One of the cruise's ports of call is Portofino, Italy, where passengers and crew retired to the Jolly American Bar for evening drinks and dancing.

MONACO -
Boarding an easyCruise is like moving to college: The people look young, the showers look scary and you pretty much have one question: When’s the party?

And just like in college, the answer is every night. All night. You can sleep when you’re old.

EasyCruise is not your grandma’s cruise line. No Vegas-style shows (but a DJ who spins till 5 a.m.); no formal captain’s dinner (no need - he dances and drinks with the passengers anyway); no water-park-style swimming pool (just a well-populated hot tub).

It’s part hostel, part frat house, part summer camp, all in exotic locales.

EasyCruise is the latest venture of 38-year-old ‘‘serial entrepreneur’’ Stelios Haji-Ioannou, whose London-based company, easyGroup, owns, among other things, a successful budget airline (easyJet), a chain of hotels (easyHotel) and an Internet provider (easyInternet).

The company’s first and only ship, the 170-capacity easyCruiseOne which launched in May, offers energetic but economical travelers from all over the world a way to party - frugally - on the playgrounds of the rich and famous.

How frugally? Think $375 for a four-night Mediterranean cruise.

Summer’s easyCruise playground was the French and Italian rivieras, with stops in Cannes, St. Tropez and Nice, France; Monaco; and Genoa, Portofino and Imperia, Italy. The winter playground, beginning this weekend, will be the Eastern Caribbean - Martinique, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, the Grenadines, Grenada and Barbados.

The easyCruise kids on these playgrounds average 32 years old - about 20 years younger, the company says, than the passengers on most commercial cruises these days.

Here’s why:

Unlike traditional cruise lines, which keep people entertained at all times on the ship, there’s not much reason to stay onboard easyCruiseOne when it’s not moving. You don’t pay for any extras. If you want food, you’ll pay for it onboard. Housekeeping? Gotta order it on ship. Extra towel? Extra money. In that way, it’s more like a ferry than a cruise ship, industry watchers say.

EasyCruise’s big selling point to young travelers is its schedule. The ship doesn’t leave port until morning - sometimes as late as 10 a.m. - so guests can party all night onshore, if they choose. They can board and disembark anywhere along the itinerary, too, as long as they spend at least two nights on the ship.

With one season behind it, what easyGroup has called its ‘‘experiment’’ is working, says James Rothnie, easyGroup director of corporate affairs, though others in the cruise industry wonder how it’s possibly making money. In May, its first month of operation, the ship filled 59 percent of its cabins. By August, that number was more than 80 percent, and weekends in September were full, ship personnel said.

Though most of the marketing has concentrated on the United Kingdom, thousands of passengers are booking from all over the world, says Rothnie, easyGroup director of corporate affairs. About 50 percent this summer came from the United Kingdom and 10 percent from the United States. Others came from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, South Africa, Germany, the Netherlands, France, Italy, Spain and Greece.

‘‘EasyCruise is attracting a young crowd who would not generally have considered cruising with a conventional cruise line,’’ Rothnie explains. ‘‘These 20-, 30- and 40-year-olds do not like the idea of being kept on a ship every evening, which is exactly why easyCruise gets the young and independently minded crowd.’’

You might say the ship itself is independently minded - EasyCruiseOne is bright orange, the company’s signature color, inside and out.

You wouldn’t think an orange boat would be so hard to find in a harbor. That is, unless you were boarding in Monaco, the luxury-ship capital of the universe.

Under cloudy September skies and aided only by a port map printed from the easyCruise Web site, I lugged my supersized American suitcase downhill toward Port Hercule, along busy streets, searching among all the shiny white boats for any shade of orange. I passed decadent yacht after decadent yacht whose daily varnish-polishings probably cost as much as my five-day cruise.

‘‘Excuse me, where can I find easyCruise?’’ I asked a police officer walking toward me.

‘‘It’s behind the big one,’’ he said, pointing around the bend to a mammoth cruise ship, the Insignia, dwarfing everything else in the harbor.

There it was: the little orange David among all the glittery, glamorous Goliaths.

Check-in was, well, easy. Except for heave-ho-ing my overstuffed suitcase up the gangplank. (I was silly to think there’d be porters.)

The ship’s ‘‘grand foyer’’ was a purple-and-orange couch, coffee table and reception desk in the small entryway. No pianist serenading or waiter sashaying by to offer me my first onboard cocktail. But it was remarkably clean, quiet and small.

EasyCruiseOne had been a gambling boat in Singapore before easyGroup bought and refurbished the whole thing last spring, Rothnie says. Now there’s a Cafe Ritazza coffee shop and convenience store on the main floor, an American-style sports bar a floor above and a gym a floor below.

And the staterooms?

Tiny. Orange. Bare-bones.

The 75 standard cabins, 90 square feet designed for two people, have two twin-size mattresses on the floor, about a dozen hangers, an outlet, a mirror, a shelf and a couple of hooks. Four-person cabins with bunk beds are also available, as are suites, which are a bit larger and have couches and balconies.

But the tiny ‘‘wet unit’’ is the same in all the cabins: a shower stall, sink and toilet, all behind one sliding shower door. The biggest complaint I would hear from passengers all week was about the ‘‘reluctant’’ shower drains and the subsequent water that stood on the bathroom floors. It was an inconvenience, but a minor one, they would say; after all, you don’t get a four-star hotel for a budget-motel price.

These were the kinds of accommodations I’d expected on my $400-easyCruise.

What I didn’t expect was the camaraderie among the passengers, the wild-and-crazy nights under the starry Riviera skies and all the e-mail addresses I’d take home as souvenirs.

Kind of like college.

A sign posted outside the exit each day tells passengers when the ship will depart for the next port: 6 a.m., 8 a.m., 10 a.m., sometimes later. If you’re not back on board, they’ll pull away without you and might destroy your luggage, you’re warned.

‘‘Who needs a warning like that for a 6 a.m. departure?’’ I thought as I exited the ship for the evening in Monaco. Oh, how easily time slips away when you’re gallivanting in party meccas along the Riviera.

A late night with other easyCruisers at the Casino de Monte Carlo and then at a dock party outside a luxury yacht found me running back to my little orange ship at 5:59 a.m. the first night of my cruise.

Over a few laughs and a bottle of champagne, I, along with some fellow easyCruisers - a couple from the United Kingdom celebrating her birthday and a lovely young Polish woman on ‘‘holiday’’ - watched the sun rise behind Monaco as we pulled away from port.

Bedtime that night: 8 a.m.

From then on, I decided to stick closer to folks who I knew wouldn’t let this adventuresome solo reporter cut it so close on another deadline.

In Portofino, that meant joining a large group of passengers and crew at the Jolly American Bar for evening drinks, dancing and a karaoke-style ‘‘Greased Lightning’’ impression before the tender boat took us all back to the ship, anchored a ways from the small harbor.

Other port cities, such as Genoa, offered less to do at night, so most of the nightlife moved back on the ship. After a nap in Genoa from about 10 p.m. to 1 a.m., the call of the club awoke me. Up on deck, a DJ was spinning everything from the Beatles to Billy Joel, Kylie Minogue and Beyonce.

About 50 people - women, men, passengers, crew, even the ship’s captain - danced and drank beer and fruity cocktails like ‘‘Sex on the Boat’’ from the outdoor cocktail bar. Two outgoing women from Belfast, best friends vacationing together, practically pulled me onto the dance floor; we stuck together the rest of the cruise. Pretty soon I found myself dancing to ‘‘Uptown Girl’’ with the captain, Fabien Roche.

Like most of the easyCruise staff and officers, Roche has worked on other cruise ships. And, like most everyone else, he says this one is the most fun.

Another night, around a table on deck, I commiserated with some gals from London on a universal topic: men. Later, in the hot tub, a group of us jokingly critiqued outfits and predicted who, on board, might go back to the room that night with whom.

Just like in college.

EasyCruise and the competition it provides are good for the cruise industry, says Oivind Mathisen, editor and co-publisher of New York-based ‘‘Cruise Industry News,’’ which publishes newsletters and magazines and maintains a Web site on the topic. But until there’s evidence that easyGroup is making significant money from this venture, few cruise lines are apt to follow its no-frills, party-all-night model, he explains.

Traditional cruise lines are not targeting the same demographics as easyCruise, Mathisen says. Most are focused on getting families onboard, offering things like rock climbing, in-line skating and, in the case of Royal Caribbean, body surfing on the ship.

‘‘Obviously they’re targeting more active people, and that implies younger people,’’ he says, ‘‘but not at (easyCruise’s) bare-bones level.’’

Rothnie says that 98 percent of easyCruise’s summer passengers indicated that they would consider taking another cruise. He said he’s encouraged by the American response to the Caribbean cruises, too. Half of the people booking are Americans. Most of the marketing outside of the United Kingdom has been through the company’s Web site, www.easycruise.com, he says, ‘‘which has proved effective to a Net-savvy American audience.’’ (All reservations are made online, another change from traditional cruise lines.)

While onboard the ship, I kept hearing rumors of an easyCruiseTwo ship and a Greek Isles itinerary being planned for next summer, all a possibility, Rothnie says.

‘‘We have said all along that we will go through a whole calendar year - a summer and winter season - before making any firm commitments to expansion,’’ he says. ‘‘However, Stelios is spending an increasing amount of time already on studying the growth of easyCruise. Along with the French and Italian rivieras and the Caribbean, other areas of the Mediterranean, the Greek Islands and the Red Sea and Arabian Gulf are all areas of interest to us.’’

EasyCruise isn’t for everyone - certainly not for those who want to be pampered and eat from buffets at all hours of the night on the ship. And, as inexpensive as the cruise is, getting to the regions can significantly increase the price of the trip for American travelers. Airfares to Nice in September were about $900, and flying to Barbados isn’t much cheaper.

But if you’re young or young at heart, don’t mind sopping up water from the bathroom floor and want to meet a lot of people from around the world in one (very small) space, you might just be a good easyCruiser.

Two months back from the trip, I still exchange e-mails with my new good friends from the cruise. There’s even an easyCruise reunion in the works.

Again, just like college.

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IF YOU GO:

All bookings are made through the easyCruise Web site, www.easycruise.com, and charged to a credit card. You can book online now for a winter itinerary in the eastern Caribbean, or for a Mediterranean itinerary beginning again in May 2006. You must book for at least two consecutive nights, but you may embark and disembark anywhere on the itinerary and for up to 14 days. The cost of the cruise is per room (not per person) per night.

In the Mediterranean, fly to Nice, France, via London, New York City, Paris or Rome. In September, round-trip airfare on British Airways to Nice Cote d’Azur airport was $918. If embarking the cruise in Monaco, take a 30-minute train ride from Nice for less than $10. Cannes and St. Tropez, France, are also short train rides from the airport. The only other city along the route that has an airport is Genoa, Italy.