HaroldLeslie

The people on board always tell me that they cannot blow their own noses without approval from above.

Thank you for your best wishes. We are now safely on board after a scare involving my wallet. I was already in the taxi going back home when my wife found in my jacket where I put it when going through security. Yes, we locals get involved a lot in the ships and their movements. Despite being a moderately large city and enteral large towns the business community is very integrated. The weather yesterday was nothing special and of course it will be worse out on the open water. St. Catherine's Point on the Isle of Wight always experiences the higher gusts being an exposed headland. I know a few of the staff on board from our previous cruises on her. As a nosey old git I'd be interested in finding out more but I shall probably keep it to myself.

The individual companies cannot make such strategic decisions without the backing of the whole group. Carnival had to organise a whopping great loan facility to cover them all. Safety wasn't the only consideration. Having quite rightly diverted because of the medical emergency there were then few options left available. The captain may not have fancied his chances of getting out of A Coruña and the bad weather gives them enough of a justification to change their itinerary. As I have said many times, other much smaller ships were operating throughout and Iona came through without problems.

They are all cruise companies?

Where do you think I live?

You were never unsafe. It was only a gale and other much smaller ships were operating without problems. Or is Sky Princess an inherently less safe ship than Iona, for example 😉 Whatever, we are really looking forward to embarking on her tomorrow. Just the last minute packing in the morning and then our son is picking us up at 12:15. We should be onboard by 13:00 🙂

I was going off Marine Traffic but 05:30 is more realistic. She is about 65nm off the Nab at 16 knots so she should be there around 03:30 then there is the run along the Solent and up to the berth. About the typical arrival time then 🙂

ETA for Iona is now 03:00 tomorrow. As you know they like to get in as early as possible on account of the amount of work involved in changeover. It may be that the main channel is now less congested now that Sky Princess is not going to be hogging it 😉

Nothing happens on a ship without approval from head office. We have had various experiences with missed ports. Some were due to inappropriate weather, some due to ship systems failures, some due to Covid, sometimes more than one on the same cruise. As a company you have do do whatever you need to keep the customers happy and more importantly keep them coming back. You are correct that any negotiation has to be done before you get off the ship.

The maths depend upon the principle applied to these payments. If it relates to a portion of the cruise that has been devalued then perhaps the payment ought in some way be proportional to the price paid. If it is just to ward off complaints then the payment would be per person. I was told a long while ago that in business if a customer is happy then they might tell three or four other people but if they are unhappy then they might tell twelve to fifteen. Usually these matters are quantified by the size of the pile of complaints letters. On another matter I see that Iona has been working her way up channel at a steady 17 knots through all the threatening conditions. Are there any reports from those on board as to how this part of the passage has been?

The extreme example is Aurora's world cruise in 2005 which was cancelled completely. Lots of missed ports there!

Good point. And an important one.

Oh absolutely. But we're getting too pedantic here. From the business point of view you need to do enough to keep that customer's future business. This is not a court of law wherein an amount of damage has to be decided. You need to keep such customers happy, or at least not so unhappy that they will prefer to take their custom elsewhere.

I have been looking back through my records which also date back over 20 years but were not as extensive in the early days as they are more recently. I can see various lump sum credits which were probably not specifically for port fees but were an overall gesture to help smooth the many disappointments, one or two of which were blamed on the weather.. As I said, such behaviour is a main reason why we have jumped ship from P&O.

They should. But they could be excused for thinking that if any circumstances should upset their schedule they would be compensated in some way or other. This is what usually happens with most cruise lines. When they learn about the way that Princess has handled this situation they are of course entitled to take their custom elsewhere. We have suffered many upsets from P&O and the list of ports that we shall never have the chance to visit is quite long. Any compensation was limited to the return of port fees and nothing more. That's the main reason that we don't cruise with P&O any more. Too many disappointments.

All fair points especially the bit about charging extra fees for the extended stay in Southampton. If it were purely a question of safety then the ship could have sheltered at anchor off the east coast of the Isle of Wight. There are plenty of other ships travelling through the Western Channel including the Irish ferry W.B. Yeats. Indeed, Iona is at present rounding the north west corner of Spain. Something doesn’t quite ring true to me but I’m not onboard so I’m not too bothered about it but from my experience $100 that you can’t easily spend does seem rather light.

HMRC can be an awkward bunch. There is the question of VAT on all purchases and a gambling licence for the casino. The cross channel ships all have to close their offerings.

That’s fair enough then. Of course you wouldn’t expect many complaints from those who were not on board and didn’t know about the situation.

I think those are gust speed. The Met Office has a maximum forecast of 20mph with gusts up to 36 at 14:00 which is hardly a force 5. When I did the Round the Island race in my 23ft boat it started off at force 7 but eased off to six later on. With weather forecasts I generally look at several and then pick the one that I like the best: 🙂 No, not on the roll call. I haven’t bothered much with cruise forums lately but I was particularly interested in the circumstances of this voyage. We live in Chandlers Ford which is only about seven miles from the docks so we shall probably set off around 12:15 on Saturday.

There are people who might be considering a cruise and are comparing experiences on various cruise lines. From the point of view of the cruise company you would prefer to attract as many customers as possible and some would be put off by stories such as these. As a service provider they level of ‘compensation’ needs to be set at a level that keeps the majority of its customers happy. There will always be a few who will complain about the slightest inconvenience but if there is significant discontent then the payment is probably too low.

Shops and casino are shut whilst in territorial waters.

We are also booked on that cruise. I had an email offer a couple of weeks ago that was too good to refuse.

There’ll be a lot of rain and a few gusts of wind but nothing unusual. We live a few miles from Southampton and the Hampshire basin is well sheltered from all directions. We are joining Sky Princess on Saturday morning and I had noticed the change of itinerary. I was interested to see the reason for the change.