AEGBRG

IM with AEGBRG.

 

Are all of you Saints?

 

I Think not.

Thanks man! At least somebody on this board agrees me. Be careful though -- you are going to upset a lot of people on this board who think they are perfect and have never broken a rule or a law at one point in their life.

The $25 corkage fee is practically stealing, but that is perfectly OK with the people on this board as long as Celebrity is the one doing the cheating.

Still wondering, if your family would have consumed 30 drinks a day if you were paying for each drink??

Obviously no. Again, I said I apologize for mentioning and endorsing the sharing of drink cards. What more do you want me to say?

No worries guys. Celebrity starting the drink packages around, what, two years ago?? It is still very profitable for them or else they would not still be offering it. None of you will lose it because of me.

Also, I apologize for endorsing the sharing of drinks. I should not have done that. For those of you I have offended, I am sorry.

You are correct. I should not have made assumptions about you.

 

Lets look at this a little differently. I persoanlly think Neiman Marcus completely overcharges for their merchandise. I have the choice of not shopping there, or I could just switch the tag from a cheaper piece of clothing in thier store onto the more expensive one just because the prices they are asking would like stealing from me. Alternatively I could buy one pair of pants and then when no one is looking I could slip another pair into the bag with the first pair. Instead I just choose to shop elsewhere.

 

You can pay the asking price for your drinks / packages, you can not drink pay drinks while on your cruise or you can not cruise Celebrity because you feel the drink prices are too high. All of those options do not involve theft. Your option is theft just as buying one piece of clothing from NM and shoplifting another becuase of the high price is theft.

There is one problem with your analogy -- you can shop elsewhere. You do not have buy Neiman Marcus merchandise. As you pointed out.

With cruising, you cannot shop elsewhere -- or in other words, you cannot bring your own alcohol on board. So you do not have a choice. It's either there alcohol -- at their prices -- or nothing. If they are going to completely monopolize alcoholic drink sales on their ships, then some people -- like my family -- will try to save money, even it involves sharing drink cards.

If you have a problem with this then you should complain to Celebrity cruises about changing their drink policy. They need to either lower their drink prices or give people the choice to bring their own alcohol on board.

Everybody does need to lighten up a bit though. I am not endorsing going to rob a bank or anything. If you have a family and you chooses to buy each person a drink package then that's fine. If my family chooses to share a couple then we will do that, too. We can both still have great time, right?

Excellent response Crazy Cruizer. Sooner or later stealing comes back to get you. I assume that AEGBRG thinks that downloading movies from sites that stole them at the screening, buying obviously fake merchandise, paying for one buffet and sneaking food to take home to someone else, tapping into the neighbor's cable are all fine too. Someone a couple of towns over even went so far as it illegally tap into the gas line and bypass his meter (he obvisouly got caught).

 

Sooner or later when no one pays for movies or music, we will all suffer by not having music and movies available or have them not be of the same quality. When "insert fancy brand here" goes out of business due to counterfitters what brand will the counterfiters go after next. Buffets will raise the prices. This is no differnt that shoplifting in my book, although on B2B 14 days cruises it could amount to grand theft.

 

In the end I believe that most people are honest. Those that are not delude themselves into thinking that everyone does it so that it will be OK in thier minds. However, I am sure that on every Celebrity cruise there are multiple families / couples that are sharing a package. This certainly doesn't make it right, nor do I believe they are anywhere close to a majority.

LOL. Looks like the cruise critic police is out in full force tonight. I really do not care for the crazy assumptions you guys are making about me. Do you guys work for Celebrity cruises or something? -- because you are all getting really sensitive about this. If not, I really do not understand all the animosity. The fact of the matter is people DO SHARE DRINKS -- and for good reason. Have any of you been on a Celebrity cruise lately and seen the prices? It's criminal what they charge for drinks, especially when you can't bring your own alcohol on board.

I am sure many people who are on this forum have done it, but I guess I am the only one willing to admit it. If that is worst crime I commit in my life I think I will be OK.

Personally I'd rather have them monitor it better with lower prices for people who follow the rules...

Our family was not the only one doing this. Every family we came across purchased one or two drink packages and passed along drinks to other family members. Do you really think a family of 4 or 5 are really going to get 5 beverage packages?

And by reading some of the posts about Celebrity on this board and how they can treat customers, do you really care if Celebrity gets cheated out of a few drinks?

If I were to give anyone advice on the beverage packages, I would say share them -- or you can give Celebrity another few hundred bucks, unnecessarily.

I think the whole process is somewhat similar to how stores monitor shoplifters and petty thieves. No system is fool proof but they do enforce the rules as a deterrent to others.

 

First off I think they give everybody the benefit of the doubt. The system is based on trust and honesty and works under the presumption that the cruise passengers are not petty thieves who would stoop so low as to steal drinks. Hopefully all of you reading this are giving this a respectful nod and no one is rubbing their hands together and cackling a sinister giggle at the opportunity for cheating the cruise line.

 

Second, they monitor usage since each time you purchase a drink by scanning your card into their system. Through this they look for unusual usage patterns and this is used for a pointer for step three.

 

Third, they have a security team on board who watches for this based on casual observations and also observations based on reports/alerts of unusual usage.

 

If you get caught you are thrown off the ship. Pretty severe punishment to risk to save a few dollars on drinks.

I would not worry about them monitoring anything. We were on the 11-night equinox and got two drink packages -- prem non-alch and classic alch. We shared the drinks amongst the five of us, and we must of gotten around 30 drinks per day. No one gave us trouble about it.

Most people who get drink cards pass drinks along the family. You would be naive to think otherwise. Celebrity is not stupid and know this occurs -- that is why drink packages are so expensive. They know families will share and factor this into the price of the drink packages.