• I took my first cruise solo on Royal Caribbean’s Wonder of the Seas.
• My trip was full of surprises, from the price of the room to the best way to meet people.
• Excursions were more social than I expected, and people kept asking me where my parents were.

I’d traveled long distances solo by plane and train — so why not try cruising alone?

In April 2022, I went on my first cruise by myself. During my seven-night solo voyage on board Royal Caribbean’s Wonder of the Seas, my ship sailed to Roatán, Honduras; Cozumel and Costa Maya, Mexico; and Royal Caribbean’s own private island in the Bahamas.

As a longtime solo traveler and first-time cruiser, a few things surprised me about cruising alone. From booking the trip to setting sail, here’s what I didn’t expect.

When booking my cruise, I was surprised to find that the room rate was higher for just one person than for two.

Because most cruise ship staterooms are meant to hold at least two people, booking a room by yourself often means you still have to pay higher prices. Some cruise ships have solo cabins for just one person, but mine didn’t. 

When I booked my cruise, the listed rates for my ship were per person, not per room. But when switching between one and two guests in my search, the cost per person doubled when I had just one person selected. This is known as paying a “single supplement,” as it helps the cruise line make up for the revenue it would have generated from having a second person on board.

For $2,000, I got an ocean-view stateroom to myself. It would have cost about half the price per person if I had brought someone with me.

It was easier to meet people on the ship than I expected it would be as a solo traveler.

As someone who is typically shy around new people, I was surprised by how easy it was to talk to other travelers on the ship.

Couples, families, and other solo cruisers seemed open to chatting and sharing their experiences with me around the pool decks and at various eateries and common spaces. After all, we had at least one thing in common — being on this epic vacation. 

I thought I’d have a hard time navigating the ports to find my excursion groups, but since I booked through the cruise line, there were so many signs and directions that made it easy.

At each cruise port, passengers may disembark to spend their time as they wish. They might sightsee independently, take a taxi to a beach, link up with a local tour guide, or join an official cruise-line excursion.

I joined a cruise-line excursion at every port and was nervous about finding my group amid the large crowds. However, I was given clear directions on where to meet my group each time, and there were so many posted signs that it was easy. 

I figured that since I was a solo traveler, I’d experience the ports alone, but I found that many people on excursions were looking to meet new people. It made making friends easy.

I found that excursions were the easiest way to meet people on the ship. With group activities like hiking and plenty of downtime on bus rides to and from the tour locations, I spent most of my time socializing. On a guided hike in Roatán, Honduras, I met couples, families, and one other solo traveler.

But I was shocked to be mistaken for a child every time I entered or exited the ship.

“Where are your parents?” was a question I had to answer nearly every day of my cruise.

Cruise-line workers were quick to assume that I was a lost child rather than a solo cruiser each time I entered and exited the ship. This could be because I look young (in my opinion), but it also made me think that solo cruising might be less common at 26, my age at the time.

Even as a single person on the world’s largest cruise ship, it can be hard to find a chair on the pool deck after noon.

Wonder of the Seas is one of the largest cruise ships in the world, so I thought that it would be pretty easy to find a single pool chair on the ship at any time.

But by midday, most of the chairs were occupied or covered with towels. While saving chairs with towels wasn’t allowed on my ship, I didn’t see the rule enforced, so I had to arrive early to secure a good spot. 

While I thought my first cruise was still enjoyable alone, if I were to take another one, I’d prefer to bring a buddy.

Despite the social activities and friendly cruisers who loved to chat with random strangers like me, I still found myself feeling lonely on the ship. I longed to have a conversation with someone who knew me or to share my experiences in new places with a loved one. Being surrounded by so many families and groups of friends made me wish I could be with mine.

If I cruise again, I’ll definitely bring my own crew.

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• A Manhattan jury found Live Nation liable for violating antitrust laws.
• The DOJ and nearly 40 states initially sued to split the Ticketmaster parent company two years ago.
• The verdict could pave the way for a breakup of the company.

Ticketmaster parent company Live Nation holds an illegal monopoly over the concert and live event industry, a Manhattan federal jury found on Wednesday.

The entertainment giant was found liable for violating antitrust laws following a roughly six-week civil trial. The jury’s verdict, which came on the fourth day of deliberations, could pave the way for steep monetary penalties — or a court-ordered breakup of the company.

