Cruise Ship News

Another cruise cancellation has occured, this time on Princess’s Sea Princess. As reported in the BBC news, the Sea Princess, with over 2000 passengers on board cancelled the cruise because of a “technical fault”.  Evidently one of the luxury ship’s propulsion motors is to blame according to the Hampshire News.  What would have been a memorable 14-day Mediterranean cruise for these passengers has turned into a nightmare.  Unfortunately this is a great example as to why you buy travel insurance, but that won’t help if you’ve only got 2 weeks of vacation coming and that just got ruined.  So what would you consider to be a reasonable compensation?  Princess is offering a full refund and 25% discount on another cruise but what about air-fare, (or perhaps the last of your frequent flyer miles that you used)?  I’m sure the cruise lines have protocols that they follow in these instances but does everyone get reimbursed the same?  If you make more of a fuss do you get reimbursed more??   If you’ve ever been in this kind of situation please share your story with the rest of us. 

Cruise blogger John Heald, cruise director on the Carnival Freedom, had a great idea: a cruise for bloggers. (The Freedom will sail from Miami on January 19, 2008, stop at Ocho Rios, Jamaica; George Town, Grand Cayman; and Cozumel,Mexico, returning to Miami on January 26.) We wonder if Heald knows what he’s in for. Does he have a clue as to what even a few hundred heavy Internet users will do to the ship’s connection? The Freedom has WiFi throughout the ship according to its specs, but we’re wondering more about the available bandwidth. Ships rely on satellite connectivity while at sea (and oddly, even while in port in our limited experience), and these connections are rarely noted for their bandwidth or consistency.

Our last cruise ship Internet experience wasn’t spectacular. On board the Golden Princess late last year (also part of the Carnival corporate family), we found that connectivity was available only in the ship’s computer cluster and via WiFi in a small lounge area. (Reportedly, Carnival was scheduled to install ship-wide WiFi on all ships by the end of 2006; I guess we were too early, or that didn’t apply to Princess.) I was a daily user, and encountered many of the same hardy user group in the Atrium lounge each day. The connection quality ranged from really slow on a good day to completely unusable on a couple of days. It was expensive, too, being billed on an time-used basis. Super slow speeds and high per-minute charges aren’t a great combination.

To add insult to injury, Princess cruisers with five or more cruises get “free Internet” as a perk - for some bizarre reason, though, the “free” part only applied if you were using one of the ship’s computers. Any power user will bring a laptop, and thus even some of the long-time cruisers ended up paying the high hourly rates.

Back to the Bloggers Cruise - it seems likely that a few hundred (or potentially many hundreds if the idea takes off) of web-savvy bloggers all firing up their laptops at once might stress the Freedom’s connectivity in a way that it hasn’t been in the past. (We’ve seen this happen at land-based hotels the first time they host a webaster conference, though now laptops are so pervasive among business travelers that a webmaster surge is probably only a modest increase over normal. A cruise ship is a different story, though.)

Carnival needs to take steps to ensure great connectivity on this cruise - imagine the negative PR for the cruise line if hundreds of bloggers return to Miami frustrated and angry, ready to hit the first WiFi hotspot they find to complain about slow, costly, or unreliable Internet on the cruise that was designed for them. Waiving Internet charges on that trip would help matters too, and responding quickly to tech issues will be essential.

Enough pessimism - good luck to the Bloggers Cruise and those Web pundits brave enough to unplug their broadband cable for a week in the sun!

Straight from the Cayman Net News Online

Royal Caribbean International has announced there will be 60 fewer calls by its ships to the Cayman Islands starting from January 2008. It said this was due to re-deployment of the vessels.

…The Explorer of the Seas will be re-deployed to New Jersey and will run a mix of Eastern/Southern Caribbean, Bermuda and Canadian routes, while The Legend of the Seas will be re-deployed to Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic. The Rhapsody of the Seas will be based in Asia next year and The Zenith, part of Celebrity Cruises, will be leaving the fleet altogether.

