LadyMage

If there is a silver lining to this situation, the guests booked after RCI reclaimed the FOS can thank the Maxwell Group for the discounted rates and the FOS is coming out of drydock with several upgrades and enhancements

 

Hopefully this situation will not over shadow the incredible product that the successful music charters are providing to their guests

 

San Juan PR will be the epicenter of full charter music cruises in the next few months....Festival at Sea in July, Capital Jazz SuperCruise in October and Dave Koz & Friends in Feb 2016...all 3 are sell outs

I kick myself for always seeming to miss Dave Koz & Friends!!! But the problem is, it doesn't jive with my work schedule, and it's ALWAYS such a great lineup...argh!

But CapJazz has been just such a great time. So yep, I'm going to stick with them.

I think that this will actually put a spotlight on the other music charters. If anything, Maxwell at Sea has been an example of "what NOT to do in public relations when putting on a music cruise". If people see that other music charters are nothing like Maxwell/BTW, that's more business to the good eggs.

For those of you going on the capital jazz supercruise:

 

I just realized that we will be in port together! We are sailing out of San Juan as well on Oct 24. We'll be waving to you from the Summit!

Hey hey! See you across the way! :D If we're sharing a host hotel, please feel free to party with us!

Wow... I hope RCI has plans in place to handle embarkation and the ensuing pandemonium on May 3rd. Since the charter was cancelled in November, but the promoter is still telling customers as late as January 28th that its still on - it seems there will be quite a few people showing up who expect to have a cabin that they paid HUGE bucks for, only to find upon arrival that they don't have a cabin at all, because the promoter took their money despite the charter being cancelled. Unfortunately, I think embarkation will be a disaster for everyone, whether booked on the charter or via cabins direct from RCI. I just hope it doesn't turn into a riot. :(

I really, really hope it won't come to that. Final payments on this thing are due on March 15th - I'm sure that there will be answers by then.

It would be so much easier for them to just come out and say, "Look, it's not going to go the way we originally planned, but this is what we're doing about it". Yes, people will be disappointed. But guess what else: they'll respect them for owning up to it. Instead they're doing the direct and exact opposite: silencing naysayers, banning critics, and forcing people to go elsewhere for answers.

I'm confident that somewhere behind the scenes, they're trying to work out an alternative, or a salvage plan - something. There's way too much on the line for them to lose. Yes, I'm giving them a little bit of benefit of the doubt here - I just severely doubt that they'd sit still on something like this, especially considering how it's soured publicly and the massive sum of money they're now liable for. But if they worked out anything in terms of alternatives, now's a really good time for them to let people know. They're already pissing people off A LOT by non-answering. They're not going to have a good result if they roll out the alternative after this sort of bad publicity.

From looking at their facebook page, I think their clients now are aware that this cruise is a no go. They haven't taken any more payments from them, but they also are not answereing their phones to answer their questions; nor have they returned their money.:mad:

They're still sanitizing their facebook pages. They banned me, as well as a bunch of other people, but they routinely go through and delete any naysayers. I guess the only silver lining is that they stopped taking payments, but sanitizing their social media is the single worst thing they can do. If their image wasn't awful before, they're sinking it further.

Thing is this: I did a FB search for Maxwell at sea from their event page, and there were a bunch of others' event pages about this charter - know how folks attending can create events just to see whom they can meet up with on board? It's the FB version of a roll call. I skimmed through those; not everyone is aware that it's canceled.

Really not shocked if the attorney general will step in about this. That is a LOT! of money they've taken.

Frankly, the way they've handled this - the outright dishonesty and fraud - they don't deserve to be in business!

 

By the way, in addition to the Twitter account @maxwellatsea, they also have @btwconcerts. :)

Agreed completely. This was the only piece of info I needed before reporting them to the Arizona attorney general.

OK, guys. Update.

I pinged Royal Caribbean on social media, and they confirmed that Maxwell and the Seven Seas is canceled.

BTW Concerts is still not admitting it.

This thread has so far given more information to the attendees of Maxwell at Sea than the promoters themselves. That, frankly, is appalling. If BTW concerts will stay in business after this, I will be amazed.

It's definitely a thought. I would think that repeat successful charters may cut a break on the rent costs, or maybe have some extras thrown in...

Carnival LIVE is something I've been thinking about, but I've yet to see a performance that would make me say, "hey, I'll do that". Capital Jazz is my favorite, and Hattack, you know that ship is full to bursting, and I think that if they ever changed ship classes, they'd find the new classes on a silver platter.

I think I got a gray hair when I saw that price. 5.6M!? Jeez Louise...

No surprise in re: Constellation. And it's also an example of the charter promoter thinking about guest attendance and costs. If they felt that their event wasn't going to sell the Eurodam in full, they knew that the easiest way to 1. ensure attendance and 2. still cut a profit is 3. to downgrade the ship. And the prices are very reasonable, too.

That should've said "I am surprised if people haven't started..." in re: refunds. My bad.

And to note, I've been screencapping, best I could, the posts that I know would end up deleted. They banned people from posting to their page, especially people who have criticized them or pointed out that RCI is selling cabins at a fraction of the cost, before disabling the posts-to-page feature completely.

A scam would imply there was never any cruise planned to begin with, or they were listing artists who had no affiliation with the cruise. I don’t think a professional musician like Maxwell (who is the marquee artist- his name is on the cruise itself) would align himself with anything like that. My theory is that the high prices reflect back to poor decision-making on the part of the organizers. Maybe they were overly ambitious in booking the entertainment, and when it came time to crunch the numbers, those were the prices they had to charge in order to pay all the artists.

 

As far as the other points (deleting posts and such), I still think that’s more attributable to poor management than scam. Maybe they are in denial (to themselves even) that the cruise was a failure, and if they can just buy themselves some time, they can somehow get everything worked out in time to pull off the cruise, even if it’s a smaller version of what they originally envisioned.

 

I am not excusing or justifying in anyway the behavior and actions of the organizers of the cruise, I just can easily imagine how an idea that began with nothing but the highest of intentions (bring some great entertainers and their fans on a ship for a week of music, parties and fun) started to snowball out of control to the point that they are now desperately attempting damage control and will be lucky if this whole debacle doesn’t put them out of business.

It certainly wasn't intended to be a scam; they did genuinely want to put this thing on. The promoter has had an established range of land events, and to whatever end, they had gone through and taken place. Likely, they just got carried away and thought that the land festivals could make for a successful cruise. However, they have planned that cruise VERY! poorly, and executed poorly.

I severely doubt that this charter will take place, in any iteration. RCI made it clear. Whatever reputation the promoter had to land events has been shot in the foot by the deplorable management of the event and the sanitizing of the website and the social media. They aren't likely to live it down anytime soon. If this won't kill the franchise altogether, I'll be amazed.

as recently as two weeks ago - two full months after RCI cancelled their charter - callers were being assured that the full ship charter was still definitely on, and they were still taking customers' money on the basis of that assurance. At that point, they were willfully perpetrating a fraud, and it had definitely become a scam.

Agreed. At the point of RCI pulling their chapter, they should've just sent out an email saying, "Sorry, guys, this isn't going to happen." That would've been the gracious thing to do. And if they would've done that and given a timeline on the refunds, then they would have kept their integrity, and people would've considered booking it if they were to try again with another ship at a different time. But as it is, they hadn't done that, and the fallout will continue to reverberate.

I was part of a startup land event in Montego Bay in 2009, and looked forward to repeating it 2010. That event pulled its plug as well, and we were all alerted to that. Reason was similar: not enough rooms booked to pull it off. But it was handled properly.

I doubt you'll see anyone from the Maxwell cruise show up here to clarify - because my bet is that they understand that if they start openly acknowledging the charter is no longer on that (more) customers will start demanding full refunds, refunds that they have no funds to pay.

I am not surprised if people haven't started demanding refunds already. There has been some twitter activity by attendees who have discovered the actual state of the charter through this thread. I honestly have no idea how the Maxwell at Sea people will salvage this situation; if a third-party forum has more information than they're providing to their own clients, it speaks volumes about the state of things.

Let's be clear, this is not the first or will be the last music charter cruise outfit that failed....failure can be for many legitimate reasons,...the economy, poor marketing, underestimating the competition, greed, failure to have in place a 3-5 year sound business plan, not the right mix of ship size to meet the demand...recent failed attempts that come to mind are R. Kelly & Kenny G (that I know of)

 

it looks "easy" & very lucrative from the outside looking in...just because Maxwell has a huge fan base that does not link up to filing 4000 berths on the FOS....usually one's first time attempt is on a much smaller scale (group on a regular sailing, older smaller ship on a 3-5 day cruise with a smaller line up etc)...and word of mouth from satisfied repeat guests ,slowly build your base

 