The Department of Justice, plus 39 states and the District of Columbia, sued Live Nation about two years ago to force a split from Ticketmaster, alleging that the company’s market dominance drove up ticket prices for fans of live music, sports events, and theater.

The plaintiffs have argued that Live Nation controls 78% of the large amphitheaters used by artists and, through Ticketmaster, 86% of primary ticketing at major concert venues — meaning the initial sale of tickets.

Days into the trial in March, it emerged that the Justice Department and Live Nation had agreed to a settlement that would allow the company to remain intact. Several states also signed on to the deal, which still needs approval from US District Judge Arun Subramanian.

A senior Justice Department official told reporters last month that the DOJ was “confident” it would have won at trial, but that its goal was to get American concertgoers “relief as fast as possible.”

The remaining 30-plus plaintiff states moved forward with the court fight against Live Nation as attorneys general bashed the settlement terms, saying they favored the company over consumers.

“This is a historic and resounding victory for artists, fans, and the venues that support them,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said after the verdict was reached. “In the face of dwindling antitrust enforcement by the Trump Administration, this verdict shows just how far states can go to protect our residents from big corporations that are using their power to illegally raise prices and rip-off Americans.”

Live Nation, which merged with Ticketmaster in 2010, has maintained that it does not have a monopoly and that concert ticket prices are relatively low, especially compared to those for sporting events.

Subramanian is set to schedule future proceedings to determine the total amount in damages, final penalties, and restitution for consumers.

The jury on Wednesday found that Live Nation overcharged consumers for tickets sold between May 2020 through 2024, by $1.72 for each ticket, but the judge can order the company to pay additional damages.

• Elon Musk’s AI company xAI plans to allow Cursor to use some of its compute power for training.
• Cursor will train its AI model Composer 2.5 using tens of thousands of xAI GPUs, sources said.
• The arrangement marks a new strategy for xAI in a competitive AI landscape.

Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, plans to put its stockpile of computing power to use in a new arrangement with coding startup Cursor, according to people familiar with the matter.

Cursor plans to train its latest AI coding model, Composer 2.5, on xAI infrastructure, the people said. Cursor will use tens of thousands of xAI’s graphic processing units (GPUs), the chips used to train AI models, they said.

The setup effectively turns xAI into a kind of cloud provider. By renting some of its GPUs to other companies, xAI could start generating revenue from its massive infrastructure while still developing its own AI models. The arrangement could help the company offset the costs of building and operating data centers, while also deepening ties with a startup that has access to valuable coding data.

Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, the largest cloud providers, own millions of chips and rent computing power out to thousands of companies and developers, generating huge profits. Newer players like CoreWeave and Lambda have built businesses around supplying GPUs to AI model developers. Access to computing power has become an increasingly competitive aspect of the AI arms race.

Representatives for xAI and Cursor did not respond to a request for comment.

It’s not the first time Cursor and xAI have overlapped. The startup hired two former Cursor product engineering leads in March, Andrew Milich and Jason Ginsburg. Ginsburg and Milich oversee xAI’s product team and report directly to Musk and xAI president Michael Nicolls, Business Insider previously reported.

xAI is one of many companies racing to build the best AI models, and it has one of the largest data center footprints. Musk said during an all-hands last December that xAI would beat competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic because it would have access to more power to train its models.

Over the past two years, xAI has rapidly expanded the footprint of its data centers, a project it has named Colossus. Last year, the company said it had around 200,000 Nvidia GPUs, and Musk has said it plans to expand to 1 million GPUs.

xAI’s infrastructure team has been experiencing a leadership shake-up. It lost its infrastructure lead, Heinrich Küttler, last week. The company moved Jake Palmer into a leadership role over the physical infrastructure team, and SpaceX’s Daniel Dueri took a leadership position over the compute infrastructure team last week, Business Insider previously reported.

In a memo to staff last week, Nicolls, xAI’s president, said the company’s model FLOPs Utilization (MFUs), a measure of how efficiently a GPU is used during AI training, was “embarrassingly low” at about 11%. Nicolls said he aims for the team to reach 50% in the next few months. For comparison, according to AI infrastructure company Lambda AI, most large-scale AI training operates between 35% to 45% MFU.

