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Great Article on Overtourism - Shouldn't Cruise Lines Mix Up Their Itineraries More?


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6 hours ago, clo said:

🙂  I can't imagine eliminating Antarctica because there was snow!

I love your passion for Antarctica and clearly the visit made an impression on you but I do understand Kim's point. Where I live there are plenty of amazing beaches, that are easy for me to access so if I am going to be travelling to the other side of the world I'm not particularly interested in spending a day at any beach no matter how amazing someone tells me said beach is. It is something I can do any time at home so when I am overseas I want to be seeing and doing things I can't do at home. 

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5 minutes ago, DarrenM said:

Please stop it. What's the point of Christmas without Santa?

 

And how do you know the reaper was grim?

Watch the film Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale. You will be happy to have Christmas without Santa after that 🤣

Edited by ilikeanswers
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One of our favorite ports was Basseterre in St. Kitts when we stopped there around 20 years ago on a Celebrity cruise. It was a Christmas cruise, and the locals were engaging in "Christmas sports." The stores seemed to be locally owned. When we went again 10 years later, the town had a different feel. There were Diamonds International and the other chain stores that sprout like weeds in all the cruise ship ports. 

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10 hours ago, MicCanberra said:

I bet it works eventually.

No, it does not!  Four winters in the central New York snow belt -with first snow fall no later than early October and last one never before May - convinced me that praying, yelling, swearing - nothing worked - the damn white stuff just kept coming!

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14 hours ago, Extra Kim said:

Well if I like where I'm going, Why wouldn't do something similar? 

 

Not sure how you still can be able to miss the point. I wouldn't mind if I never saw snow again, ever. Spend several weeks in a army tent when it's below - 30°C and you need to showel away 1 meter of snow before you can put up the tent and you too might just get enough of the winter for the rest of your life..

 

Do you think that the cruise lines have a problem attracting new passangers? For real? Where have you been the last 10 years? Antarctica? 😉 All major lines are expanding and have new ships on order, plus there new lines in the pipe line.


Actually a number of lines have cancelled ships out of entire seasons in some ports.  

 

The number of new builds with the staggering number of cabins in each will not be sustainable long term.  The next time we have a global recession (and it's not an if, it's a when) the lines will either have to mothball ships, take a loss by sailing them half full, or reduce fares to the point that they aren't making a dime.

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If I spent several weeks in a tent at -30C, I might be like Kim.  I did live through the Blizzard of 1977, 100 inches of snow in 3 days and 200 inches that winter.  Then President Carter sent in the National Guard to dig us out.  There's a book "White Death" by Erno Rossi about it.  I had to dig a tunnel to my front door.  That was before I had a snowblower.

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8 hours ago, MicCanberra said:

Hate to burst your bubble but Santa has gone the way of the tooth fairy and the easter bunny.

My friends son’s reaction to learning Santa wasn’t real, “Nooooooooooooo!!!!!! What?  Are you going to tell me the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy are my parents too.  Cause no way!”. 

 

I also remember overhearing two kids discussing why they knew Santa and the Easter  Bunny wasn’t real, but why the tooth fairy had to be real.

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2 hours ago, ducklite said:


Actually a number of lines have cancelled ships out of entire seasons in some ports.  

 

The number of new builds with the staggering number of cabins in each will not be sustainable long term.  The next time we have a global recession (and it's not an if, it's a when) the lines will either have to mothball ships, take a loss by sailing them half full, or reduce fares to the point that they aren't making a dime.

3% of the Americans have been on a cruise, even less of the Europeans. Sure if a recession hits, they might need to reduce the fares but they may still make money.. All the big lines are still in business since the last recession.

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2 hours ago, Extra Kim said:

3% of the Americans have been on a cruise, even less of the Europeans. Sure if a recession hits, they might need to reduce the fares but they may still make money.. All the big lines are still in business since the last recession.


Taking a look at RCI--they didn't even pay a dividend between Q3 '08 and Q2 '11. 

 

Carnival didn't pay one all year in '09.

 

NCLH doesn't pay dividends, and DCL's money is too wrapped up in their entire enterprise to know what they would have paid, but you can bet that all of them were suffering. 

 

You could take a cruise out of Florida for as little as $28 a day back in 2009.  The lines were desperate to put souls into berths and were doing it at a loss, hoping they'd make up the difference at the bar and casino.

 

Not sure how you can say the lines with the large ships were making money.  And they had less huge ships to fill then than they do now.  

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I live in Minne-Snow-Ta and this past winter was a tough one. My wife runs an in-home daycare and I handle the shovel duties. There were way too many days this winter where I had to shovel 3 or more times a day to keep it safe for the parents and kids.
I know there are some absolutely stunning "colder" places that I would love to visit. But not until I retire, or I can do multiple trips a year. Now it is mostly to the Caribbean and I am fine with that. When you are dealing with weeks of snow and then weeks of -25º weather, sometimes summer doesn't even warm up your bones enough.

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I would love to see some of those Fairmont hotels in Canada which look like castles  covered in snow which I reckon would look really neat, I might not like to get out of the car though, just to look as I have only seen them with no snow

Never get snow where we live and do not understand the issues with living with snow.

