It’s the ship where everybody knows your name. But is that convenient – or creepy?

“Measured in hours,” asks quizmaster Jed of the half-full lecture theatre on Deck Seven of the Majestic Princess, a vast cruise ship that’s steaming steadily through the Tasman Sea in the general direction of Hobart, with only the lightest of rolls despite the six-metre swells, “how long did it take for the Titanic to sink?”

A light titter runs through the Vista Lounge.

“I’m sorry to bring it up,” says Jed.

But he’s not sorry, obviously. It’s far too warm for icebergs and no one’s worrying about seaworthiness or a shortage of lifeboats, and Jed’s just doing his job: bantering his way through the 45-minute “Let’s Get Quizzical” – a soothing, low-stakes contest of our knowledge that includes questions about Michael Jackson’s signature dance, Batman’s alter ego, the common name for sodium chloride, and the name of the pirate boat in Peter Pan.

Embarrassingly, I get two of those four answers wrong, and also flub the Titanic question, but there’s no time to wallow in my shame: I’m on a schedule, determined to squeeze as much shipboard participation as I can into a single day.

It’s a sunny Tuesday morning in mid-February, during that week of calm that squeaked in between the havoc of the Auckland mega-floods and Cyclone Gabrielle.

The Majestic Princess is on day 11 of a 14-day cruise that started in Auckland and will end in Sydney but for me it’s day three of seven, as our media group boarded mid-cruise in Dunedin. Today is the first of two “Tasman Sea days”, so there’ll be no shore visits to distract me.

Yet this is still no small challenge: the calendar of activities available aboard this ship, with its 3500-odd passengers and another 1300 or so crew, is like a night-school administrator’s hallucinatory fever-dream: I can take a line-dancing class or a quiz; I can attend a seminar about second-hand Rolexes or play mini golf; I can join a raffle or watch a bartending show.

Timing clashes mean I’ll never fit in the table-tennis tournament and the acupuncture seminar; the “seacrafts” session and the soccer shootout, and I’m feeling unsure about whether to invest the $10 minimum stake to play bingo.

Boarding a cruise is to cross into a slightly strange yet strangely pleasant alternate universe. The ship uses a system called MedallionClass, where every guest carries around a coin-sized electronic “medallion” which, in conjunction with an app on your smartphone, functions as an omniscient and omnipotent boarding pass, room-key, ID card, credit card, onboard navigation aid, event scheduler and information portal.

The medallion allows the crew to track exactly where on the ship you are at any given moment, which seemed thoroughly dystopian until I realised it meant you could order a coffee or cocktail or room service meal from literally anywhere on the ship and have it brought to you faster than an Uber Eats. (That said, I never quite got used to the fact that whenever I approached a bar the waitstaff knew my name, because my medallion had alerted their iPad to my presence and presented them with my photo and name. It’s a fine line between convenient and creepy.)

My second-favourite function of the medallion app was the map which showed my real-time location, and gave step-by-step instructions on how to get to my destination. Without it I would have been constantly lost, because .

Jasper Wolthuis, the Dutch-born hotel general manager, gave our group a whistle-stop tour of it all: the restaurants, dining rooms and bars; the shore-excursion desk; the duty-free watch and perfume stores; the multi-storey central atrium that felt like an up-market shopping mall only with double the usual quota of gold railing, marble floors and spiral staircases.

We fast-walked through the casino (closed until we’re 12 miles off the coast and into international waters); past the TV studio (where I caught sight of quiz-master Jed with a different hat on, leading a choir of passengers through a rehearsal of Blame It on the Boogie). We checked out the huge performance theatre; the “Camp Discovery” youth and teen centres (empty seeing its term-time); the indoor and outdoor pools, the gym and the spa.

Wolthuis says the medallions can also be used for Covid contact tracing, but that function has recently been turned off now. Just like the outside world, cruise ships are dismantling the systems put in place to combat the virus.

In most regions mask-wearing on cruises is a thing of the past, but Wolthuis says the Australasian rules are much stricter, so on this cruise staff are still universally masked, and guests are also expected to mask up in group settings. And compliance is high: I’ve not seen such widespread mask-wearing since New Zealand was last in lockdown.

Covid is still a touchy subject for cruise companies. As the pandemic took hold in early 2020, during a cruise around New Zealand and Australia. Upon arriving in Sydney hundreds of passengers were without adequate screening, leading to local transmission. All cruises halted as borders slammed shut, and cruising , after Omicron brought an end to our elimination policy. As on land, infections onboard are no longer a show-stopper: cruise lines are required simply to monitor cases and keep sufferers isolated in their cabins for seven days.

If it’s any comfort, I can confirm that personally I made it through seven days aboard without catching Covid. Which was just as well because, like I said, I had a busy schedule to keep, especially on that Tuesday where I set myself the foolish task of participating in basically everything: I squeezed in a posing session with the onboard photographer, a Swedish massage, a TRX workout lesson, a seminar about Picasso from the ship’s gallery director, a lot of sweating in the spa’s sauna, several meals, lots of drinking, and I even found time to spend half an hour thoroughly lost while looking for the gym.

Then after dark, I concluded the day with an enjoyably terrible movie: Top Gun: Maverick on the big outdoor movie screen while wrapped up snugly on some deckchairs and drinking cocktails with my new media-pack chums.

All this, and yet I’d still missed so much that day: a pickle ball tournament, a Tag Hauer event, a seminar on how to “eat more to weigh less”, a free footprint analysis, a Neil Diamond tribute act in the big theatre and an art auction where I could have bought one of the Picasso ceramic pieces mentioned in that earlier seminar, if only I’d had a spare $20k on me.

Suffice to say, on Wednesday I had a bit of a sleep-in. And for the remainder of the cruise I pursued a rather less manic timetable.

Filling your day with shipboard entertainment is, of course, enormous fun. But there are a couple of other things that are arguably even better. Things like staying in your cabin and reading a book, as a sea breeze wafts the curtains leading to your balcony; or sitting in a top-deck jacuzzi and looking at the clouds, till your fingers turn wrinkly; or, best of all, just leaning on a deck-rail and marvelling at the fact that when you’re halfway across the Tasman Sea, no matter which way you look there’s just ocean, all the way to the horizon.

Princess Cruises has a number of Australia/NZ cruises next summer on four different ships, including a 13-day round trip departing Sydney on November 27, 2023 on Majestic Princess. Fares start at $1759 per person twin share for an inside cabin. See: