Mario Salcedo (born 1949 or 1950),[1] nicknamed Super Mario, is an American businessman and a long-term passenger on cruise ships. He has continuously lived on Royal Caribbean International cruise ships since 2000, aside from about 15 days on land a year and a 15-month gap during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021.
Born in Cuba, Salcedo immigrated with his parents to the Miami metropolitan area when he was seven years old and later became a naturalized American citizen. He received economics and finance undergraduate and graduate degrees, after which he worked in Miami at a multinational corporation where he rose to the level of international finance director. The role required a large amount of traveling in Latin America. After 21 years of work, he resigned from the company in 1996 at the age of 47, and embarked on more than 100 cruises on different cruise lines between 1997 and 2000. He eventually settled with Royal Caribbean after experiencing Voyager of the Seas, the largest cruise ship at the time, in January 2000.
Working from the cruise ship, Salcedo manages an online investment management business for 10 high-net-worth individuals. By 2016, Salcedo had been on more than 1,000 cruises, 850 of which were with Royal Caribbean, and had spent more than 6,000 nights on board Royal Caribbean ships. The documentarian Lance Oppenheim profiled Salcedo in the documentary short The Happiest Guy in the World in 2018.