What do they do about changing timezones on oceanliners such as the Queen Mary 2?

Question

What do they do about changing timezones on oceanliners such as the Queen Mary 2?

Answer 1

Most passengers adjust their clocks/watches to the local time as they pass through the various timezones.  This is especially true if there is a stop in a local port.  You need to know when to be back on the boat.

As for the crew and the ship's systems, they use the standard of GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) for all date and time needs.

Answer 2

every morning they give you a pamphlet and it tells you what the time is and everything

Answer 3

If you mean as far as how you know that the time has changed?  Most of the cruiseships I have been on have a "welcome" station that updates you where in the Ocean you are and what the current time is.

Answer 4

The ship adjusts it's clocks nightly.  Every evening in the daily bulletin passengers are reminded to update their clocks and watches.  Clocks are moved an hour forward or backwards as needed.

Typically the ship will adjust it's clocks so that passengers are on the same time as the port they are about to visit.  Due to the size of time zones and the speed of ships, it's very rare for a ship to cross more than one time zone a day.  This means that passengers rarely (if ever) have to adjust their watches more than one hour a night.

On a long voyage like a Trans-Atlantic, clocks will be moved one hour every night until local time on the ship is the same as local time at the destination port.

Now, if a ship passes in to a new time zone, but won't be visiting a port in that time zone, then the clocks probably won't be adjusted.  For example a "cruise to nowhere" where the ship heads several hundred miles off shore prior to returning to the same port it departed from.  The ship won't put it's passengers through the hassel of adjusting their watches.