And, from Newsday, 

…Following the success of NCL Corp.’s year-round departures from New York, Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd. next week begins offering its own year-round cruises from the terminal it is developing in Bayonne, just across the Hudson River from New York.

It seems a bit odd for a classic cruise destination like the Cayman Islands to lose traffic while the often chilly New York City area adds it, but I suppose the cruise lines move their ships to where passengers are.

The recent sinking of the Sea Diamond off the Island of Santorini raises many questions for even the most seasoned cruise traveller.  An article found in Alanat News provides more insight on the subject. 

According to research undertaken by the University of Newfoundland in Canada, since 1980 21 passenger ships have sunk around the world, a figure made up of cruise liners and the vessels of ferry operators. To put it another way, that’s roughly one a year. In the same period, a further 76 passenger ships ran aground and, in many cases, structural or equipment deficiencies have been to blame…

So how can you be sure your liner is safe? According to the Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA), the body responsible for regulating the UK’s liner industry, the first thing to check is the age of your ship. “There is no tipping point in terms of what makes a safe or unsafe ship,” explains Prasad Panicker, of the MCA’s vessel survey branch. “However, if it’s more than 25 years old, you need to check its safety record…

In 1982, an agreement known as the Paris Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) was signed by the state organisations of 25 maritime nations, including all European coastal states and those of the North Atlantic basin.

When planning your next cruise make it a point to check out the MOU web site to help make your cruise ship decision a bit easier. Using the search feature on this site, you can see when your ship was last inspected. You can also check the “Detention List” - if your ship is on that list, that’s not a good thing. Fortunately, when we scanned the list, we didn’t see any ships from the major lines.

http://www.parismou.org/

Norwegian Cruise Lines is moving a cruise ship from Hawaii to Europe. The Pride of Hawaii will start showing its pride on the other side of the globe when it leaves Hawaii in late January. Pride must be a limited commodity, as the ship will be renamed Norwegian Jade. The ship will have a casino added, and will replace the current tropical flowers hull artwork with a new design.

Two other NCL cruise ships, Pride of Aloha and Pride of America, will remain in Hawaii. NCL saw 2006 revenue jump from $1.6 billion to $2 billion, but the cruise line swung from a $16 million profit to a $130 million loss. Clearly, the line hopes that they’ll be able to improve the profitability of their Hawaiian operation by cutting back on capacity in the market.

The Pride of Hawaii’s stay in that state was quite short - the cruise ship only moved there last summer. (From the Seattle Times.)

Wow, this looks like a fun ride:

This doesn’t look like one of the really massive cruise ships, but it’s still quite large and is really bouncing around. I bet the dramamine dispenser was popular on THAT cruise. Must have made dining room service a bit challenging, too!

The Princess Kaguya is a cruise ship with a mission. Rather than just serving as a floating hotel for tourists, the organization proposing to build this mega-ship hopes that it will be an attraction in the ports that it visits and serve as a floating center of cultural exchange. The ship itself will be 505 meters long - that’s 1657 feet long. Or, in other terms, about five and a half football fields or almost a third of a mile long. The ship would hold a staggering 8,400 passengers while at sea, and could accommodate 10,000 visitors while in port.

Here, we are aiming to make real the dreams of those charmed by the sea by building an “International Urban Cruise Ship”. There are quite a few international cruise ships traveling around the world, and none are open to the local people of the cities they visit. The ship becomes nothing more than the scenery from the harbor. The ship we are planning will be fully available to the people it visits at each port of call, functioning as an international cultural exchange.

The people at each port city will be able to enjoy all the facilities on the ship and the latest and greatest equipment that the ship brings in to each port. The ship will become a part, an extension of the port city where it arrives at the moment it docks in at the harbor. All facilities including hotels, shopping malls, sport arena and various events at the multi-purpose hall on board will become a part of the city, available to the passengers and locals alike.

The cultural exchange which takes place at each port of call all over the world will help to build an international network of people and ideas, which is the core concept of our “Princess Kaguya” project.

