Nine years at sea.One very specific job.

What a port shopping expert actually does

On a cruise ship there is one person whose entire job is the ports: which stores are worth your morning, which stones are real, which prices are negotiable and which are theatre. I did that job for nine years, across more than three thousand days at sea and eighty countries.

The talks I gave held four hundred people. Then the ship docked, four thousand walked off, and most of them shopped in the first three stores they saw — the ones positioned to be found, not the ones worth finding.

The thing that kept bothering me

Every week I watched the same scene. Someone would come back on board delighted with a purchase, and I would know, without saying anything, that a store two streets over would have done it for a third less and thrown in the setting.

They never found out. There is no mechanism by which they could find out. You get one morning in Cozumel, you make one decision, and then you sail. The information gap is the entire business model of a cruise port.

Why a duck

I needed something that would travel through a ship on its own. Not an app nobody downloads. Not a flyer that goes in the bin at the elevator. Something a nine-year-old would pick up off a railing and carry to their parents.

So: over a thousand Mystery Ducks, hidden across the fleet, each on a numbered podium with a web address printed into the base. No QR code — QR codes fail in bright sun with one bar of signal, and by the time the camera app opens the moment has gone. Five words typed into a browser works every time.

Whoever finds it, keeps it. They type duckfor.fun/find, tell us their ports, and get the list I would have given them in person.

How it stays free

The retailers pay for the introduction. A store in Aruba does not want four thousand people wandering past — it wants twenty buyers who arrived deliberately. Sending those twenty is worth more to them than the margin they concede on a first purchase, so they concede it.

That is the whole arrangement, and it is why nothing is held back behind a paid tier. There would be no point.

What I will not do

• Sell your email address. Not to retailers, not to anyone. It exists to send your pass and your port notes.
• Put a store on the list because it paid the most. A bad recommendation costs me the only thing this runs on.
• Claim an affiliation I do not have. duckfor.fun is independent and is not endorsed by any cruise line.
• Pretend the duck is magic. It is a plastic duck. The nine years behind the list are the product.