Cursor is in talks for a reported valuation of around $50 billion, Bloomberg reported last month. Meanwhile, it faces pressure as major AI startups like Anthropic and OpenAI push aggressively into building coding assistants.

In March, Cursor released Composer 2, a coding model designed to generate and edit code across large projects. Cursor built the model on top of an open-source AI model from Chinese startup Moonshot AI and fine-tuned it using its own data from its developer user base.

Do you work at xAI or have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at gkay@businessinsider.com or Signal at 248-894-6012. Use a personal email address, a non-work device, and non-work WiFi; here’s our guide to sharing information securely.

• Helping my dad plan for Medicaid showed me I had no estate plan of my own.
• I learned how easily a home and assets can be lost without proper preparation.
• I set up a will and trust to protect my family and avoid future complications.

I sat in a stiff chair next to my 86-year-old dad as a lawyer outlined the complicated rules of Medicaid law.

My dad furrowed his brow, trying to understand the legal complexities that could mean the difference between being able to leave his home — where he’d lived for nearly 60 years — for my sisters and me, rather than having it confiscated as collateral should he die in a long-term care facility.

A few months earlier, my dad — who was recently diagnosed with early-stage dementia — called me with an urgent request. “I want you to make sure they don’t take my house,” he said, obviously coming to terms with the possibility that extended memory care could be in his future.

My dad has no savings to cover long-term care

My dad grew up one of nine kids raised during the lean years of the Great Depression and World War II. He knew the value of owning a home, both monetarily and in the sense of pride he derived from knowing he’d at least leave that small piece of property to my sisters and me after he died.

But like many seniors, he lives on a fixed income and doesn’t have savings to cover the often astronomical expense of long-term care facilities, even with Medicare. Should he need long-term care — a possibility despite his age since he’s in great physical shape and had a mother who lived well into her 90s — the ownership of his home could be in jeopardy.

According to federal and many state laws, Medicaid is required to pursue “estate recovery” after a recipient dies, often placing liens on the decedent’s home or estate to recover care expenses. There are several ways to avoid this, including setting up trusts and a form of property co-ownership called a life estate. Ultimately, our lawyer advised we take advantage of a caretaker clause in Medicaid law, which would apply to my sister, who lives with our dad.

As we went through all these scenarios, while also helping my dad set up his will, healthcare power of attorney (who makes healthcare decisions on his behalf if he’s incapacitated), and durable power of attorney (who can make financial decisions on his behalf), I couldn’t help thinking about my own family.

It made me realize I didn’t have a will

My husband and I did not have a will, any power of attorney, or even beneficiaries on our bank accounts. We’re both cruising toward 50, and we have a young son, so I knew we needed to address our own estate planning.

Our bank offers free estate planning consultations, so I booked an appointment for us to go through the basics before speaking with an attorney who will charge for their services.

Though we’ve been married almost 15 years and faced some health crises, such as my breast cancer diagnosis nearly a decade ago, my husband and I had never discussed what would happen if one or both of us died. While these conversations are hard, we knew they were necessary to ensure our son is cared for physically and financially after we’re gone.

In our case, if one spouse died, the other would automatically inherit any assets and assume sole guardianship of our son. But if both of us were to die at the same time, things get more complicated.

Since we have an underage child, we set up a trust where any of our assets — our home, retirement accounts, etc. — would go to benefit our child once he reaches adulthood. Then we had to choose who would not only take guardianship of our son but also manage our estate, taking care of everything from ensuring our final tax returns were filed to managing the money left to our son.

Talking about death can be hard

Through these conversations, we learned that not having specific, legally verified instructions for your assets — even if it’s just a checking account or a car — can cause bureaucratic headaches for grieving loved ones. And not establishing specific instructions via a healthcare power of attorney — such as whether you want to be resuscitated or put on life support — can put family in the difficult position of making life-or-death choices in the midst of a crisis.

I know that we’ve done all we can to ensure my dad is taken care of for the remainder of his life, and that everything he has worked so hard for will go where he wants it. And I know my husband, son, or sisters won’t have to shoulder the burden of sorting out my affairs when I die.

Talking about my death, as well as the demise of my father and husband, was hard. No one wants to have these difficult conversations. But knowing that we’ve done the unpleasant work to make sure our wishes are respected and our loved ones are protected upon our deaths is well worth the discomfort.