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Having been of a few cruises, I'd like to point out a few things: 1) Listed prices generally DO NOT include gratuities. Low level cruise employees like the cle
by ssharp 13y ago
Having been of a few cruises, I'd like to point out a few things:
1) Listed prices generally DO NOT include gratuities. Low level cruise employees like the cleaning crew, cabin stewards, waiters, cooks, etc. are paid ridiculously low wages, because cruise ships are registered to countries like Panama and the companies do not need to adhere to U.S. standards. I don't recall offhand, but for a 7-day cruise the "automatic" gratuity is, I believe, around $100 or so per person, so take that into consideration. You can remove the charge if you want to, but you'd have to be a pretty big asshole to do that :) Also, prices are based on double-occupancy, so if you go by yourself, double the fares.
2) Internet is expensive, slow, and charges by the minute). However, if you do this a lot, some cruise loyalty programs will give you free internet. I know Princess does this. Also, you're cell phone my work in certain locations. I'm a U.S. AT&T subscriber and I have full service in U.S. ports like San Juan and the U.S. Virgin Islands. If you can tether your phone, you'll get much faster and cheaper service that way than on the boat internet.
3) Don't get sick / injured. My wife stepped on broken glass while wearing open-toed shoes and got cut up pretty bad. The doctor on board used strips instead of stitches, and the cut reopened in two days, by which time we were already off the ship. The crew handled the incident terribly. The problem with the glass was not resolved quickly, my wife had to wait a fair amount of time for someone to show up with a wheelchair to take her to the doctor and the crew went into "don't get sued" mode really quickly. They gave us pushback when we refused to sign a liability waiver before getting treatment and we had some security guy who kept insisting to come into our room to photograph the shoes my wife was wearing at the time. When we complained the next day about the process, a nice woman sat down with us to hear out our complaint, but never really did anything. We were adamant about NOT paying for the care and it never showed up on our bill, so we let well enough alone. Three months later, they sent us a bill for $300 for the care. After we sent their HQ a letter in response, they ended up waiving the fee and giving us $100 credit towards our next cruise. Nice, but it was ridiculous in the first place since.
4) In regards to the above, had something worse happened, or they had refused to waive the fee, good luck fighting the cruise company in court. You're not only bound by typical consumer-crushing stuff like forced arbitration, but you're also getting into international legal difficulties. For big cases like the cruise that tipped over, it's worth the hassle, but for smaller claims, you're pretty limited in what you can realistically do.
All that said, I think this is a pretty cool idea and had always thought about how cruises could be a cool little work/vacation thing.
- larrys 13y ago"2) Internet is expensive, slow, and charges by the minute). " When I've been on cruises (this dates back to as early as 2002 iirc) I've always been concerned with this. And there are times as well (when sailing) that you are out of reach by satellite and have no connectivity at all. Unless things have changed you aren't going to be streaming video or doing anything that requires bandwidth. Once again, from my experience, things could have changed as I haven't cruised in at least 4 years. With respect to internet on cruises it's a totally YMMV. I was concerned enough about access that I actually tracked down and contacted the operator of the service [1] for the particular ship I was on (and they do this for many cruise lines) and spoke to an engineer to ask questions before taking a particular cruise. I wasn't going to rely on what the cruise ship customer service told me. One of the questions I had was "do you block any ports"? The engineer (quite knowledgeable not customer service but engineering) said they didn't but it turned out that (at the time) they blocked anything that carried voice or obviously video (like ichat, skype etc.). Have no idea if that is still the case. But here is the strangest thing. Back in perhaps 2004 on a particular ship you couldn't (get this) connect by wifi with a Mac!. That's right you had to have a windows machine to connect to the ships wifi. Made no sense. But true. Nobody on the ship with a mac could connect only PC laptops. Ended up having to use the crap in the "Internet Cafe" which made 1996 using AOL seem quick. Literally couldn't even get email during certain times since all ship traffic went through one pipe. For the next cruise I also brought a PC laptop. (But on that ship I didn't need it). [1] It was this company: http://www.mtnsat.com/ http://www.mtnsat.com/
- toomuchtodo 13y agoWas the cruise line Royal Caribbean?
- larrys 13y agoYep. RCL.
- toomuchtodo 13y agoHave been cruising with them for over 15 years. Have a love/hate relationship with them (also, several of my friends work onboard a variety of their ships in the entertainment tech department).