The average CEO of a company included in the S&P 500 makes 268 times more than their median employee, a figure that outrages many. Cruise line CEOs blow this number out of the water.
The top cruise line CEOs are paid a minimum of several hundred to well more than 1,000 times more than a median ship employee. Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings’ (NCLH) Harry Sommer makes 380 times more than the median NCLH crew member, Royal Caribbean’s Jason Liberty collects 953 times more than the median RCCL crew member, and Carnival Corporation’s Josh Weinstein brings home a staggering 1,398 times more than the median Carnival employee.
Leading the CEO pay discrepancy is Carnival Corporation’s CEO Weinstein who made $23,566,603 (million)in 2024 compared to the median employee salary of a Carnival crew member of just $16,854. Royal Caribbean CEO Jason Liberty is next making $17,216,276 (million) in 2023 compared to a median RCCL crew member of $18,073. At the “low” end of the trio, Norwegian Cruise Line Holding’s CEO Sommer made $8,864,592 (million) in 2023 compared to the median NCL crew member employee salary of $23,330.
There is no possible justification to such an absurdly high CEO – median crew compensation ratio. Highlighting this discrepancy, Carnival’s Weinstein hourly salary comes out to $11,800 meaning he makes the average Carnival crew member annual salary in less than an hour and a half.
Cruise line CEOs also receive a full range of perks such as luxury automobile allowances which often exceed the total compensation of a typical crew member. For example, while the Del Rio father and son (Del Rio Jr.) team were the CEO and president of Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings and Oceania Cruises, respectively, they collected over $45,000 a year in luxury car allowances. Del Rio Sr. also received $100,000 in a travel expense allowance, tax preparation service and a $20,000 country club allowance in 2023 when he retired on June 30th. In 2023, he still received $12,372,976 in compensation, bonuses, and “other compensation,” including $2,000,000 for consulting plus items such as a car allowance and executive medical insurance. Former CEO of Celebrity Cruises Lisa Lutoff-Perlo received an exorbitant luxury car allowance of $52,747 in addition to her compensation of $9,700,000 in 2023.
Proponents of higher cruise executive pay might argue that crew members’ salaries are not accurately captured in the median numbers as they are usually employed 8-9 months out of the year, and are provided “free” meals and room and board.
This argument is nonsense. Crew members work a minimum of 12 hours of physically demanding work a day, 7 days a week, for months at a time, living in close quarters under deck. Crew members in the last two decades have lost many of the maritime rights they previously had when U.S. maritime law applied to jury trials in U.S. courts when they were injured as of a result of their long hours of work. Crew members are now required to pursue international arbitration in feckless countries like Panama and the Bahamas where a single arbitrator paid by the cruise line will apply the law of these non-U.S. countries.
The greediest cruise CEO in the last decade, by far, has been Frank Del Rio, Sr., who took home over 67,000,000 in two years alone.
I have written extensively over the years about how cruise CEO’ collect obscene amounts of money while hard working crew members work extremely hard to make a living with few benefits and no retirement, pension-profit or 401k benefits at all. Some of my prior articles include:
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Image credit: Cruise ship sailing on sea of money – AARP; Harry Sommer – NCLH ; Jason Liberty – Royal Caribbean Group; Josh Weistein – Tradewinds.