What's perplexing in the Maxwell case is the number of missteps...I feel sorry for the poor customer service folks who are on the front lines answering the phones...they can only say what they have been scripted to communicate...I feel very sorry for the guests who paid (way to much IMHO) for what could have been an incredible musical immersion

 

The irony in the Maxwell case, with the line up, at those prices, they would have been better charting a Seabourn Luxury Cruise Line size vessel (450 guests) to open for sale in May 2014 to sail in January 2016...it would have been a sell out

My very first music cruise was on the Celebrity Century. Now that would've been a ship of the right size to pull off the Maxwell at Sea charter; it's small, has an excellent setup, and doesn't break the bank. So with calculating talent fees in mind, it would've not been too terrible price-wise for the attendees if they would've booked that ship instead. Seabourn is also excellent; I think Diana Krall did her cruise charter on this line in the Mediterranean, and it was a hit.

I think that it was just plain inexperience with the running of a charter cruise that had caused this to go under. All of those errors add up to an inevitable conclusion, but each of those errors in context are just...amateurish. They should have sought out and cultivated more of an audience by investing in festival sponsorships outside their own franchise; this would've exposed them to a far bigger potential audience. All they've done so far works well with putting on a land festival, where prices are much lower for admission than a cruise, and guests can save on their flight/hotel costs if they book their own. But it just doesn't work that way with charter cruises; there's a lot more money-juggling and publicity-hunting involved. I look at the Smooth Jazz Cruise and the Dave Koz cruise as examples; though neither franchise is based in my home of NY, I've seen their ads make their way to NY-based events on a regular basis. And they got attendees that way.

Although, in thinking about it, something occurred to me about their prices: could it be that they didn't have enough money from the sponsors and investors to adequately cover their production expenses, and thus jacked up the attendance costs?

I can think of no other reason why they'd ask those sorts of prices of their attendees, apart from them trying to recoup. Dave Koz hosts his cruises on Jewel of the Seas and his prices are nowhere near what Maxwell at Sea showed.

I truly feel awful for the employees of this promoter. They're likely deluged in phone calls, maybe even saw it coming, and if the RCI legal team did intervene - at least as far as the site verbiage is concerned - then I doubt they can say anything...

JSs are selling for $1,499 per person or around $3,000 for two. No where on the RCI website is there a price of $7,002.50 for a JS. Are you still trying to book with Maxwell? The cruise was cancelled in November.

 

I think that those who booked with Maxwell booked a lot of JSs and above -- wonder if they will go back into inventory. There are about 15 JSs on the website.

Hmmmm. Last time I checked the Maxwell cruise site, they were claiming their inside cabins were "sold out" - outright lie; RCI offered me an inside cabin all to myself for 1/5 of their cost - but I'd imagine the JS cabins were for the artists.

They had to put up a bond -- wonder if anything is left to pay passengers.

I'd hope there is. Else the lawsuit will be epic.

That's IF they paid the artists... I somehow doubt that.

This makes me wonder if this entire thing was deliberate, and done for the insurance money. There is no cruise company who will put on a charter without insurance, and I can't imagine it'll be a small payout.

Guess what else they don't know much about? Social media! So they've deleted all posts and banned the posters from their Facebook page. Know where we all need to go to spread the word about the dishonesty AND the Facebook censorship?

 

Twitter! Their twitter handle is @maxwellatsea, and when I looked it up they've been posting using the hashtag #maxwellatsea. Tweet about what's been going on, and ask them why they've deleted all negative posts from their Facebook page and have made no announcement that the charter is not happening? They can't delete twitter messages! I think I'm going to go call them out! :D

 

EDIT: Just sent this tweet: @maxwellatsea why aren't you letting your customers AND artists know RCI cancelled your charter in November? Pretty dishonest! #maxwellatsea

LOL. That's pretty much what I'm thinking too. The mistakes they're making on social media are pure amateur hour. Do they not know that if it's on social media, or the Internet, it lives forever?

This is precisely why I screencapped the posts....

Yikes, somehow even with all of this stupidity I'm still surprised that they're not communicating with their artists. I wonder if they will still be on the hook for paying the talent.

I'd imagine so...

I don't think the artists are aware. Anthony Hamilton tweeted about the cruise yesterday. I tweeted him back and asked if it had been cancelled. He tweeted me back and said not that he knew of.