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One of our colder trips was Churchill, Manitoba in November 2013.  Daytime temps were 0-10F, nighttime -20F.  But we saw a lot of polar bears and it was worth it. 

I retired in 2002 and I love retirement.  When it's snowing, I wait until it stops and the street plow has filled up my driveway before I fire up the snowblower.  Feb. last year was bitter, with no day above 32F and most days 0-10F.  Newspaper quoted the weather bureau that it was the coldest Feb in 100 years.  I looked like Nanook of the north when I was clearing the driveway that month.

So Kim and Mike, I feel your pain.

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11 hours ago, navybankerteacher said:

No, it does not!  Four winters in the central New York snow belt -with first snow fall no later than early October and last one never before May - convinced me that praying, yelling, swearing - nothing worked - the damn white stuff just kept coming!

I consider snow to be a four letter word.🙂

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7 hours ago, Extra Kim said:

3% of the Americans have been on a cruise, even less of the Europeans. Sure if a recession hits, they might need to reduce the fares but they may still make money.. All the big lines are still in business since the last recession.

 

While there might be a market of people who never cruised it doesn't mean they ever want to cruise. In Europe you have a lot of cheap inter continental flights especially to the major tourist cities and not everyone desires to visit the Caribbean. Not to mention there are lots of tourist destinations you can't even reach by a cruise anyway. 

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18 minutes ago, ilikeanswers said:

 

While there might be a market of people who never cruised it doesn't mean they ever want to cruise. In Europe you have a lot of cheap inter continental flights especially to the major tourist cities and not everyone desires to visit the Caribbean. Not to mention there are lots of tourist destinations you can't even reach by a cruise anyway. 

 

A good read on Tourism and Louvre and Mona Lisa 😩, aint just the cruising / ports that are over burdened.

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/12/arts/design/mona-lisa-louvre.html

Edited by chipmaster
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3 hours ago, clo said:

Please provide a reputable and verifiable citation to support this.  Thanks in advance.

I'm sure that the article quoted Richard Fein saying that, but since I can't find the article again I did some reading on the topic. I guess that they quoted him wrong, because, depending on what source you rely on, 11-13 million Americans cruise every year.

I stand corrected, it should be "around 3-4% of the Americans cruise each year".

Even this might be wrong, depending on how they have counted, it doesn't say if they count repeat cruise passangers.

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4 hours ago, chipmaster said:

 

A good read on Tourism and Louvre and Mona Lisa 😩, aint just the cruising / ports that are over burdened.

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/12/arts/design/mona-lisa-louvre.html

 

At the end of the day more sites are just going to need a quota system to limit numbers. 

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9 hours ago, Tom47 said:

 

So Kim and Mike, I feel your pain.

I live in the south east part of Sweden. Normaly it isn't extremely cold in Kalmar, but since we live on the coast we have a wind chill factor and it's humid. 

I spent most of my military service on the island Gotland, that winter was their coldest in 20 years. I also spent one month in Boden, in the very north of Sweden. Two of those weeks in a tent with -20 to -25°C during the days and below -30°C during the nights (we worked mostly during the night).

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12 hours ago, Thecat123 said:

I would love to see some of those Fairmont hotels in Canada which look like castles  covered in snow which I reckon would look really neat, I might not like to get out of the car though, just to look as I have only seen them with no snow

Never get snow where we live and do not understand the issues with living with snow.


I've stayed at a few of them.  The problem is that even in the same category, the rooms can be very inconsistent in size and quality.  My favorite of all of them is the Fairmont in Winnipeg (not a castle, sorry) which has some incredibly nice suites and absolutely outstanding service.

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4 hours ago, Extra Kim said:

I'm sure that the article quoted Richard Fein saying that, but since I can't find the article again I did some reading on the topic. I guess that they quoted him wrong, because, depending on what source you rely on, 11-13 million Americans cruise every year.

I stand corrected, it should be "around 3-4% of the Americans cruise each year".

Even this might be wrong, depending on how they have counted, it doesn't say if they count repeat cruise passangers.


As an American with friends in every state and of every socio-economic persuasion, I can tell you that many Americans have no desire to cruise--ever. 

I'd say that less than 15% of my friends have taken a cruise or will ever take a cruise.  Most who have the means to travel take land based vacations, whether it's renting a cabin in the Blue Mountains to staying in a 5* hotel in Paris, they simply have no interest in cruising. 

Of those who have taken a cruise, over half won't cruise again either because they didn't enjoy the experience, or because it wasn't something they would normally do but had to for a business or family related event.  About 25% of them will only cruise on theme cruises for specific bands or food/wine related cruises. 

I can think of maybe a half dozen people in my professional/social circle who love Caribbean cruises on large ships--which is a very small percentage.  They are also the people who will be first affected by economic slowdowns or who can only afford to travel every five years or so.   

The wealthiest people I know have never and would never cruise--unless it was on a private yacht charter.  Instead they go to their second (or third) homes in Hawaii, Tuscany, Sonoma, Paris, Fisher Island, San Diego, Ibiza, etc. to get away.

Edited by ducklite
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