An Ocean Of Bad Cruise News

Oh, it’s a bloody miserable time to be someone who likes to cruise. And I’m an expert at being bloody miserable most of the time anyway so I know what I’m talking about here.

Well, this is the less-regular-than-it-used-to-be-for-obvious-reasons update letting you know what’s going on around this site, what’s new and thoroughly depressing in the world of travel (with an emphasis on crusing because you know me!), and whether anything’s jumped out at me and slapped me in the face with a mallet embossed with the words “Something Interesting”, only back-to-front so it reads the correct way when the bruising starts to show.

New Site Content

First up, let’s get new content on this site out of the way. What have you missed since I last updated, that intervening period bursting at the seams with all those visits you failed to impress upon this site?

Abbeys! Who likes abbeys! You!? Well, are you in for a treat! We’ve got visits to two – count ’em! – two whole abbey posts on the site recently. Mottisfont Abbey is not too far from where we live in the grand scheme of things so we’ve visited on more than one occasion and that post is a blend of a couple so you can see what there is to offer. Calke Abbey in Derbyshire is somewhere we only visited once during one of our runs up to Yorkshire but it’s an interesting example of a stately home left in a state of disrepair. Worth a nose.

Brand new travel content has made an appearance on this site with an account of the short stay in Chester which we took at the conclusion of our Marella cruise in November (our last cruise, oh God! And yes, that’s how long it takes me to write up about trips) and if you’d like to see some of that historical city’s museums, its cathedral, and perhaps the odd pub or two or three or four then that’s where you should be heading.

Other content on this site in recent weeks has been of the rewritten and expanded variety.

Norway first, and a single post originally covering our day in Olden and the excursion we took on the glacial lake with a bit of a turbulent history and to a glacier has been rewritten, heavily expanded, filled out with more photos, and now split into three parts: Olden, Norway covers arrival on the cruise ship; Lovatnet Lake And Kjenndal Glacier Excursion contains the bulk of the trip with the prettiest pictures and most of the history; Kjenndalen And Cruise Away From Olden concludes the day’s trip with a couple of photo stops and a sailaway from the port.

Some enhancements to China posts too: The Great Wall of China has huge amounts of new information and cleaned-up photos to gawp at; the Summer Palace, Beijing visit that took place after the wall, likewise, has undergone a total overhaul.

Cruise Boos

Did you see the way I swapped News for Boos there? Fucking hilarious, me.

So, yeah, we live in a wonderful, wonderful time for cruising and sarcasm.

The EU has recently published some guidance for cruising’s return. Guidance. Guidance dreamed up by people who’ve never been on cruises. Guidance for one specific industry when no other ones have been targeted. Was there guidance for getting people on planes after the pandemic? Was there guidance for getting the trains running? Was there guidance on what it would take to open up hotels? Was there fuck. I’d have loved to see the airline responses to something like “Airlines should increase leg room and leave one row spare between rows” but I can’t because there was a simple shrug and an “It’s probably fine” after some dick in some office did a quick search for outbreaks of illnesses on planes and ended up watching the Airplane movies instead.

And then we’ve got the Foreign and Commonwealth Office here in the UK; once a likely bastion of the best brains of Britain but now a simpering septic tank where the fluffiest of turds have started to break down all the good work on which they float.

What do the FCO have to say about Britons who want to travel to, let’s say, Spain?

Hi there faceless, unaccountable FCO! Can I travel to Spain?

Hop on a plane to Spain! You’re rammed in close with strangers for hours but don’t worry because planes are absolutely fine and we guess they’re probably not an infection vector because we don’t want to look up what that means!

And a cruise to Spain?

UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES MUST YOU BOARD A CRUISE SHIP AND HEAD TO SPAIN!

But I can take a ferry to Spain, right?

Take a ferry to Spain! Ferries are awesome ways to get some fresh air and enjoy the views of the sea as you head to Spain.

And that’s different to cruises how?

UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES MUST YOU EXPERIENCE FRESH AIR FROM A CRUISE SHIP EN ROUTE TO SPAIN! FRESH AIR FROM A LARGER VESSEL WITH MORE CLEANING AND A BETTER LAYOUT WITH MORE SPACE HAS BEEN SCIENTIFICALLY ASSUMED TO BE SOMEHOW UNACCEPTABLE BY, OOH, LET’S SAY PUBLIC HEALTH ENGLAND OR SOMETHING.

