Cruises make you sick … plus five more reasons to give them a wide berth

If the norovirus outbreak on the cruise ship Oriana doesn't put you off, how about being trapped in irresponsible tourism hell

As disease incubators go, cruise ships are pretty darned effective. The latest ship to turn into a giant mobile sickbag is the Oriana, which has just returned to Southampton after lurching around the Baltic with a norovirus outbreak. More than 300 passengers are reported to have gone down with the vomiting bug.

This is by no means the first time a cruise has gone a bit Killer on Board; norovirus outbreaks have hit ships in Florida, Canada and the Mediterranean. In 2009, the Pacific Dawn was quarantined to a tiny island then diverted to Brisbane after becoming awash with swine flu.

Booking a cruise is essentially buying a ticket for a plague ship lottery. Confine large numbers of people in a relatively small space – after letting them savour the germs of a new country every day – and the probability of a vomit bonanza is pretty high.

But the disturbingly high chance of being on a nausea-riddled norovirus gulag is not the only reason to give the giant cruise liners a wide berth. Here are five reasons to leave cruising off your travel agenda:

1. You'll 'see the world', but without seeing anything at all

Cruising is a way to see the world in bitesize snippets so small that they're effectively pointless. Watch cruise ship passengers in a town like Dubrovnik, and the methodology is crystal clear. They get off the ship, wait for a bus to the Old Town, then aimlessly wander around the Old Town taking a few photos and eating bad pizza. A few hours later, they form gigantic queues to get a bus back to the ship, and sail off again to do the same thing somewhere else the next day.

It's a surefire way to get practically zero appreciation of the places you're visiting. At best it's a hurried highlights reel, taking photos of things you can later explain nothing about.

2. You'll run the risk of ending up in a hermetically-sealed cruise passenger pen

Number one, of course, assumes you're docking at a destination that has something to see in the first place. In the Caribbean and Central America, there are many "towns" that exist solely for cruise ships to dock at. Passengers getting off at Puerto Quetzal in Guatemala or Puerto Limon in Nicaragua will find little to do aside from duty-free shopping or pre-organised tour bus excursions.

The most appalling example of this is Labadee in Haiti, where passengers are completely sealed off from the troubled country around them, and left to shop or sunbathe for the day in a resort owned by the cruise company.

3. You will lose your status as an individual

When a ship belches out 1,000 people all wanting to tick off a highlights reel of whatever destination they're at, personalisation is never going to be a strong point. Hence the gigantic groups following a tour guide's umbrella, listening to a basic script that gets repeated daily, in every cruise port. And that's before you delve into the time-sapping logistics of getting everyone on and off the ship. Sign up for a large cruise ship, and you're effectively signing away your status as an individual human being for the duration.

4. It's irresponsible tourism by default

If you give even the smallest fig for responsible tourism, then cruising is the diametric opposite. Very little money makes its way to the communities visited when passengers eat most meals on the ship, shop at company-owned duty free shops and go on excursions organised by the cruise line.

The ships also have an appalling environmental impact, both in terms ofCO2 emitted and the amount of rubbish and waste water dumped into the oceans.

And, in a political climate where companies are hounded about their tax contributions, cruise companies shouldn't be let off the hook. Ships sail under Panamanian and Liberian flags for tax avoidance purposes, despite the companies clearly being based elsewhere. Carnival Cruises – the biggest cruise company in the world and owner of the Costa and P&O brands – paid just 1.1% in corporate taxes on US$11.3bn profits in the last five years.

5. You're trapped with people who like cruises

For all the quality of experience, environmental and ethical arguments, the real hell of cruising revolves around the people you're stuck on the boat with. Despite multi-million pound marketing campaigns portraying cruising as something for everyone, a quick visual check in Venice, St Vincent or Vanuatu will confirm that most passengers conform to the grey-haired, buffet-savaging stereotype.

And on every ship, there will a large proportion of cruise bores. They are the people who have no conversation other than listing the cruises they've been on, and the places they have been to as a result. They can offer no insight into those places beyond saying what a lovely time they had.

You really, really do not want to be trapped next to one of these people at dinner.

With a few honourable exceptions, cruising is for the lazy and the culturally disinterested; people perhaps better suited to two weeks in a beach resort that have convinced themselves they're doing something far more worthy and adventurous.