Regardless of whether a cigarette was involved in the Princess fire, I hope we can all agree that cigarette-caused fires on cruise ships are rare! Not the sort of thing that motivates major policy changes.

Seriously, does anybody know whatever happened to the designated smoking and non-smoking staterooms cruise ships used to have? I know they existed in the '90s. But it was around 2000 (I think) that I called to book (what line I do not recall) and requested a non somoking room. I was told that such things didn't exist anymore! As I remember it. one side of the ship was non smoking. The other side was smoking from mid-ships back. This resulted in about 25% of the rooms allowing smoking -- about in keping with the percentage of the population that smoked then. It also resulted in everyone gettting a smoke free balcony who wanted one. Everybody I knew like this policy. Does anybody know why the cruise lines abandoned it, and instead allowed all rooms to be smoking (and now allow none to be smoking)?