How to Use a Cruise Butler Without Getting Freaked out About Your Dirty Laundry

Pro-tip: Separate your dirty laundry from your clean things.

I was kicked back on the sofa in the living room of my Sapphire Verandah Suite on Crystal Symphony, sipping from a flute of Charles Heidsieck Champagne, nibbling on some chef-prepared canapés, while my butler and stateroom attendant unpacked my luggage.

“Hold up,” some friends say, “You let them go through your stuff? What about your dirty underwear?” 

This always seems to come up whenever I mention that butlers will pack and unpack your luggage for you. I’m not sure what kind of unspeakable damage my friends are doing to their undergarments during their travels that they’re that reticent to let a stranger they’ve paid money for personalized service to handle their intimates, but it’s a common enough response that I’ve begun to wonder.

Butler service on cruises is something of a throwback to an era when most travelers headed for far-away locales and were much more accustomed to the personal services provided by the staff. Nowadays, such personal service seems intrusive, but a hundred years ago, the class of traveler would have thought nothing of domestic workers cleaning their spaces and caring for their clothing—even allowing themselves to be dressed and undressed like dolls wasn’t uncommon in the era before formalwear became more manageable on one’s own, and dinners became less formal full-stop. 

Butlers are effectively household managers, being in ultimate charge of the service provided in a household—everything from cleaning and maintenance to the provision of dining and entertainment services. On a cruise, where much of that activity is already taken care of by the hotel department, butlers are essentially dedicated concierges—who also serve beverages and snacks. 

In addition to packing and unpacking, butlers also take care of dining reservations for specialty restaurants, shore excursions, or making recommendations for shopping and dining onshore, butlers can also provide some pretty above-and-beyond service. On Crystal, they can help coordinate off-menu dishes with the chefs (if you want them to fix your grandmother’s cookie recipe, they’ll do it, provided they can source the ingredients), and on at least one occasion, a Crystal butler has run off the ship in a port to purchase a guest’s favorite brand of coffee. 

As far as the dirty laundry, Shameer Ampopilakkil, the Head Butler on the Seven Seas Mariner with Regent Seven Seas Cruises offers some advice—place the clothing items you want to keep private in a separate bag or case. You won’t have to worry about whatever judgment you’re concerned is coming (because they provide such personal service, there’s very little a veteran butler hasn’t seen). 

There are also benefits to having such an intimate level of service onboard. The butlers are trained to catalog guest preferences, intuitively knowing when guests will be in or away, hungry or thirsty, what settings they prefer their room at, and other minutiae that doesn’t seem like much, but adds up as the relationship is built to make the guest’s experience onboard progressively more effortless as their butler gets to know them. On my recent Crystal cruise, I ordered my iced Americano just once—and my butler had it for me every morning afterwards, on a silver cloth lined tray set out on my verandah.

Many cruise lines—Crystal, Seabourn, Regent Seven Seas, Silversea—that offer butler service report that their passengers often build multiyear relationships with their butlers, often requesting the same ones again and again. 

As far as the dirty laundry—there’s no rule that says you can’t unpack a little bit before you let your butler have at your suitcase. Just get the stuff you want out of the way, and then spend the first few hours of your vacation sipping champagne and having a nosh instead in the closet fussing with hangers.