If you ever someone be described as having sea legs, it’s probably a Maritimer of some sort doing the describing and it’s a compliment. It means that they don’t get seasick and can be relied on as a crewmember on the high seas. There’s probably plenty of staff on cruise ships that don’t have sea legs at all, and even those massive vessels can start to pitch and yawl in the high seas if the storm is powerful enough. So, it might be staff or guests that feel queasy for a while, and so what is the best place on a cruise ship for motion sickness? 

The conventional response is going to be to be in your stateroom and lying down, and that may well be true for a lot of landlubbers who are primarily on the big boat for the all-inclusive food and drinks and the opportunity to stumble back to that stateroom from the casino at 3am. Not every passenger is going to be like that on every cruise, but if we continue to think about the best place to avoid motion sickness from a more of a physics standpoint it might be a different location.  

When a ship is on high seas it is the highest point in the vessel that’s going to have the greatest degree of motion. One of the things you’re told as a kid growing up on the ocean is that if you do get seasickness one way to relieve it is to look to the horizon. We’re talking about the best place on cruise ship for motion sickness here though. Even though the best view of the horizon would be from the command tower of a cruise ship it’s always going to be the case that guests aren’t allowed up there.  

Get Low 

The reverse of what we talked about earlier there is true, and it makes sense that the place where the ship is going to be rocking the least is right where the bottom of the hull right along the spine of the ship. That’s where the cargo holds are located, so we have to think that’s the best place on a cruise ship for motion sickness if you could be absolutely anywhere. But you don’t have access to that part of the ship either, and a lot of guests will have been warned about acting inappropriately on the pool deck by day 2 or 3 at the latest.  

Some cruise ships will be better for handling high waves than others, although nobody books a cruise taking the chance they might get seasick into consideration. The truth of it may be that you’ll be just as queasy no matter where you are on the ship. In that case you may just need to rely on an Rx motion sickness treatment medication to provide relief until the vessel can get into calmer waters, or you can ask a crewmember about the best place on cruise ship for motion sickness.