The developers of this concept even claim to have filed an international patent for the idea of operating a ship in this manner, and in particular holding events on board the ship. We’re not patent experts, but somehow the idea of arriving in a port and having the locals come on board doesn’t seem quite original enough to earn a patent… but we’ll see.

It seems that the logistics of moving that many cruise passengers and local visitors on and off would be time consuming and, at ports without the ability to dock a ship of this magnitude, even more difficult and time consuming. The tender operation to move eight or ten thousand people back and forth would be comparable to the Normandy invasion. (Well, that might be a bit of an exaggeration, but it would dwarf the scale of today’s largest tender operations.)

The ship would have three separate hotels, including some areas designated for permanent residents.

We don’t know what the odds are of this ship getting built, but if if does, it will be one impressive cruise ship!

Most cruise ships these days have a medical team on board.  Evidently this was not the case on the cruise ship Braemer, as it was sailing 12 miles south of Shoreham, West Sussex, on its way to Dover, Kent.  It is not unusual for a passenger to be air lifted off of a ship to a land hospital, as recently reported  by a North Carolina local news web site, WVEC.com.  (This is a very good reason to buy travelers insurance when booking a cruise, because a helicopter lift to land is quite expensive). 

However this time the doctor was air lifted to the ship when a passenger was suffering chest pains, as reported in Shipping Times. 

Just before midnight last night Solent Coastguard received a radio call from the cruise ship BRAEMAR, which was 12 miles south of Shoreham on passage to Dover, reporting a male passenger who had been receiving extensive treatment for a chest pains for the previous 2 hours.

Fortunately the patient’s condition has improved. 

Looking for more information?  Check out the following article from the CLIA (Cruise Lines International Association), web site Medical Facilities Guidelines  
 

The International Council of Cruise Lines (ICCL) is a non-profit industry trade association consisting of the 16 largest passenger cruise lines that call on major ports in the United States and abroad. The ICCL is dedicated to helping the cruise industry provide a safe, healthy, secure and caring ship environment for both passengers and crew. Among those services that illustrate this commitment to passenger welfare are the shipboard medical infirmaries found on all ICCL member vessels.

One concern is that the web site hasn’t been updated since January of 2002 - surely there have been some changes since then.  Being in the medical field myself, I know that we are always updating policies and procedures to keep up with the constant changes in technology.  I hope that CLIA is also keeping up with these changes because I really do love taking cruises and would hate to think everything on my next cruise wasn’t ship shape!

Like airplanes, cruise ships have “black box” recorders to document exactly what happened in the case of a disaster.

ATHENS, Greece - Investigators using a remote-controlled submarine found a sunken Greek cruise ship’s data recorder and planned to bring it to the surface Friday, authorities said.

The Merchant Marine Ministry said the recorder could reveal details of the sinking of the Sea Diamond, information they hope to use in the prosecution of crew members.

That cruise ships contained such a device was new to us, but perhaps it will shed some light on how a cruise ship could sink in as popular a port as the Greek island of Santorini.

Thanks to Mobissimo Blog.

The captain of the sunken cruise ship Sea Diamond, charged with negligence by Greek authorities, is blaming strong currents for the disaster.

“I felt the ship, which had been on a normal course, slip to the right because of sea currents,” NET quoted him as saying. “I gave the order for a full turn left. But there was not enough time for the ship to respond.”

The captain was indicted along with five other crew members on blanket charges of causing a shipwreck through negligence, breaching international shipping safety regulations and polluting the environment, the Cyclade islands public prosecution office said. All have been released pending further testimony.

Whether this argument will hold water remains to be seen. Presumably, cruise ship captains are supposed to be familiar with currents and ensure that they give underwater hazards a wide enough berth. European legal authorities tend to be a bit stricter on personal responsibility issues of this type; in the U.S., we rely more on the civil court system to produce judgments against negligent parties. I’m sure too that the Greek authorities want to reassure the thousands of cruise ship passengers that visit daily that they take these matters very seriously. It will be interesting to see how this plays out in court.

We can expect more bad cruise ship PR when they find the bodies of the two missing passengers. Raising the sunken cruise ship should provide some great photo opps if they decide to resurrect it.