When you booked your cruise, you imagined your arms stretched wide, the Leo to your Kate at your side, carefree in your “I’m king of the world” moment.

You can definitely still go for it, but maybe don’t plan on stretching your arms too wide?

Cruise lines are overcrowded. And that undersells how much they’re, well, overselling — many ships are reporting 100%+ occupancy levels this summer, per The Wall Street Journal.

Uh, 100%+… how?

Cruises base occupancy rates on the assumption of there being two people per cabin. As passengers take advantage of post-covid discounts and promotions and flock back to ships, cabins are filling up fast, sometimes with three or four people per room.

• Royal Caribbean averaged 102.1% occupancy in Q1 this year.
• Norwegian Cruise Line averaged 101.5% in Q1, and expects a full-year rate of 103.5%.

Off-boat excursions are selling out and getting into premium activities is an ordeal. One passenger told WSJ: “Every time you went out of your room, it felt like you were in a Disneyland line.”

Customers can rebook, but to when? Many 2023 cruises are sold out and demand into 2024 is already strong, according to booking sites.

In fairness, land isn’t any better

Pent-up demand has tourism hot spots everywhere scrambling to keep up.

• South Tyrol, in the Italian Alps, has capped tourist numbers.
• Roads in Japan’s hot spots, like Tokyo and Kyoto, are “rammed” with visitors.
• An overabundance of African safaris has endangered the very animals tourists are there to see.

Sorry, penguins: Even Antarctica isn’t spared from overtourism.

The promise has been the same for more than a decade: Once augmented reality devices truly arrive, the world will never be the same.

A parade of contenders, from Google Glass to Meta’s Oculus, has changed the world, technically — but only in that a few million shelves have one extra thing sitting on them collecting dust.

How will Apple fare differently?

Vision Pro, unveiled yesterday, is Apple’s entry into the “spatial computing” derby, and it surely has some things going for it:

• The tech is impressive — the display alone has “more pixels than a 4K TV for each eye.”
• In a world full of lonely people, it adds dynamism to an empty room. Vision Pro will host hyper-immersive entertainment, capture vivid 3D memories, and facilitate “life-size” conversations via FaceTime.

It’s got plenty going against it, too:

• Vision Pro makes strides in blending digital worlds with physical spaces, but that has its limits; the EyeSight feature that reveals (an approximation of) wearers’ eyes when someone approaches feels… unsettling.
• At the end of the day, they’re asking people to wear oddball ski goggles all day — and often while being quite tethered (batteries have about two hours of juice before needing a plug-in).

And then there’s that price tag…

… Vision Pro will debut “early next year” with a $3.5k+ premium — and that’s pre-AppleCare.

Apple knows that’s steep and seemingly plans to be patient with its new category. Sales expectations for Vision Pro are relatively modest; it projects ~900k units sold in its first year, per Bloomberg.

This means Apple’s most important words…

… were actually “Feels like magic.”

The phrase, appearing multiple times in its keynote, drives Apple’s immediate takeaway message: that, others’ AI advances be damned, it’s still the tech king. That it sets the pace of innovation and can capture imagination unlike any other company.

Apple’s path to victory with Vision Pro may be, appropriately, that strong optics matter most.