Enjoy your cruise!

For a cruise to be a success, it’s not just only the voyage that has to go right, everything needs to be on the ball from embarkation, through the cruise, shore excursions, and finally disembarkation and onward connections, especially with regard to fly-cruises. This was brought to mind last week when I had a drink with a cruise ship photographer friend of mine who had just returned with his wife from an Alaskan fly-cruise with Princess Cruises. The cruise aboard Diamond Princess was excellent, said my friend. However, the experience started going down hill as soon as they disembarked to make the journey back to the UK. They left the ship in Whittier and were taken by coach to the Captain Cook Hotel in Anchorage for an overnight stay before flying from Anchorage to London, via Seattle the next morning. Their baggage had left the ship separately for the hotel. As they couldn’t check-in to their hotel until nearly five hours after arriving in Anchorage they were taken to Princess Cruises’ Hospitality Centre, but as all bays for parking coaches were occupied their bus had to make three trips ‘around the block’. During these trips they passed their hotel and noticed that all of their bags were outside in the heavy rain, it was only on the third pass that a tarpaulin had been placed over the bags. By then the damage had been done! When they got to their room in the hotel they found that all clothing in the bags was soaking wet! Complaints where made to the hotel who ‘were not interested.’ The following morning after boarding the coach to take them to Anchorage Airport for their Alaska Airlines flight to Seattle they were told that the flight had been cancelled due to ‘technical’ reasons. However, some passenger had said that they had been told about the cancellation the night before. My friend, who spent many years as a senior executive in the airline industry, said that if this was the case why hadn’t there been any contingency plans made? This question was met with a zero response from Princess Cruises’ staff, with one of them saying that their responsibility ended with delivering the passengers to the airport! On arrival at Anchorage Airport the 40 plus group of passengers who were returning to London were put on the next flight to Seattle but missed their connection to London. Although they were all put on the next London flight, nearly three hours later, many people missed onward connection in London. The cruise experience should be a seamless positive experience. It’s no good offering just the good experience at sea, if the land-side operations fail abysmally. Sphere: Related Content