Vantaggi
If you are a US citizen who knows how to work a camera professionally, they will almost certainly hire you. They need Americans to take gangway photos in Alaska. But more importantly, you will have a once-in-a-lifetime experience of traveling the world and getting paid to do it. The Videographer is extra lucky and gets to actually go on (and film) shore excursions. I got to go to Alaska, Polynesia, Australia, Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand, Hong Kong, and many other places. And I was one of the few crew members to actually go on the tours in the places themselves (to film them), as opposed to being restricted to the ship and only going on land occasionally. Plus ship life is pretty interesting. I'm counting "seeing the world" under part of the "Compensation and Benefits" score. The company was very good about compensating me for purchases that I made for them, such as tapes and camera batteries and we never ran out of the basics, like photo paper.
Svantaggi
I had to work crazy-hard. Often 75ish hours a week once I became Videographer. Between shooting, editing, selling photos in the gallery, and taking photos on formal nights, I was pretty worn out most of the time. I found out that my job used to be a two-person task (even on the smaller ships that I was working on), and I believe it. There are no days off for the Videographer or any other Photo/Video position. Oddly, you sort of get used to that. The fact that they were switching to HD video and that all the old SD video had to be replaced may have made my hours longer than normal, since normally there is archival footage that can be used in some cases. The Videographer has to do all of the things listed in the third sentence, at least on the smaller ships. I wouldn't know about the others. Your pay is commission-based, based on how many photos and videos are sold on your cruise. Sometimes the pay is good and sometimes it is not. The good news is that your room and board are all taken care of, so everything you do make is yours, base expenses aside. Your base expenses include an expensive DSLR camera (that you buy yourself and is yours to keep, but is around $1,500) and a tux/formal dress for Formal Night. You should recoup them fairly easily in a few weeks, however. If you already have both of those and your camera is on the approved list, then you're golden. I'm not really sure if videographers normally have to provide a DSLR, since I was kind of in an odd situation. The company isn't *quite* always on top of things. When I was there in 2012-2013, they were still using problematic chemical-based printers (although they were gradually switching) and printing and displaying every single photo taken instead of using digital gallery viewers. The value packs of photos that we sold were clearly made for the analogue age and awkwardly adapted to digital with fine print that screwed up quite a few sales. One time the managers sent an email that gave away that they clearly did not know what country we were in. The entire cruise line photo industry seems to be hurting in the era where everyone has their own digital camera in addition to the one on their smartphone or tablet, which is why I gave them a negative business outlook. Also, you will be away from home for the entire eight-month contract. This may include major holidays.