Travel Tech/ Meet On Cruise

Protecting Your Pictures

Website and app allows cruisers to make shipmates before they even come aboard.

By Rico Bronte

For cruisers, meeting someone on your ship with similar interests can seem downright daunting; your dining table number may as well be a Lotto number for all the luck involved.

Enter MeetOnCruise.com and the site’s free iPhone app, both designed specifically for cruisers looking to find fellow shipmates with similar interests. The idea started when founders Faraz Qureshi and Eddy Garrido were looking back on a cruise they had taken. They had enjoyed themselves, but it wasn’t until the last few days of the cruise when they finally met some folks they had things in common with, that they had that cruise-of-a-lifetime experience that everyone hopes to enjoy.

“We asked ourselves, ‘Why was there not an easier way to meet others on our cruise as soon as we booked,’” recalls Qureshi. “Cruising is a social vacation with hundreds and thousands of vacationers on a mini-city for an extended period — there had to be an easier way to meet people with shared interests.”

Utilizing their shared interest and knowledge of technology, they launched MeetOnCruise.com in January 2010, and, through listening to the cruising community, have been refining it ever since, turning into the user-friendly, easy-to-navigate application it is today. Once you book your vacation, you enter your ship and sailing date and can join that cruise’s Roll Call, which will show you other cruisers that have joined. You can meet other cruisers — on yours or any other cruise’s Roll Call — and get to know your soon-to-be traveling neighbors through online discussions. In addition, you can create a profile to show off your cruising resume, review and provide tips for certain ships, and even upload photos to share.