Beyond the cruise ship graveyard: How old cruise boats get a second life as hotels, shelters, and artificial reefs

• Decommissioned cruise ships often end up in scrapyards where they're pulled apart.
• But others have been repurposed as floating hotels and artificial reefs.

Every year, retired cruise ships are sold to ship-breaking yards in Turkey and India where thousands of workers painstakingly dismantle the massive vessels and sell their parts for scrap.

But some cruise ships survive the so-called "cruise ship graveyard" and are converted into hotels, or are even intentionally sunk to the bottom of the ocean in order to create artificial reefs.

Thanks to their mobility, cruise ships and ferries have also been temporarily transformed into hospitals and housing during emergencies like the COVID-19 pandemic, the Ukraine war, and Hurricane Katrina.

These are various scenarios in which cruise ships have been converted in the past — plus innovative ways they could be transformed in the future.

Some old cruise ships are still being used as floating hotels

Perhaps the most well-known cases of converted cruise ships are the Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth 2 hotels.

From 1936 to 1967, the Queen Mary was an active Cunard cruiseliner, lavishing travelers with amenities like five dining rooms and lounges, bars, and swimming pool during the ship's transatlantic sailings. For several years in between, the vessel also served as a troopship during World War II.

These days, the glamorous Queen Mary is no longer sailing across the ocean. Now, it's docked near California's Port of Long Beach as a popular tourist attraction and hotel where travelers can book one of the original 347 staterooms and suites.

Across the world in Dubai, the Queen Elizabeth 2 has been operating as a floating hotel as well. Before it permanently docked, the vessel sailed from 1967 to 2008, accommodating guests like singer Elton John and former US President George W Bush, the hotel says.

But after Dubai World acquired the vessel for $100 million, the Queen Elizabeth 2 transitioned into a 447-guest room hotel in 2018.

And in 2022, Qatar chartered MSC's World Europa, Poesia, and Opera cruise ships for use as temporary floating hotels to accommodate the influx of fans arriving in Doha, Qatar ahead of the Qatar World Cup. All three cruise ships have since resumed operations with MSC.

Ironically, some ships are sunk to the bottom of the sea — on purpose

After 15 years of sailing through the Chesapeake Bay, the 215-foot retired American Glory cruise ship sunk off the coast of Delaware, WHYY reported.

This was no tragic accident. In 2019, the submerged vessel joined hundreds of retired New York City subway cars, decommissioned tugboats, trawlers, barges, and military armored vehicles as the newest addition to Delaware's artificial reef program, "Redbird Reef."

Instead of passengers, the cruise ship is now frequented by fish and divers drawn to its vertical structure, according to a release from Delaware's department of natural resources and environmental control.

"For dive trips, the former cruise ship offers four passenger decks for exploration and meeting up with new aquatic residents drawn to the ship's structure such as tautog and sea bass," the department said. "Divers may also reflect on the ship once having more than 40 staterooms, most of them offering an ocean view when it cruised Atlantic coastal waters."

Cruises have been used as temporary shelters amid times of crisis

Following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, over 2,000 Ukrainian refugees lived on cruise ships docked off the coast of Scotland for months.

One refugee named Andriy, who fled Ukraine with his wife and children, told BBC Scotland in January that it was like a "small social experiment" living onboard the Viking Orion, which had a career center and hosted English classes.

A few months later in March, when a devastating earthquake struck Turkey, a 538-foot luxury cruise was turned into a temporary shelter for more than 1,000 people.

The British Red Cross has warned that passenger liners are "not appropriate for people who have been displaced from their homes," citing poor conditions such as windowless bedrooms.

These aren't the first times cruise ships have been converted into temporary housing during times of need. Following Hurricane Katrina, the Federal Emergency Management Agency entered a highly-criticized $236 million agreement with Carnival Cruise Lines to lease three ships to house displaced residents and workers.

Cruises can be both an affordable vacation and housing complex

Turning decommissioned cruise ships into affordable housing could be a win-win, according to CallisonRTKL, a Washington-based architecture firm that explored the possibility in a 2022 Miami research study.

"Currently, we are seeing cruise ships being decommissioned at one of the highest rates in history, and simultaneously there is a growing lack of affordable housing in the Miami area," architect Abe Desooky told Insider reporter Zahra Tayeb during an interview last year.

The firm's design featured 900 single-person units that would cost $1,250 per month, with a parking garage on ship's bottom decks, renderings show. The middle of the ship would be converted into a courtyard to allow natural light into the bedrooms, a high-priority for residents surveyed as part of the study, Desooky explained.

"As we move closer to environmental decay and climate change, cities like Miami need to start coming up with solutions that are atypical," the architect told Insider. "I think taking decommissioned ships and not just using them for hospitality is something that should be happening now."

Most cruise vessels have medical centers. Sometimes, an entire ship becomes a hospital.

During the pandemic, international shipping and cruise company MSC Group converted a GNV ferry ship into a "floating hospital" for COVID-19 patients in Italy's Liguria region, according to a 2020 press release. The one pictured above is not the same ship.

While the industry was paused, Carnival Corporation offered governments the option to convert their vessels into temporary healthcare facilities for non-COVID-19 patients to alleviate pressure on land-based hospitals. However, some experts argued cruise ships don't have suitable facilities to treat large numbers of patients.

At the time, the 1,000-bed US Navy hospital ship USNS Comfort was on its way to New York City for use as a temporary referral hospital. Fewer-than-expected patients were treated aboard the Comfort, which was intended to serve as an overflow as New York hospitals were filling up at the height of COVID.

Correction: Aug. 3, 2023 — An earlier version of this story erroneously stated there were no patients treated aboard the USNS Comfort in New York during the height of COVID. Patients were treated aboard the ship.