Passengers wait in the departure lounge after Royal Caribbean's Explorer of the Seas arrived back at Bayonne, New Jersey January 29, 2014. 
 
 BAYONNE, New Jersey (Reuters) - Cheers erupted aboard a Royal Caribbean cruise ship reeking of vomit and diarrhea as it pulled into its home port in New Jersey on Wednesday, ending a trip cut short because illness felled more than 600 people. 
 
 Passengers disembarking the "Explorer of the Seas" recalled the nightmare of getting sick during the Caribbean cruise, being quarantined in their rooms, and putting everything they touched into bio-hazard bags. 
 
 "I had three days of sickness and quarantine," recalled Susan Rogutski of Catawissa, Pennsylvania, who came down with gastrointestinal symptoms so severe the first day of the trip that she had to be physically dragged to the sick bay. 
 
 Carl Kern of Franklin Lakes, New Jersey, said the ship's hallways smelled of diarrhea and vomit. 
 
 "Another passenger we became friends with said he went into the men's room and someone had gotten sick right in the floor and he stepped in it. It was bad," Kern said. 
 
 More than 600 passengers and crew fell ill aboard the ship that departed Bayonne, New Jersey, on January 21, the Centers for Disease Control reported on Monday. The ship was carrying 3,050 passengers and a crew of 1,165. 
 
 Its planned 10-day cruise was cut short by two days when it returned to its home port on Wednesday. 
 
 Kern's wife, Fran Kern, was among the disappointed passengers who said the compensation being offered by Royal Caribbean, including 50 percent off a next trip, was inadequate. 
 
 "We were really disappointed. We've never been to many of these ports so to pay all this money and not get to the ports is very disappointing," Fran Kern said. 
 
 "We aren't cruisers like some people. We should have gotten a full refund," she said. 
 
 Other passengers, including Rogutski and her husband, Leonard Rogutski, felt Royal Caribbean responded well to the crisis and vowed to cruise again someday. 
 
 "Though it was a bad situation all around, and it was very bad, Royal Caribbean bent over backwards to provide everything we needed," Leonard Rogutski said. "The problem was it happened so quickly, there were so many cases, they weren't ready for what happened." 
 
 The U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said Monday that the cause of the sickness was unknown but that an environmental safety officer and an epidemiologist boarded the ship in St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands on Sunday to try to determine the cause of the outbreak and the proper response. 
 
 The ship's crew stepped up cleaning and disinfection procedures and collected stool samples from those who reported feeling ill following the outbreak, the CDC said. 
 
 The cruise line said it believes the illnesses are consistent with norovirus, a highly contagious virus spread from an infected person, contaminated food or water, or by touching contaminated surfaces, according to the CDC. 
 
 (Editing by Barbara Goldberg and Gunna Dickson) ||||| BAYONNE, N.J. — At first he thought it was the fish. 
 
 Maurice Weizmann, a Montreal businessman on a Royal Caribbean cruise with his wife, started vomiting on the second night of the 10-day voyage after eating dinner and watching a show on the ship Explorer of the Seas. His wife did too. 
 
 Soon they learned the reality: They were only two of hundreds of passengers sickened by an as-yet unidentified gastrointestinal illness that shortened their cruise by two days and created a floating sick bay on the high seas. 
 
 The Weizmanns and the roughly 3,000 other passengers disembarked Wednesday to a frigid New Jersey wind and a scrum of media greeting them. Passengers described a crew that was overwhelmed at first by the illness but then responded well, handing out food and treating the sickest passengers with an anti-nausea shot that abated many symptoms. "At the beginning, they didn't know what to do, but after that, they took care of us very well," Weizmann said. 
 
 Royal Caribbean says that 630 of the 3,071 guests reported symptoms, and that 54 crew members out of 1,166 became sick. By the time passengers disembarked, seven were still sick. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention took samples from patients when the ship docked in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, on Friday; it is expected to identify the source of the illness within the next few days. 
 
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 "We called it the cruise from hell," said Jo Guarino of Congress, N.Y., who spent four days in her room sick. Her husband became sick too, as did some of their friends. After lugging their suitcases to their car, the Guarinos recounted going down to the sick bay and seeing people vomiting and looking ill. 
 
 The cruise was supposed to visit Haiti, Puerto Rico, St. Thomas and St. Maarten. The cruise stopped only at the U.S. ports — Puerto Rico and St. Thomas — and returned home two days early, which the company called "the most prudent course for the health of our guests and our crew." 
 
 Sue Rogustki was expecting to spend her birthday, Jan. 30, on the cruise. Instead, she was back on land, feeling much better after three days of vomiting and diarrhea. She started feeling sick at 2:30 a.m. on the third day; started vomiting a few hours later and became so ill that her husband took her down to the sick bay. She was then quarantined in her room for three days; her husband stayed with her and got sick too. They're both registered nurses, and both had received flu shots long before they embarked on the cruise. 
 
