Most questions we post to our Facebook community kick off a friendly argument. Drink packages, tipping, kids in the hot tub. Those threads split down the middle and run for days. So when I posted a simple one about buffet hygiene, I figured we’d get the usual back-and-forth.
We didn’t. The yes was nearly unanimous, and the few twists that showed up weren’t the ones I expected.
The Question We Posted
We dropped the question on the Travel Life Vibes Facebook page and it took off faster than most. North of a thousand comments and a few thousand reactions before the conversation settled down.
I’ll be straight about what this is and isn’t. I didn’t read all 1,100 comments, and nobody should pretend to. What follows are the responses that kept surfacing and the ones that captured a theme cleanly. Treat it as a read on where cruisers’ heads are at, not a scientific poll.
The short version: I went looking for the “you can’t make me wash my hands” crowd and basically couldn’t find them. Almost every visible comment landed somewhere between “yes” and “yes, and honestly it should go further.”
“Everybody Touches Those Tongs”
The single most common reason cruisers gave had nothing to do with rules and everything to do with the serving spoons.
Think about a sea-day lunch rush at the buffet. Hundreds of people, one set of tongs at the carving station, one ladle in the soup. Everybody grabs the same handle. That’s the picture cruisers kept painting, and it’s hard to un-see once someone says it out loud.
What one cruiser said: “Yes please. You’re touching things all day, and then people touch the same serving spoons in the buffet. Everyone is dealing with something, and everyone has a different immune system.” — Madison
Madison’s last point is the one that stuck with me. It’s not that any single person is filthy. It’s that a buffet pools the germs of a few thousand strangers into one set of utensils, and every one of those strangers has a different bug they’re fighting off or carrying around.
Heidi took it a step further and pointed out that washing before you load your plate only solves half the problem. As she put it, everybody touches those utensils, so the smart move is to grab your food, set the plate down at your table, go wash again, and only then sit down to eat.
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I’ll admit I’d never thought about the after-wash. You scrub up, you go through the line, you touch the same handles as everyone else along the way, and then you sit down and eat a burger with your hands. Heidi’s right. The dirtiest moment is the one right before you eat, not the one before you start serving.
Thirty Seconds Or A Ruined Vacation
The second big theme was pure math, and one comment summed it up better than I could.
What one cruiser said: “What causes more distress? 30 seconds of hand washing or flushing a $2k vacation down the drain?” — Kate
That’s the whole argument in one line. Nobody books a cruise to spend two of their seven nights stuck in the cabin. Norovirus and other stomach bugs spread fast in close quarters, and once one breaks out on a sailing it can move through a ship in a hurry. Set the minor annoyance of a sink stop against the risk of losing days of a trip you saved months for, and the cost-benefit isn’t close.
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This is the framing I’d lead with to convince a hygiene skeptic, and it’s the one cruisers reached for instinctively. Don’t pitch handwashing as a rule. Pitch it as cheap insurance on an expensive vacation. Shared-surface germs come up again and again whenever cruisers vent about the buffet, including in our roundup of what cruise passengers wish would just get banned.
The “Washy Washy” Fans Came Out In Force
Here’s where the thread got fun. A big chunk of the supportive comments didn’t make a public-health case at all. They just started chanting.
If you’ve sailed Royal Caribbean, you know exactly what I mean. The line stations crew near the Windjammer buffet to hand out sanitizer and sing “washy washy” at you as you walk in. It’s corny. It’s also weirdly beloved.
What one cruiser said: “Absolutely, and I love how RC has the ‘washy washy’ singing greeter at the Windjammer.” — Jean
Jean wasn’t alone. Michael name-checked the “washy washy” routine, and Joy dropped the full version cruisers know by heart: “Royal Caribbean washy washy for your yummy yummy.”
What I take from this is bigger than one line’s gimmick. People don’t actually mind hygiene enforcement when it’s friendly. Frame it as a scolding and they bristle. Frame it as a song from a smiling crew member and the same passengers will line up and laugh about it. If a line wanted to make buffet handwashing mandatory tomorrow, the “washy washy” approach is the blueprint for getting away with it.
Tip: New to Royal? The Windjammer is their main buffet, and the sanitizer-and-song routine at the entrance is standard, not a one-off. Just go with it.
A Lot Of Cruisers Don’t Trust The Sanitizer
Now for the first real friction in the thread. Several cruisers wanted to be clear that a squirt of gel at the door is not the same as washing your hands, and they didn’t love being handed sanitizer as if it settled the matter.
What one cruiser said: “Sure. Sanitizers do little and shouldn’t replace washing hands.” — Pam
Pam’s comment matters because it points at a real gap. Ships lean on sanitizer stations because they’re fast and they keep the line moving. But alcohol gel is famously weak against norovirus, which is exactly the bug cruisers are most afraid of catching, and it’s the kind of health concern that lands ships in the headlines when something like the Norwegian Dawn flunks a CDC inspection. Soap and water, scrubbed properly, does more.
So when cruisers say “make it mandatory,” a lot of them don’t mean “add another sanitizer dispenser.” They mean actual sinks, actual soap, actual washing, before you touch a single serving spoon.
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One commenter pushed even past the buffet, arguing it should be mandatory to wash your hands before you touch anything at all. That’s not a realistic rule on a ship with thousands of people. But it tells you how seriously this slice of cruisers takes the issue. For them the buffet isn’t the problem. It’s just the most obvious symptom.
The Answer That Surprised Me — It Wasn’t About The Buffet At All
If you’d asked me to guess the contrarian take before I posted, I’d have said someone would call the whole thing nanny-state nonsense. Wrong. The standout twist came from a cruiser who agreed germs are a problem, then pointed the finger somewhere I hadn’t considered.
What one cruiser said: “I’d be more worried about those handrails than the buffet. Every booger-picking kid touched them handrails.” — Dennis
I laughed, and then I realized he had a point I couldn’t argue with. By the time you reach the buffet, you’ve already gripped a few hundred feet of handrail getting up the stairwells. Kids run their hands along them. So does everyone else. The buffet tongs get all the attention because that’s where the food is, but the handrails are touched far more often and cleaned far less visibly.
That’s the nuance I’d want a reader to walk away with. Mandatory buffet handwashing is a sensible idea that almost every cruiser supports. It also wouldn’t fix the ship. The buffet is one high-touch surface among hundreds, and the germs are on the railings, the elevator buttons, and the cabin-door handles long before they’re on your plate. If you’re sailing somewhere busy this year, a little surface awareness goes a long way, and it’s worth folding into the rest of your prep alongside the other things to know before a Caribbean cruise this year.
So, Should It Actually Be Mandatory?
After reading through the responses, my honest read is that cruisers have already decided. The yes was about as close to unanimous as anything we’ve ever posted, and the reasons were practical rather than preachy: shared utensils, mismatched immune systems, and the simple math of trading thirty seconds at a sink against days of a ruined trip. The washy-washy crowd showed that enforcement doesn’t have to feel like punishment. The sanitizer skeptics showed that gel alone won’t cut it. And Dennis reminded everyone that the buffet is only part of the story.
Would the lines ever truly make it mandatory? Probably not, since herding thousands of people through sinks at every meal is a logistics headache. But the appetite is clearly there, and the friendly-greeter model already shows a path that works.
Have you sailed a line that made handwashing feel mandatory, washy-washy song and all? Did it bug you, or did you secretly love it? Drop your take in the comments.