're looking for because I was personally asked to trade test applicants while I was in London awaiting my second contract (I'd been working with them for over a year at this point).

After you have filled in your application form, you will be probably be invited to a seminar near your home town in a hotel conference room or something. You will meet a representative who will show you a DVD about life on board, and will also give you a "mini-interview". If you have impressed them, you might even be told on the same day, and the result will be "round 2" in London (like American Idol).
To get to round 2, I suggest that you attend the first conference dressed in "black and white" neatly ironed clothing. Men; be clean shaven, women; put your hair up if it's any longer than shoulder length. Make sure that your make-up is natural and your jewellery is minimal. POLISH YOUR SHOES!!! (I always used to check applicants shoes). Take along a pad and paper and ask questions that you feel are important. SMILE!

The London Audition

For round 2, you will need to go to London and dazzle them with your technical ability. You will be asked to do a minimum of a cut and blowdry and also a hair-up for which you will need models. I actually went out onto the streets and found 2 ladies because I was so poor that I couldn't afford for 2 friends to come with me all the way to London.
Anyway, your hair-up should involve some back-combing and should take you no more than 30 minutes, so practice lots before you go. Use lots of hairspray and lots of pins. When I was checking applicants work on behalf on the company, the first thing I would do is go up to the hair-up, put my hand onto it and give it a bloody good shake! I was checking to see if the hair-up produced would withstand a walk out on promenade deck with a strong sea breeze. It's no good for the company if a passenger pays over $30 for her hair to be put up if it falls apart as soon as she walks back to her cabin.
The cut and blowdry should ideally be medium length and blowdried with LOTS of body. Heck, even a 12 year old girl can blowdry smooth. We were always looking for body, glamour, luxury. If you could do that, we knew you could meet even the most demanding passenger's needs (I once had a woman who demanded to look just like Elizabeth Taylor circa 1989, and my God did she know what she wanted...she instructed me all the way). We are looking for you to complete the cut and blowdry in no more than 45 minutes.

Afterwards, you will be given a colour exam (written) so make sure you know your theory.

After that, you will be given another short interview disguised as a thankyou for coming down. You might be grilled here, so be calm and think before you answer. Your interviewer might say stuff like, "I don't think you're ready for this kind of position yet. How do you feel about that?". Funnily enough, the person I got at this stage was called Vicky, and she was so cold it was like talking to a block of ice. It turned out that it was the daughter of the owner, Clive. Yet once I got the job, and I met her again in London, I found her to be really nice. I understood what she had been doing, and it's something I still do to this day.

After the London Audition

Ok, so after the London audition you will find out whether you have gotten the job or not by way of a letter in the post. If you haven't, write back and thank them for the opportunity of meeting with them. Explain that you will apply again in 12 months when you have more experience, and make sure you spend the next 12 months working in a busy salon to get your speed and confidence up.
If you did get the job, you will need to get prepared. You will need to spend some money at this stage on uniforms, visas, passport, medicals and training supplies. You will also need savings of around £600-800 to get you to London, live off while you are training, and to spend when you're in the hotel abroad awaiting your first ship.

Follow the welcome letter to a 'T'. And if I were you, I would buy new shoes, new make-up, new clothes, new handbags etc. for your stay in London, because it's right there and then that they will decide what sort of ship/passengers you would suit. If you come to training looking slightly less fresh or dawdy, you can forget about a 5 star ship and varied itenary. It will be backwards and forwards between Fort Lauderdale and the Bahamas twice a week for the next 8 months...sounds glamarous now, but it will become very boring, very fast.
So make sure you look and act your best at all times. It can be hard, because you will be staying at the YMCA, sharing a room, getting buses everywhere - but if that makes you think twice, have a serious re-think about going on the ships because you will be sharing a cabin much smaller than the room at the YMCA for the next 8 months!

During your training, you will learn some new hairdressing techniques, as well as about life on board and your duties for the next 8 months, including public speaking at demonstrations, life boat drill, and the hierarchy of life on a cruise ship (who the hotel manager is and why he is so important).
But quite a lot of your training will be spent learning about the products used in the Spa, from the hair products to the skin products, even to the slimming tablets. Of course, you will also have to learn about every service offered on the salon/spa menu inside out. You will be expected to be able to sell all of these products and services to the passengers once you on board, and you will be targeted to do so. If you don't sell products (and lots of them), well I guess that all I can say is that I hope you enjoy the Fort Lauderdale-Bahamas run, and don't mind being pictured on a tug boat rather than a cruise ship.
So make sure you can demonstrate while you are in London that you are not only good at doing hair, but than you can retail too.
They'll pick a ship for you based on what they see.