Even though a ferry will realistically have a completely new set of people, potentially carriers, coming aboard every day or two while a cruise ship keeps the same people on it throughout? A smaller bubble of contacts, if you will?

WE ARE ONLY DOING THIS TO PROTECT YOU FROM THE THING THAT SOUNDS SCARY TO US.

So, can I stay in a different hotel along the coast of Spain every day for two weeks?

Yes. Sounds great. We completely trust that they’re being cleaned properly and there’s quite likely some way to find out if they’ve had outbreaks of anything, and even though the hotel might have a complete change of personnel and guests every day there’s no reason to think that puts you at any terrible risk.

What about a floating hotel isolated from anyone from the outside world where you stay in the same room every day, the staff you meet are the same, and you most likely come in contact with a smaller number of people overall? A place where they report illnesses publicly?

That sounds the perfect set-up for safety.

I’m talking about cruise ships you fucking moron.

CRUISE SHIPS ARE FLEXIDISCS…

Do you mean petri dishes?

THAT’S THE PHRASE WE’VE SEEN EVERYWHERE! SOUNDS SCIENCEY, PROBABLY EVIL SCIENCEY. SO NO.

Could cruise lines rebrand as luxury, passenger-only, pre-booked-only ferries and bypass all this bullshit?

Please don’t give them ideas to get around this. This is my first day on the job and I don’t want to upset the boss, Dom.

The thing about guidance from the EU and travel advice from the FCO is that technically that’s all they are. I started watching a few videos stating “This is what’s going to happen when you can cruise again!” and it’s all clickbait crap and not helpful to anyone already anxious about when they might cruise again. Yes, it might happen, but only because the cruise lines do it for the passengers or to speed up getting confidence in the industry back. It won’t definitely happen, though, because they’re not rules. They’re not rules and they’re unlikely to be rules and there’s a good reason for that: sovereign laws. A whole slew of laws are going to come into play for anything that the EU have mentioned: local laws applicable when the ship is in national waters, EU laws as a whole, ship registrations, line ownership locations, and the trickiness arising from hitting international waters. You can understand the cruise lines wanting to abide as much as possible with the guidance just to stop the hassle but it’s going to be tricky to do so if the guidance is superseded by being in the waters of France one day then Portugal after a day at sea then a non-EU country entirely.

It’s all woolly and it’s all been pulled out of thin air by people who don’t really know what they’re talking about. The result is so unhelpful it hurts everyone from local businesses to big companies to the wider economy and to people’s livelihoods and quality of life. Nobody knows the reasoning behind the FCO’s decision because they themselves don’t have one to share. Nobody knows what will happen if a cruise line looks at the EU guidance, says “That’s nice,” and does its own thing entirely. Nobody knows if they can plan holidays. Nobody knows if their travel insurance might be invalidated by the local government at a moment’s notice. Nobody knows and the delay in cruising restarting grows. What is the point of all these organisations if you can’t get a single answer from them? A pox on them all but something non-contagious because we’ve all had enough of that, thanks.

Personal Cruise Boos

Okay, so that’s the crappy news that applies to everyone thanks to governing bodies who have shown themselves to be incompetent. Now for some crappy news that hits us personally.

We’ve got two cruises lined up for next year and have had them for a while. They’re two great cruise itineraries on two ships we’ve not cruised on and we picked both of them for the special experiences. We also picked our cabins specifically for the experiences.

The second one first, because I’m like that. This was supposed to be Grand Princess from Southampton to Southampton via the fjords and into the Arctic Circle to catch the midnight sun. Grand Princess has been changed to Regal Princess but the cruise is still going ahead as planned (for now) and we’re expecting to be told where we’ve been moved to on the new ship soon, with the expectation they’ll effectively leave us in roughly the same space on the bigger ship. We’ve not been on Regal Princess either so in that respect that’s okay (although we have cruised on Royal Princess and… meh) but there’s a big but coming up here.

