Get paid to travel – How I did it
me at the Great Wall of China
One of the most educational and memorable things you can do as you grow up is to travel the world and sample the delights that other countries and cultures have to offer. But for many the prospect of doing this is just a pipe dream as they either cannot afford to take the trip, or cannot afford to take the time off work to go on the trip. But there is a way to get paid to travel and that is by working on a cruise ship.
This is what I personally did for 13 years of my life. I joined my first ship in July 1996 and stayed on ships until March 2009. In this time I went all over the world and visited places I could only have dreamed of seeing before. I decided that the best way to get paid to travel was to work on the cruise ships so I joined a Casino in England where I lived to train up as a dealer (croupier). After getting some experience in a land based Casino I applied to a few of the major cruise lines and received a letter from Carnival Cruise line a short while later inviting me to an interview in London. I went there, had a table test and a chat with one of the personnel there and ended up getting the job.
Get Paid to Travel – How it can change your life
When I joined the ship back in 1996 I never had any plans to stay on there for a certain amount of time, I just wanted to
me in Shanghai
travel for a while and see as many places as possible. The first ship I joined was the MS Maasdam which is a Holland America line ship, but run by Carnival as they own them. I had visions of me flying out to join a ship somewhere in the Caribbean, but I ended up getting the train from my home town on the south coast of England up to Dover where I joined the ship there. When I joined, there were 8 others who joined the same day who also worked in the Casino. All of them, bar one, had never worked on ships before and all had decided that this was the best way to get paid to travel, so we were all in the same boat as such (no pun intended). We all became very close as we went through this amazing experience together.
Although I joined the ship as a dealer, I got promoted to Supervisor after a few contracts and then to Assistant Manager and then after three years I was promoted to Casino Manager. Of course with the position you get extra perks such as my own cabin, with a double bed and port hole, and of course more money. I was starting to save a lot of money and this was when I really started to appreciate how great it was to get paid to travel.
me at work on the ship
Carnival Corporation has a total of 11 different brands that they operate and I experienced quite a few of them in my 13 years on ships. I worked on Holland America Line, Air Tours (when Carnival owned them), Carnival, Seabourn and Princess. I was fortunate enough to travel all over the world to places like Australia and New Zealand, South Pacific, Hawaii, Asia, Northern Europe, Mediterranean, Iceland, Caribbean, Canada and New England, Mexico, Alaska and Central America. There is no way I would have seen even a fraction of these places without deciding to get paid to travel and work on a cruise ship.
Throughout my 13 years on cruise ships, not only did I get paid to travel and managed to save up a lot of money, but I also learned so much through being a Casino Manager for ten years and being in charge of up to 40 staff an running an operation that had up to a million dollars passing through it every cruise.
I learned so much from this experience and the skills I developed while traveling the world will serve me well for the rest of my life. If you want to get paid to travel then working on a cruise ship is one of the best things you can do to achieve this.
Read this post on how to work on a cruise ship if you want to get paid to travel very soon
boat trip on the Mekong Delta, Vietnam