Rant about HA port times!

[cruisemom42]

Cruisemom42,

 

I am not sure what you mean by "directly" but cabin prices are determined by a number of things, and I do not pretend to know all of them.

 

When I said "directly", I meant that any ship with a longer stay in a particular port should have higher cabin prices, by the line of argument advanced by the other poster. (That's a direct "A leads to B" reason.) And I can find numerous examples where that is not the case -- less expensive lines sometimes have longer port stays than more expensive ones.

 

Could it be an indirect factor? Sure, I am not arguing that it doesn't have some influence. (That's why, in my first post, I said it "doesn't have much" to do with it, not that it doesn't have any bearing.

 

But to claim that more expensive lines cannot be compared to HAL on port times isn't -- at least in my mind -- a valid argument.

[wander]

I give up. Somehow I an not making my points clear. Sorry. I said nothing about more expensive lines, only was responding to your comment that this was a "thread about the length of a stop in port which shouldn't have much to do with the cost of a cabin". From my business experience I was simply saying - it certainly can, every bit of added expense goes into operating costs, which must be covered by cabin fares.

[Cindy]

When on our recent 35 day Westerdam cruise we had a fabulous time and never whined about any of the obvious cutbacks we encountered during the cruise. But CC is a good forum for rants and HA is beginning to annoy me with their lousy port times in the name of saving some money on fuel costs.

 

Near the end of our long cruise the Westerdam did a short segment to relocate from San Diego up to Seattle. This involved cruising for 73 1/2 housr from San Diego to Victoria...with a scheduled arrival time of 5pm in Victoria. This meant that we arrived at Victoria in time for sunset, closing shops, chilling weather (it had been a gorgeous day)

etc etc. By the time the ship was cleared by the Canadian authorities it was about 5:45 and those with early dinner were already in the MDR. In order to get to Victoria that late in the day our ship cruised at about 17.5 knots between the ports (this was for 3 days). An increase to 19 knots (well within the normal cruise speed of the ship) would have gotten us to Victoria by noon (both piers in Victoria were empty that day). But HA saves money by slowing down the ship (a senior officer explained to us that this was the only reason we arrived so late in the day). We have seen the same thing on Caribbean cruises (Westerdam's 14 day Caribbean itinerary is a good example) where the HA ships leaves some ports at 3pm and arrives at the next port at 11am while other cruise lines leave the same port at 5 and arrive at their next port by 8am. Again, its because HA has been slowing down its ships to save on fuel costs.

 

So, here is my message (what we really think). A cruise line can only cut costs so much until folks start moving towards other options. With the obvious cutbacks in cuisine, entertainment, staff, and port times...HA is driving some of us to other lines.

 

Hank

 

I've only been on one HAL cruise -- Noordam Southern Caribbean last November. I thought all our port times were reasonable. We did have a couple ports with a 3:00 p.m. departure, but we were always in by 8:00 a.m. I just looked on the HAL site at the same itinerary for this year, and the port times seem to be the same ones I remember from our cruise last year. During our cruise, I did hear some people bemoaning the things that were missing from the past, but being new we didn't know the difference and we thought many things were wonderful!:) I guess it's good that we didn't know what we were missing.:D

I think different lines are taking different approaches to cutting operating costs. Perhaps HAL has decided that they don't want to dilute the on-board experience any further, but on certain itineraries they can save $$$ on fuel by slowing their sailing speed, and your itinerary was one that was affected.

On some cruises we take, like our 7-night Western Caribbean cruises from Galveston with ports we've been to too many times to count, port time doesn't matter to me at all. On others, like our Celebrity Pacific Coastal in September, they matter a great deal. I too would be upset to have a port that was important to me have an extremely late arrival. On the other hand, rest assured that if the ship from another line that has a longer port call isn't saving money on fuel they're cutting somewhere else!