12 Cruise Tricks I Learned From a Cabin Steward — I Use Them Every Trip

You hand your suitcase to a cruise porter and figure that part is simple: give him the bag, walk onto the ship, and it shows up outside your cabin. On one cruise, mine never did — not at three, not at four, not after sailaway — and inside it were the shoes I wanted for dinner and almost everything I had packed for the first night. A cabin steward watched me check the hallway a fifth time and gave me one line that changed how I pack: pack like that bag is going to be late. I'm Calvin Rusk. I'm sixty-five, and since then I've picked up twelve luggage tricks from cabin stewards, porters, and a few mistakes of my own that I now use on every trip: putting your contact information inside the bag, keeping your home address off the outside tag, stripping old cruise tags before every embarkation, spotting your suitcase from twenty feet away, photographing it before the porter takes it, dropping a tracker inside, never handing over what you can't live without, packing the carry-on for day one, checking the tag before the bag leaves your hand, not packing more than you can carry off the ship yourself, knowing what to do the moment a bag goes missing, and number one, what happens on the final night when people accidentally pack the very things they need to get off the ship. What's the one thing you always keep in your cruise carry-on? Sometimes the best tip comes from somebody who's already made the mistake. Next time: the five places I check in the cabin before I unpack a single shirt, and the ten-second check I want the steward to know about before the ship leaves port. #CalvinRusk #CruisePacking