• The fjords are beautiful.
• We always pick balcony cabins.
• On Grand-class ships we always pick balcony cabins on Caribe deck because the balconies are huge.
• We always spend a lot of time on our balcony on cruises.
• We were especially looking forward to being on our balcony in and around Norway next year, seat reclined, feet up on the foot-stool, table between us with drinks, possibly wrapped up if it’s cold, reading books, maybe playing cards, watching the landscape drift past, taking photos, enjoying our private little space in stunning surroundings.
• Regal Princess is a different class of cruise ship.
• We’ve got deeper shelves in our house than the balconies you get on Regal Princess.
• You can’t recline on a chair on the balcony and look out, only sideways, so prepare to welcome neck ache to your life, and you then have to sit as far from your partner as it’s possible to be.
• You want to sit and watch the scenery go past then you sit up straight.
• It’s pretty much fucked up what we were most looking forward to, to be honest.

We aren’t the only people upset about this because other people select those rooms for exactly that reason. There have been the usual replies on Facebook of “A cabin’s just a cabin” from people who don’t understand that we’re upset about the outside space not the inside space; morons. There have been the usual replies of “Well, we don’t use a balcony much” from people who don’t realise that other people do, which is the whole fucking point to being upset, and that comment is about as much use as being told someone’s husband has died and replying “Well, I’m not married so this doesn’t really concern me.”

We are waiting to see where we’re allocated, what we can do about it, and whether or not we’re going to cancel that cruise. Haven’t made our minds up yet. Regal has some nice features. It’s got some shit ones. It’s completely missing one that’s really important to us. We’ll think on it some more.

The first cruise next year is the really worrying one. That’s supposed to be our dream cruise. We have been looking forward to this since we booked it. Japan to Alaska on Sun Princess. Great class of ship by all accounts, and we’ve splashed out on a mini-suite which on these ships is laid out like a suite on more modern vessels; separate toilet and bath areas, separate rooms, double-length balcony. This was going to be the perfect place to hole up for a Trans-Pacific crossing and see the splendour of Alaska.

Was. Is. Probably isn’t. Right now it’s still happening. We don’t think it will, though. Carnival are dumping a load of older vessels with P&O’s Oceana already having suddenly been sold. Our expectation is that Sun Princess is going to vanish too. The distressing part about this is that there’s no obvious replacement cruise here at the same time. Regal was supposed to be in the region next year but is being redeployed to the UK as indicated already. Majestic is taking over Regal’s cruises. The dates of those cruises don’t support a swap from Sun to Majestic and even if it were to happen then the mini-suites on Majestic, while area-wise are similar, are just elongated standard rooms with a substandard balcony again. We like big balconies and we cannot lie. I can’t see us being offered a suite on Majestic as it repositions for no extra cost. I can see us being told we can have an increasingly worthless and risky future cruise credit. I can see us saying to hell with it all.

We are trying to prepare ourselves for not just writing off 2020’s cruises but also upending everything we were looking forward to in 2021. 2020 was supposed to be our year of multiple, small, not-that-important cruises so losing them hasn’t been the worst thing in the world all the while we had next year’s plans with its two big cruises still in place. One’s been knocked about a bit but is still roughly standing and the other is teetering while Princess are gathering hands at the rug under it about to yank hard, and now cruise depression is starting to creep up on us. Nothing’s determined yet but we think it’s only a matter of time and then we’ve got to work out what the hell to do. We’re even pondering taking the whole of next year off cruising just so we don’t have 24 months of bitter disappointment to contend with as we’re not sure our love affair with our favourite form of travelling can recover from more plans being changed.

Still, worse things happen at… oh shit.

Other People’s Travel Stuff

There’s still not a huge amount of interesting travel posts getting published and catching my eye but we should start to see an improvement there so only a few links off site on this update.

Let’s start with Tanya because she’s got the best writing style. If you’ve not read her travel content before then she does a lot of cruising too (not recently, obviously) and I can thoroughly recommend immersing yourself in the humour. One of her new updates to whet your appetite: Don’t be tardy…or tarty when heading out to the caves!

Travel-writing favourite Pip has recently released a new niche website aimed specifically at things to do and see in Wales. We haven’t been to Wales nearly enough so it’s something we’ll keep an eye on closely. Why not start a hop through the new Wales Bucket List site with a read of Awesome places to stay in the Cambrian Mountains?

Finally, since we might be curtailing cruising longer than we really want we have to keep an eye out on some of those travel destinations in Europe that we’ve not hit and which might fit in nicely with a long weekend. The Czech Republic’s capital has always looked appealing and this Three Day City Break To Prague from Jason and Vicky might come in handy.