This is the first of the hopefully more regular general update posts with the new, more relevant titles (replacing the older Site And Social Updates format which, while accurate, didn’t really explain what was covered in the content). The purpose of these posts is simply to cover website changes, new content added to the portfolio section of the site (as changes there aren’t publicised through the WordPress Reader), and give general cruise and travel news as well as promote any online content that’s caught my eye since the last time I posted.
A Long Weekend In Iceland
If you do actually visit the site on a reasonably regular basis or you subscribe to the RSS feed or you follow this site’s updates on Twitter or Facebook or you’re interested in Iceland and know how to actually search for things on the internet and social networks (I’m constantly disappointed with the number of humans for whom this is apparently an unlearnable ability) then you might already know that posts covering our December visit to Iceland have recently all gone up on the site. In case none of that is true then… well, you know it now.
Spoiler Alert! We loved Iceland! But don’t let that spoiler dissuade you from checking out the six posts about our visit as they’re packed full of photos and videos of the stunning natural wonders there and potential ideas for things to see and do should you be heading that way in the near future.
- A Friday In Reykjavík – Our trip from London Gatwick to Keflavík airport, the hotel we stayed at in the Icelandic capital, and a little bit of food and drink on our first evening.
- Museums, Art, And The Northern Lights – We spent the Saturday exploring Reykjavík on foot which for us meant hitting some museums and an art gallery then heading out for an excruciatingly cold boat trip in the harbour at night to see the Northern Lights from water.
- Reykjavík To Skógafoss – Part 1 of a tour of Iceland’s southern coast which took us to a large waterfall with an almost permanent rainbow across it when the sun is out.
- Vík And Reynisfjara Black Sand Beach – Part 2 of the south coast tour took us to the southernmost village in Iceland and a beach with some stunning views of basalt sea stacks. Or petrified trolls if you believe the legends.
- Sólheimajökull Glacier And Seljalandsfoss – Part 3 of our Icelandic coastal tour gave us a bonus visit to a glacier and the second waterfall of the day which it’s possible to walk behind.
- Frozen Lake Tjörnin – The last morning in Iceland was spent doing a little last-minute shopping then going for a wander around the large lake in the centre of Reykjavík which, thanks to well-below-zero temperatures, was almost completely frozen over.
Site Changes
In the last update I mentioned that I’d added a hopefully more useful menu to the site. One tweak to that has been to add icons for each of the cruise lines under the Cruises option. Mostly pointless, but I think it looks nice.
There’s a new page on the site now too which was also mentioned in the blog entry about the latest cruise we’d booked and that is Cruise History. That page not only lists everywhere we’ve been and on which ship that took place but also includes our upcoming cruises too. It would be fair to say from looking down the list there that we’re definitely Princess Cruises people.
Quite a few unused plugins have been removed, most of which only applied to backend functionality but one, the Pinterest plugin that simplified the sharing of images on this site to the Pinterest platform, was something I never used and saw no evidence that anyone else was either. You should no longer see a Pinterest sharing option if you hover over pictures.
Negative Cruise Line News
There have been quite a few developments for various cruise lines since the last time I posted one of these round-ups and they’re all pretty negative too. Everything can’t always be amazing.
The really bad news comes out of Hungary where a collision between the Viking Sigyn riverboat and the Mermaid, a sightseeing boat mostly carrying South Korean tourists, resulted in the latter capsizing in less than seven seconds with a huge loss of life. A truly terrible tragedy, a devastating incident for everyone involved and for all the families who have lost loved ones, and something for which no further comment should be made until the facts come to light.
Another collision now but one – at time of writing – that’s only resulted in injuries. MSC Opera had the exact opposite of a textbook docking in Venice as shown in this compilation of three videos, one from dockside, one from atop the bridge, and one from another vessel on the city’s famous waterways. This is what a 65000 gross tonnage ship looks like when there’s (in all likelihood) an engine malfunction. The boat being hit is the Uniworld vessel River Countess. Thankfully, most passengers on the boat had already left ahead of flights home. There are obviously going to be a lot of passengers who were due to commence holidays who will be badly affected by all this.
Virgin Voyages held something called a Scarlet Night in London to promote their cruise line. Obviously, it was just one big PR blitz to show how incredible and different and fantastic Virgin cruises will be. Well, everybody’s different and I suppose the best thing that could be said about it all is that Virgin Voyages are not the cruise line for us. Looking at the pictures and videos online there was almost a uniformity in the appearance and behaviour of attendees. Young people. Pretty people. Healthy people. Smiling people. Quirky things. Wacky things. Tack on the request for everyone to wear red and it looked like a cult meeting before a mass suicide pact. Disclaimer: I have a reputation for being a grumpy bastard and Virgin’s pretentious marketing has been something I’ve remarked upon negatively before.
