There’s a certain fantasy to going on a cruise. Your bed’s made, your meals are cooked. You can play all day, or not. You can see places you never dreamed of seeing. You can snack and drink and swim. You can sleep in and nobody’s going to sound the alarm. And once in a while, [...]
Tomorrow is a day associated with trivia, this being a leap year, so today’s blog is also associated with trivia…that doesn’t make it a trivial blog. Does it? February 29, of course, only comes as often as presidential elections (and in the same years). Having said that, there’s nothing trivial about the Leap Day Sale [...]
The cry that you hear from people who love cruising and who love Mexico — that would be us — is this: “Somebody do something!” News on the weekend that 22 Carnival passengers were robbed, at gunpoint, while on an organized shore excursion in Puerto Vallarta, has taken violence in Mexico to another level. Until [...]
So much is made of the sizes of cruise ships, isn’t it? Some cruisers think biggest is best. Some think smaller is better because of its intimacy. There is, naturally, no correct answer. In reading about cruise ships, we came across an interesting measurement. Take the size of the ship (measured in “gross tonnage”) and [...]
If we didn’t know better, we’d say with just a drip of sarcasm that the reason it took Cunard 172 years to do weddings on their ships, it’s because they wanted to get it right. The real reason, however, is that British law prohibited weddings on British ships. When one of its stablemates, Carnival, had [...]
On the weekend, we came across a story about “gentlemen hosts” on cruise ships. These are “jobs” for single men who pay $30 a day to go and have a good time on a cruise, with no romantic liaisons allowed. In other words, they have to be, well, gentlemen. The Gentleman Host Program and others [...]
In the old and never-ending wake of the Costa Concordia accident, there is a new perspective that’s worth acknowledging. It comes, courtesy of a show the Discovery Channel aired this weekend. A former cruise ship captain from California, Paul Leyda, was interviewed extensively on the show. In a story that appeared in a Bay Area [...]
When you’re No. 2 — or even No. 3 or No. 4 — you try harder. Norwegian Cruise Lines has plenty of experience, competing with bigger brands, all of which are part of cruise line consortiums…Carnival, Royal Caribbean, Princess and so on. When you try harder, you try everything. Quality of products, quality of service. [...]
In another life, as a sports writer, there were five big sports events I hoped to see before moving on to another profession. One of them was the Kentucky Derby. I made it, in 1978, when Affirmed left the favorite, Alydar, a length-and-a-half behind at the finish line of the famous Run For The Roses. [...]
“We are committed to Southampton as our main base, but Liverpool is our spiritual home.” Those are the words of Peter Shanks, Cunard’s President, after word leaked in the Liverpool Daily Post that the Queen Mary 2 may — that’s “may” — start sailing from Liverpool to New York on a one-off, sporadic basis. The [...]