...Okay, that's just infuriating. Those artists are losing out a week off their schedules for something that's not even taking place? HELL no. Not cool. I am willing to bet that very few of them even got paid in the first place. In the concert world, the artists need to be paid in full by a certain deadline, and I cannot imagine that ANY of them will come near that boat or that promoter without a check.

I'm banned too. I hope they get their butts sued off. folks should contact the artists and let them know what a sham they are involved in

They reaaaallly want to torpedo what's left of their image, don't they?

Indeed. The artists are no fools, though, I think they've seen enough of those things go down. I checked a couple of the websites, not all of them are advertising this cruise. I think they are already aware of what's going on.

Guess they know nothing about how to market a theme cruise or from other poster's posts, a land vacation (like the Cancun substitute).

The concert franchise has actually been around for locally based music festivals, from what I gather. Common complaints? Price. OF COURSE. And it isn't rocket science: if your event isn't priced to sell, it won't.

I could go into the whole event-planning breakdown, but it'll take too long. Suffice it to say, I also have doubts the Cancun Jazz Fest will ever take place.

Especially at the prices they charged!!

Indeed!!! I knew it was going to go under the minute I saw the prices. They surely didn't think that they would sell out at this insane rate, did they?

I just looked at the Maxwell at Sea facebook page and one of their cruisers asked when their payment was going to be processed for January and wanted to know if the cruise had been cancelled or wasin trouble.

 

The Company sponsoring the cruise responded today saying that there was a problem with their system and January's payment shad not been taken out yet. This company is horrible!

They just deleted ALL the comments from their group where people were pissed off about it possibly not happening, and now I'm officially banned from commenting on their pages.

Well, way to go, Maxwell at Sea! You've officially confirmed that I was right, right alongside with everyone from here who has come over there to say it. Nice! Very nice! I hope you enjoy the lawsuit that will be brought against you, because I can't possibly imagine that the people who were pissed about it are going to sit quietly.

At the airport on Sundays in the boarding area while waiting for your flight home, you can spot the cruisers who have been on a full music charter...we are wearing colorful teeshirts with the list of artists on the back and we are sleeping, exhausted by 7-8 days/nights of having the cruise of a lifetime

Oh, yes, yes, this! I took one of my friends aboard CapJazz last year, and I warned her: the only sleep you will get is before and after this cruise, not during it. She didn't believe me. She zonked hard on Day 3, and at the airport, she was telling me that there's NO way anyone could go right back to work after such a cruise. She is right!

Me, I made friends with the coffee stand girl on the boat...only way to keep going until jam sessions wrap up! :)

I was looking at the Maxwell at Sea cruise to see how it went...mainly because I liked the line up and was going to possibly book in 2016. However, since I've been cruising with Tom Joyner for the past 3 years (this is my 4th) I know it takes A LOT to pull off a successful Full Charter. On Tom Joyner, I literally have something to do for almost 24 hrs straight! Sometimes the last concert is at 2am! And the during the day there are really informative seminars, art auctions, and poolside activities. I have been sailing with people that have become life long friends. And then to top it all off, I see the fruit of my contribution by the scholarships that the Foundation gives to students that attend HBCU's.

 

I probably will go on a regular cruise at some point, but right now I'm having too much fun on Tom Joyner. :)

I don't think I can do a regular cruise. Capital Jazz spoiled me for life :) But...I think I should like to do a regular voyage one of those days. The Freedom looks like an awesome ship, but I would love to revisit the Celebrity line.

The Tom Joyner Foundation (501C-3) provides the correct paperwork for your taxes....excellent way to support HBCUs & enjoy A Party With a Purpose

 

If the. 3 day weekend Cancun Jazz Festival in September is being offered as an alternative for the Maxwell cruise it makes the 8 day/night Capital Jazz SuperCruise 9 in October the :eek:deal of the century:eek: with enough change left over to deposit for SuperCruise 10

 

Will check on RCI website C&A page to see if being an Emerald Member qualifies me for a special rate on this sailing to fill the cabin void left by the Maxwell situation

Three days for the price they're asking is just...nuts. I go to jazz festivals routinely. Most of them are in Southern California, and at last check, they ask 1/3 of the price they're asking for tix alone! *facepalm* This, ladies and gents, is an example of People Not Learning Their Lesson.

I'm definitely going to book Supercruise 10. I'd love for them to consider the Celebrity fleet for the setting, though - my very first music cruise was on the Celebrity Century and that was a love at first sail. Is the capacity similar? I like the Carnival fleet A-OK though. Anywhere there's a martini bar is fine by me! :D :D