From honey buckets to cruise line president, MSC’s Rick Sasso

Speaking at the Miami Beach Convention Center, the MSC Cruises USA chairman said ‘There’s room for anybody and everybody…. There are a thousand different jobs and categories of jobs in our industry. Study them… Learn about the industry before you even look at the jobs.’ 

Seatrade Cruise Global takes place this week, from April 8-11. 

Tomorrow’s Talent Today, part of Seatrade Cruise Global 2024, launched in 2023 and is aimed at HR, training and recruitment professionals in cruise, as well as tutors from universities, colleges and training institutes specialising in cruise-related courses and their students looking for a career onboard or shoreside.

Uplifting 

Sasso recounted his career so far in travel, which started in the aviation sector with emptying waste from airplane toilets (‘honey buckets’) at Miami International Airport. ‘Ambitious and an achiever,’ he set about learning from colleagues around him and their different roles. ‘This ambition and achievement has to be at the core of all of you,’ Sasso asserted. 

Sasso has been a well-respected figure in the cruise industry for more than four decades. After holding key positions at Costa Cruises and Chandris Cruises, he joined the senior management team that launched Celebrity Cruises in 1990 and later served as president of Celebrity.  

Sasso was named president of MSC Cruises USA in April 2004 and in August 2016, he assumed the role of chairman of MSC Cruises for North America.

Tips 

‘It’s important we kick off with a session like this,’ he said, referring to the ‘Tomorrow’s Talent Today Opening Keynote: A Career in Cruise,’ explaining, ‘We’re going to need, in the next weeks and months, new players’ in the industry.’ 

He shared three key tips for a successful career in cruise: firstly, looking around for new opportunities to learn from your surroundings. Secondly, ‘volunteer for everything’ in your role, even unappealing tasks offered by a manager; thirdly, ‘watch other people and learn from them.’ 

The ‘bad news’ about this advice: ‘If you’re not an achiever and you’re not ambitious, it won’t make sense to you,’ said Sasso. 

Six degrees of separation

Create a list, he told students, with two columns: on the left-hand side, outline the companies you’d like to work for (‘It could be 10 or 20 that you admire or respect’); on the right-hand side, list all the jobs you could do. 

Sasso also encouraged networking and forming connections, emphasising the importance of the ‘six degrees of separation’ concept – the notion that all people are six or fewer social connections away from one another. ‘It can solve problems and carve out your career… you should try it.’ 

Another senior cruise industry veteran, Bruce Nierenberg, presented an overview of the industry for student attendees.