It’s entirely possible that Princess now holds the norovirus record. This weekend, the cruise line admitted the number of cases on two of its ships had grown to 499. Saturday, the Crown Princess returned to Fort Lauderdale from the Caribbean with 12% of the people on board suffering from the disease — 364 passengers and [...]
Something that comes with going on cruises of any kind is education. It could be from meeting people of different races, it could be from experiencing geography never before seen, or it could just be a history lesson. Take the Danube River. You don’t have to take a river cruise on the Danube to find [...]
Princess is having a photo contest for passengers, and that means the pressure is on in our household. On her, not me. Because my little shutterbug has 18,772 photos on her laptop (as of late yesterday), a huge percentage of them from cruises, and I just know somewhere in there is a winner. When she [...]
As we keep reminding our kids, because nobody else will, we were really ahead of our time as cruising parents. It was a couple of decades ago (exact year not disclosed, to protect revealing exact ages and getting us in exact trouble) and we decided on a family cruise, down the Mexican Riviera. Our sons [...]
Let’s clarify one thing about this blog before we begin: It is not about age discrimination. As cruise lines search for entertainment lightning rods to attract passengers to ships, they are reaching further into the…uh, age bag. They are recruiting entertainers of our age, and older. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. However, it [...]
Today, it’s time to make three port stops, all of which are enjoying their changing associations with cruise ships… New Orleans: It’s almost like people who cruise just re-discovered what a great place New Orleans is to visit. In 2011, the port showed an increase of 39 per cent to 738,908, the most cruise passengers [...]
Either there’s been a dip in the advertising by major cruise lines, or it just seems that way. Everybody’s just a little gun shy about promoting cruises when bodies are still being discovered off the shores of Italy. The cruise pendulum continues to swing towards river cruising, and there is no shortage of advertising these [...]
It was our intention to write about something other than the Costa Concordia today. However, it’s difficult to find a story anywhere on cruising that doesn’t include more than a passing reference to a ship almost nobody had even heard of three weeks ago. In fact, most of the stories about cruising these days are [...]
One last postscript on the cruise-ship accident that nobody wants to read about any more… This wasn’t supposed to be the Costa Concordia’s final cruise, so there are passengers booked on future trips that won’t happen. What happens to them? In addition to probably millions paying in liability to those on the ship, Costa will [...]
Ice breakers leading the way to reach the fuel-starved people of Nome, on the far west coast of Alaska. Elsewhere in the state, there are snowbanks towering 15 to 18 feet high. Good time to think about an Alaskan cruise? The answer is yes. It is now that cruise companies start promoting this year’s cruises [...]