 "I had three days of sickness and quarantine, and of course you had to stay in your room, so that you didn't infect others," said Rogustki, of Bloomsburg, Pa. "That's three days that you didn't get to enjoy." 
 
 Even for those who weren't sick, the cruise was a strange scene. Guests weren't allowed to get their own food from the buffet; it had to be served to them. And as soon as they got up from a seat, a crew member would be there, scrubbing it down, said Sonia Smith of Glen Ridge, N.J. Smith's husband became sick on the cruise, and while he was quarantined, he ordered room service from a special menu. 
 
 Royal Caribbean is offering a 50% refund of the cruise fare and 50% future cruise credit to all guests. Passengers who were quarantined will receive an additional credit of one future day for each day they were confined to their rooms. "In the end, the exceptional disruptions caused by the early wave of illness meant that we were unable to deliver the vacation our guests were expecting," the company said in a statement. 
 
 The ill-fated voyage prompted California Rep. John Garamendi (D-Walnut Grove) to propose a cruise ship passenger bill of rights that would require disclosure of any previous incidents. "At times, the cruise industry seems like the Wild West on the high seas. Most trips are fine, but when things go wrong, passengers are often left confused, bewildered and at the mercy of cruise lines for any compensation or reimbursement for the untimely and premature termination of their voyage. And that's just not right," he said in a statement. "Cruise ship passengers have a right to know in advance whether they are booking passage on the 'Love Boat' or on a voyage to despair." 
 
 The illness outbreak was the latest mishap to befall a U.S. cruise ship. In 2010, passengers were stranded on the Carnival ship Splendor for four days after a fire; in February 2013, passengers on a Carnival cruise to Mexico were stuck without power after a fire; and in March, more than 100 people fell ill on a Royal Caribbean ship. 
 
 On Monday, Royal Caribbean reported a profit of $7 million for the fourth quarter of 2013; a year earlier, the company had a loss of $393 million in the same period. "It has been a challenging year," Richard D. Fain, chairman and chief executive, said in a statement, then expressing optimism about 2014. 
 
 Julie Maron, 68, has been on 28 cruises, all without incident. She and her husband, Michael, were excited to try the Explorer of the Seas, with its ice-skating rink, mini-golf course, 15 decks and handful of pools. 
 
 But Maron, of Allentown, Pa., started feeling ill a few days into the trip. She headed down to the sick bay, but the line was so long that she decided instead to get off the boat when it docked at Puerto Rico and head straight to a pharmacy. The pharmacist recommended an over-the-counter drug, and Maron spent the next three days sleeping and recovering. 
 
 "At one point I think there were 200 people down there" in the sick bay, Maron said. "I couldn't stand for that long." But the experience hasn't turned them off cruises, the couple said. They've already booked one for next year. 
 
 alana.semuels@latimes.com 
 
 
 
 ||||| (CNN) -- No one wants to spend their vacation in the bathroom. 
 
 Reports of an outbreak of vomiting and diarrhea at sea have some imminent cruisers worried. 
 
 "My mother, who is a first time cruiser, is seriously reconsidering our choice for our family vacation," wrote CNN reader Monica Mancera in an e-mail. The University of Texas at Austin student is booked on a Carnival cruise with her family in March. 
 
 The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is investigating an outbreak this week of gastrointestinal illness on Royal Caribbean's Explorer of the Seas; the cause has not yet been determined. More than 650 passengers and crew have become ill, according to the cruise line. The outbreak is the second so far this year aboard a cruise ship. 
 
 Just the thought of wasting precious vacation time has worker-bee bystanders riled up: So glad it's not me! Poor suckers! 
 
 And cruise skeptics have another opportunity to ask: What were they thinking? 
 
 "I feel bad for sick people, but I don't understand the desire to be on the petri dish in the first place," wrote one CNN reader. 
 
 Cruising represents one of travel's deeper divides. Love it or hate it, most of the keenest objections are only half true -- or false, depending on how you look at it. 
 
 Floating petri dishes? 
 
 Cruise ships are ripe for spreading illness. Outbreaks of norovirus, the leading cause of acute gastroenteritis in the United States, occur most frequently in close quarters, according to the CDC. Nursing homes, dormitories and cruise ships are common transmission grounds. 
 
 In 2013, the CDC's Vessel Sanitation Program logged nine gastroenteritis outbreaks aboard ships, seven of which had a confirmed cause of norovirus. About 1,200 cruise passengers were affected by those norovirus cases. 
 
 Three of the affected sailings were from U.S. ports, with about 700 passengers sickened, according to Stewart Chiron, CEO of CruiseGuy.com. 
 
 To put those figures in perspective, the industry's Cruise Lines International Association says more than 10 million passengers embarked on CLIA member cruise ships from a U.S. port in 2012, and norovirus sickens an estimated 21 million people in the United States every year, according to the CDC. 
 
