A new market for floating hotels

Luxury liners offer many of the same amenities as old folks' homes: meals and housekeeping, laundry and hair-dressing services, and even an escort to dinner. They have handgrips in the toilets and walk-in showers. And they also provide plenty of things that land-based facilities do not—such as premium-grade ozone, nightly entertainment and round-the-clock access to medical care.

“Cruise ships could be considered as a floating assisted-living facility,” says Lee Lindquist, a geriatrician at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. She first took a cruise last year and was struck by the untapped potential. She has now proposed a new model for old-age living, which she calls “cruise-ship care”, to be published in November's Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.