Once you're out there

Once you have been placed on a ship, you will fly out to meet it wherever it next docks. Get plently of sleep if you're put up in a hotle becuase you are going to need it.
When you arrive on your ship, you will be told your working hours. These are likely to be 1 full day off each week, and 2 half days (i.e. you will be at work for 6 days per week). Your working hours will be this - start at 7.45AM, have one hour for lunch at around 1PM and then continue working until 8.15PM. That's correct, you will be working 11 hours each day. And beleve me, every day will be like Christmas Eve in the salon (i.e. fully booked). You will be completely on your own and you will have no assistants. You will need to do all of your own cleaning up, shampooing, towel folding etc. And you will be working on a 30 minute appointment system for all blowdrys and hair ups. After the consultation and shampooing, you are left with about 15-20 minutes for every client, and most of them want big hair.
When you have a half day off, one of those days will be in the middle of the week where you will start at either 7.45AM - 2PM or 2PM - 8.15PM. Your other half day off will always be in the same place, and that is the place where the passengers get off to go home (I know New York and Miami like the back of my own hand thanks to that).
Be warned though, the second half day off is preceeded the night before with what's called "Port clean". Port clean is named becuase it is the deep clean you do before arriving in the home port. It's to make sure that the entire ship looks brand new for the next set of passengers. This is not a normal salon clean by any standards. When you have finished your working day at 8.15pm (this will have been a full working day where you started at 7.45AM), you will get something to eat, get changed into your jeans and t-shirt, return to the spa for around 9.30pm and begin cleaning EVERYTHING...every roller, every drawer, every chair foot, every top of every mirror, every floor tile...and try as we did over the 2 years I did the job, we never once finished as a team before 1AM.

Now the scary bit...for all this work, you will be paid the princely sum of around $45 per week (£25). That's not a typo. Fourty Five US DOLLARS or Twenty Five UK Pounds. Each week. There is no such thing as minimum wage at sea, so get that idea out of your head right now.
But here's the good bit. On top of that, you will be paid 10% of everything you do or SELL! Hmmmmmnnnnn...see why I blabbered on about being able to retail before? If you do a blowdry for $30, you will get paid $3 in commission. But if you can find a problem that the client has, to which you can offer a solution e.g. a skin cream for $60, while you are styling her hair, the bill will now be $90 and you commission tripled to $9 for doing no extra work (just 2 minutes of conversation). So it didn't take me long at all to figure out that I would earn way more commission selling skin care products than hair products (average hair product commission $1.50, average skin care product commission $5), so I decorated my entire station with skin care products and simply waited for my clients to ask me..."What's that?"

Despite being fully booked all week, I often made more commission from selling skin-care products than I did from my hairdressing services all week!

And the way I looked at it was this...the products were really good and worth their cost (I still use them to this day), and the client was actually getting a problem solved that she may have had for many years, rather than giving all her holiday money to the casino. My clients used to thank me for taking an interest in them, and the feedback left at the end of the cruise on the passenger comment cards was always positive.

So my $45 a week retainer, was increased to $500+ in one easy step. And with no rent, no food bills, no utility bills, and NO TAX etc. I had loads of money to spend (though now I am older I would probably save instead. I mean, I was buying my T-Shirts each week at Saks 5th Avenue, NY for $200 each!).

Conclusion

I really enjoyed my time on the ships and would recommend anyone to do it. I have tried to be fair and put mostly the cons of the job into this post so that you can really weigh up whther it's right for you. I mean, while I was having a ball earning loads of money, there were others in my team who wouldn't sell, and they were receiving around $200 per week for doing the same hours and they were always miserable.
I very quickly rose through the ranks, to assistant manager and then spa manager during my first contract and changed ships 3 times in order to do so.
By my second contract I was personally offered the position on the QE2 cruise ship to do a world cruise. At 21 years of age, that was a fantastic opportunity and I didn't have to think twice. I've woken up in some faraway places, and did some exciting things. I've fallen asleep on carribean beaches after a night out clubbing, jumped out of airplanes, trekked through the rain-forests, gone on safari in Kenya, stood atop table mountain, watched the July 4th fireworks from underneath the Brooklyn Bridge, snorkled the Great Barrier Reef, visited the Raffles hotel, seen sex shows in Thailand, visited palaces, visited hovels, crossed the international date line and lost a day of my life, stood a top an active volcano, gone caving 500ft underground, swam with the dolphins, seen the flying fish, been welcomed into a school full of children in the American Samoa...God I could go on and on.
So you see, working on cruiseships is like anything else in life...the reward is equal to the risk.

If you feel like exploring the possibility further, you can check out these 2 links (If you contact them, please mention you saw them on this site. Perhaps they might be able to reply to this post with more information for other members):

Steiner

Harding Bros.

Regards,
Chris

Chris thank you for replying so quickly.
I have been offered an interview with OnBoardSpa. You did not mention this company so I would be interested to know if anyone else has had any involvement with them.

Thanks a gain it is a very good piece.

glamchic wrote:

I have been offered an interview with OnBoardSpa. You did not mention this company so I would be interested to know if anyone else has had any involvement with them.



Hi Glamchic.
OnBoardSpa is actually Harding Bros., who are linked to in the post above.