Global cruise ship passengers

There is something deeply, cosmically funny about the fact that the number of people voluntarily boarding floating cities to eat unlimited shrimp has moved in perfect synchronisation with the number of people voluntarily boarding flying buses to save fourteen euros on a flight to somewhere they didn't particularly want to go in the first place. Both decisions suggest a species that has solved most of its immediate problems and decided to spend the solution on velocity and buffets. The universe, one suspects, is taking notes.

What's happening here is almost certainly economic tides lifting all boats, which is a phrase cruise companies probably use in their marketing materials without irony. Between 2010 and 2022, disposable income in developed economies grew erratically but persistently, cheap financing became cheaper, and a generation realised they could book a holiday for the cost of a used car—via either of these spectacularly efficient machines for moving humans from place to place. Both industries also benefited from the same underlying cultural shift: the notion that experiences, however uncomfortable or cheaply made, were worth more than the money spent on them. Add in that cruise passengers and budget airline passengers likely overlap significantly (people willing to endure one minor indignity are apparently willing to endure several), and you've got two industries swimming in the same economic current, growing at almost identical rates despite having almost nothing else in common.

This correlation doesn't actually tell us anything about cruise ships or Ryanair, which is perhaps the most honest thing we can say about it. It tells us, instead, that two completely unrelated ways of moving people around the world responded identically to the same mysterious force—probably economic growth, possibly cultural mood, possibly just that more humans existed in 2022 than in 2010. The correlation is real. The explanation remains offshore.