Cruise Passengers Puzzled by Persistent Cruise Cabin Odors
When embarking on a cruise, there are many delightful things you expect to smell – such as delicious food onboard or the salty sea air. Sewage and feces do not make that list.
However, one first-time cruiser and his family, who were sailing onboard an unspecified Royal Caribbean cruise ship, were hit with a rather gross smell every time they entered their stateroom.
“Is it normal to occasionally smell poop? It’s my wife and I first cruise with our daughter and everytime we enter our room we are hit with the smell of feces,” the father explained on Reddit.
“We assumed it was our daughter’s diaper or maybe her farting, but we took out the diapers and dropped her off at daycare and we still smell it so I was wondering if that’s normal on a cruise,” he inquired.
Allow me to join the comments section in saying that this smell is not normal – but does happen from time to time. As cruise ships operate 24/7 every single day of the year, sometimes things do go wrong – including in the pipes.
When these smells do pop up, they are usually coming from the bathroom – either stemming from a backed up pipe or a malfunctioning bathroom floor drain trap, which is supposed to block sewer gasses.
“You may have a dried up drain trap. Run water in the sink, shower and floor drain,” one cruise fan guessed.
“Your room may be close to a sewage pipe may be my guess. I don’t think this is normal,” another theorized.
In the future, hopefully this guest will know to contact guest services sooner for help if something smells funky – literally or figuratively.
The guest services team at Royal Caribbean is there to help day and night, and may have been able to either address the maintenance issue that is causing the smell quickly or move the family to a fresher-smelling cabin.
A Smelly Situation Onboard Allure of the Seas
Only one day before the father posted about his family’s smelly cabin, another cruise guest shared his own complaints about clogged toilets and unsatisfactory odors onboard Allure of the Seas.
“On the Allure this week and twice we’ve had times where we went to flush our toilet… And no flush. Called maintenance and they said they were working on things because someone had flushed a foreign object down the toilet,” he shared.
Cruise ship toilets are generally stronger and more powerful than commodes on land because they use a vacuum system – but it’s still important to not put anything down them aside from the cruise-line-provided toilet paper.
Even with the extra power behind the flush, the waste still has to make its way through a potentially complicated system of pipes to reach the vessel’s waste treatment and storage facilities.
Read Also: What Do Cruise Ships Do with Sewage and Waste?
However, the malfunctioning toilet wasn’t this guest’s only complaint. There was also an unexplained sewage smell on Deck 7 of the Oasis-class ship.
“And, on deck 7 port side, the hallway has smelled like waste all week right around the 7200 block,” he wrote.
“On the first couple of days people were in the hall complaining to their stateroom attendants asking for some kind of air freshener to at least help mask it. No idea if it’s related to the toilets or just a fun coincidence,” the recent guest continued.
The cause of the smell, or how it is being addressed, is unclear – although the crew members are certainly working on it.
Interestingly, the 2010-launched vessel was only recently in dry dock for a month between February and March of 2025 to undergo a major $100 million overhaul.
This refurbishment also followed a flooding incident in a hallway on Deck 10 on the 5,484-guest ship in December 2024 – so the pipes and sewage system definitely would have been checked.
Even so, constantly being in service does mean that signs of wear and tear can manifest at any time – even when they’re least expected. But that’s why the major cruise lines always have maintenance teams, engineers, and plumbers onboard to spring into action at a moment’s notice.