 More outbreaks of gastroenteritis have been reported aboard cruise ships since 2001, according to CDC statistics. The government agency says the spike is tied to an increase in both passengers and ships sailing the seas as well as an overall increase in norovirus outbreaks. 
 
 "There are attempts to control these types of outbreaks, but it's hard to guarantee that it's not going to happen for any particular cruise," said Dr. Lin Chen, director of the Travel Medicine Center at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 
 
 So yes, the threat of illness is real. Yet the number of reported outbreaks among thousands of annual sailings has ranged in recent years from less than a dozen affected sailings to about three dozen. 
 
 Bottom line: More people are getting sick on land. (Granted, that's little comfort if you're vomiting violently at sea). 
 
 Are ships or passengers unsanitary? 
 
 Norovirus, the most common cruise ship outbreak offender, spreads quickly from person to person but can also be transmitted through contaminated food or water or from contaminated surfaces. 
 
 The CDC's Vessel Sanitation Program conducts regular unannounced inspections of cruise ships. Explorer of the Seas, the Royal Caribbean ship currently experiencing an outbreak, scored a 98 out of 100 on its last inspection in July 2013. 
 
 "Something like this is not representative of an unclean ship," said Colleen McDaniel, managing editor of CruiseCritic.com. "It doesn't mean this particular vessel was unclean. It just means there was an outbreak on board. They're ending the cruise two days early and doing a really deep cleaning of the ship. It's not likely to happen on the same ship again." 
 
 Unlikely, but not unheard of: Princess Cruises' Crown Princess had norovirus outbreaks on two consecutive sailings in 2012. In 2010, the CDC issued a four-day no-sail recommendation for a Celebrity Cruises ship after three consecutive outbreaks of gastrointestinal illness. 
 
 The deep cleaning upon Explorer of the Seas' return to port "will be the third aggressive sanitizing procedure the ship has undertaken since we became aware of the issue," Royal Caribbean said. 
 
 Cruise lines activate CDC-monitored response plans when outbreaks are detected. Measures include increasing the frequency of cleaning and disinfection, isolating ill people, distributing information about proper hand-washing and hygiene as well as illness updates and regular reporting to CDC Vessel Sanitation Program officials. 
 
 Hygiene is extremely important when outbreaks occur. Proper hand-washing, avoiding contact with ill passengers and direct contact with public surfaces such as restroom door handles can help stem the spread of highly contagious illness. The CDC offers health tips for cruisers on its website. 
 
 Avid cruiser Marcy Webster and her husband won't be changing their plans for an upcoming sailing on Royal Caribbean's Allure of the Seas. 
 
 "It is not the cruise line's fault. It is a passenger who came onboard sick and spread the virus everywhere. On every cruise I have been on, the crew is diligent in keeping things clean and making passengers use hand sanitizer," Webster, of Keller, Texas, wrote in an e-mail. 
 
 "Bad things happen. If you stop your life for fear of what could be, you never experience anything." 
 
 CNN's Katia Hetter contributed to this report.
– The official illness tally from the Royal Caribbean cruise ship that returned to New Jersey yesterday, two days ahead of schedule: 630 passengers and 54 employees. That's a 20-year cruise ship record, according to CDC data, and passengers tell CNN the true number is probably much higher, since some sick people didn't bother going to the infirmary—or purposely hid their illness to avoid being quarantined. Royal Caribbean itself suspects the true number could be as high as 900, the New York Daily News reports. Here are the worst details passengers related—warning, do not read while eating: One passenger says that when she arrived at the infirmary, sick people were throwing up in buckets, bags, and basically everywhere, and she had to wait three hours to be seen. Another says the infirmary was so crowded that sick people were cramming the stairwells nearby. "People were puking into their barf bags while waiting," he says. (A different passenger estimates that, at one point, there were at least 200 people in the infirmary; she chose to disembark at a port and go to a pharmacy instead, she tells the Los Angeles Times.) Another passenger gets even more explicit: On the second night of the cruise, "I was in the dining room and a woman was vomiting into her napkin," she says. "There were people walking around in their pajamas with vomit and diarrhea on them. People were barfing all over the place." "Another passenger we became friends with said he went into the men's room and someone had gotten sick right in the floor and he stepped in it. It was bad," a passenger tells Reuters. Another tells CBS News, "The sick were in the hot tubs and the pools so people were getting sick that way by being near other people. They were throwing up in the hallways, the pool deck, everyone is trying to jump over it, walk through it." The ship will undergo a "thorough 'barrier' sanitization program," but another not-at-all-comforting CNN article notes that a Princess cruise ship experienced outbreaks on two consecutive sailings in 2012, and a Celebrity ship once saw three consecutive outbreaks. Should the passengers ever want to set foot on a ship again, Royal Caribbean is offering them all 50% refunds and 50% off a future cruise. Those quarantined to their rooms will get even bigger discounts on future cruises. Woo hoo?