Some people come back from vacation and immediately start planning the next trip. These two came back and never unpacked.
Libby Rome and her husband have been living full time on cruise ships for over three years, paying around $66 a day between them for accommodation, food, transportation, and entertainment.
There is no apartment waiting for them somewhere, no car sitting in a garage, no utility bills piling up. Just an ocean view and a fresh port every few mornings.
This is not their first experiment with unconventional living.
The couple have been nomadic for more than 16 years, long before they ever set foot on a cruise ship as a permanent address. But the decision to make the ship itself home turned out to be the logical endpoint of a lifestyle they had already been building for years.
What Everyday Life Actually Looks Like at Sea
One of the first questions people tend to ask about full-time cruising is how the mundane stuff gets handled. The answer, according to Rome, is that a lot of it simply disappears.
Laundry is a good example. After reaching Elite tier status with Princess Cruises, which is awarded to passengers with more than 15 sailings or 150 cruise days, Rome receives complimentary laundry service.
She puts her clothes in a bag, fills out a form, leaves it by the door, and her cabin steward returns everything clean and hung the following day.
Other Elite tier benefits include a complimentary minibar setup, afternoon tea delivered to the stateroom, and a canapé selection on formal nights.
Mail goes to her sister in the United States. Most ships can handle outgoing mail too, though anyone sending something time-sensitive should ask at which port the mail will actually be dispatched.
Possessions stay minimal by design. Without much to own, there is not much to maintain, replace, or run errands around. The whole feedback loop of buying things and then managing them simply does not apply.
Managing a Chronic Illness on a Moving Ship
Rome has Type 1 Diabetes, which requires consistent access to medical supplies. At the beginning of her full-time sailing life, this was genuinely difficult. She was never departing from the same port twice, which meant different doctors, different pharmacies, and no continuity.
Her solution was to start booking back-to-back sailings that depart and return from the same port. On turnaround days, between one voyage ending and the next beginning, she can visit the same doctor repeatedly and establish some consistency in her care.
She has also used the onboard medical facilities when needed and found them reassuring rather than a source of anxiety.
Princess Cruises, like most lines, is clear that its medical centers are designed for acute care during vacations rather than long-term chronic illness management, but for emergencies and unexpected situations, the capability is there.
The $66 a Day Breakdown
Rome shared her cost estimate on TikTok, putting their per-day spend at around $66 per person for accommodation, transport, meals, and entertainment.
The couple does not stay on the same ship indefinitely. They rotate across two or three different ships throughout the year, which keeps things varied and helps them make use of loyalty perks across different itineraries.
For people used to paying rent or a mortgage on top of utilities, groceries, transportation, and everything else that comes with a fixed address, the number lands differently than it might at first glance.
What to Do Before You Commit
Rome’s advice for anyone seriously considering this kind of lifestyle is straightforward: test it properly before making any permanent decisions.
- Book a standard cruise to get comfortable with ship life.
- Follow that up with a repositioning cruise, which tends to have more sea days and fewer port stops, giving a truer sense of extended time on board.
- Pay attention to how the body responds to motion. Rome got mildly seasick a couple of times in the early days but found it manageable once she learned how to prevent it.
The sea days matter because they reveal what the experience is actually like when there is no destination to look forward to that morning. A lot of people discover they love it. Others realize they need land more than they thought.
Three Years In, No Plans to Stop
After more than three years of waking up on the water, Rome told People that neither of them has any desire to change course.
For two people who have spent the better part of two decades living without a fixed home, the cruise ship is not a compromise or a quirky experiment. It is, by any reasonable measure, exactly where they want to be.