The main thing that bugs me about the Virgin promotions is that it doesn’t seem to be based on a sensible business plan. So far, Virgin have had success with flying and they’ve made a pig’s ear out of their train service so they’re currently at 50/50 for providing a means to travel but cruising is something completely different. It’s not just a means to get you from A to B where the price and time are the key factors. You need something that has an appeal on the ship as well and in all the destinations to people all year round, and right now all I’m seeing as the Virgin target is Young, Rich, Healthy Cruisers. Or Richard Branson clones. I might be wrong but there do not appear to be that many of them in the world – I certainly am not seeing people who fit into that category on cruise ships in huge numbers – but somehow the goal will be to find 2000 of them week-in, week-out who want to cruise out of Miami. Don’t get me wrong, there are some nice things about the Virgin ships but it all feels like another U By Uniworld scenario in the making. I can see a lot of people wanting to try Virgin Voyages just to say they’ve done it (and they’ll doubtless say how amazing everything is). I can’t see a lot of repeat cruisers outside a tiny core. It feels like an odd business plan for a cruise line to go after a very narrow type of cruiser to fill its ship with no other lines under the same parent organisation that can cater for different demographics. What happens as people get older? You can’t possibly get any loyalty to the brand from that sort of approach.
But I’m not a businessman. I might be completely wrong.
Another cruise line making some baffling decisions to me is Saga Cruises. They’re a line we’re quite interested in as once we reach that magical age of 50 (the minimum age you can be to cruise with them, unless you’re cruising with someone who’s 50+ and you’re over 40) they could become a convenient option on account of some of their cruises departing from Portsmouth Port which, as luck would have it, is ten minutes from our house on foot. Anyway, Saga have a new ship – Spirit of Discovery – and there’s a naming ceremony coming up. We know of several people who’ve been invited along as they’re PR-friendly folks who’ve likely signed up with CLIA for just these sorts of things. Most of these invites make sense because the people invited are over 50. However, I know of three people in their 20s who have been asked along. That’s three people who by the time they might be considering a cruise with Saga may find that the ships they looked at before have since been sold to China as gambling hotels. I get that these people may have that mythical influence on account of follower numbers on social media platforms but it just doesn’t seem relevant to me. How many 20-somethings would take advice on a holiday from someone in their sixties? So why would the reverse be true? This feels like little more than someone checking off “Invited person with X thousand followers on Instagram” off a social marketing list. It harks back to recent big discussions online about influencers and follower numbers and the huge disconnect between the two things.
Basically, I just don’t get marketing people and I don’t wholly trust anyone even lightly connected with promotions. I’m pretty PR-hostile as you can tell. It’s part of the reason I’ve never signed up with CLIA’s cruise bloggers association and why, generally-speaking, I’m far more critical than gushing; it’s a kind of compensation effect for a lot of what I see as sometimes overly-positive reviewing that comes as a natural by-product of getting something for free, often subconsciously just because that’s human nature. We saw a fabulous seminar aboard Diamond Princess last year by a former police detective all about scam artists and the similar techniques employed by them and salespeople. One of the techniques described was the free sample approach that, because people are generally nice, twists their brain patterns into feeling positively or thinking that they owe something as a result, often to someone’s (usually their own) eventual detriment.
Carnival Corporation (whose lines include Princess, P&O, Aida, Costa, Cunard, Seabourn, Carnival, and Holland America) have been on probation for environmental pollution and attempted cover-ups several years ago in Alaska by Caribbean Princess. Well, they’ve subsequently violated that probation with more issues and have angered a judge enough when some of the heads didn’t turn up for a court hearing to discuss this that despite reaching a financial agreement with federal prosecutors they may yet still be banned from docking in any US port. It’s extremely unlikely because of the number of jobs at stake and economic impact that would cause. However, the two things to remember here are: firstly, don’t be a dick to the environment; secondly, don’t piss off a judge.
It’s entirely possible that my next update will only contain positive cruise line news. I wouldn’t count on it, though. See previous disclaimer about being a grumpy bastard.
Online Stuff
Rich and Helen recently paid a visit to our home city and didn’t even say hello. To be fair, though, we were busy and they were here on business of a sort. In Ponant L’Austral Ship Visit and First Impressions they review the Ponant L’Austral, a ship and line we’ve been paying attention to for a while as we knew it was due a visit to Portsmouth. It’s in the smaller, more luxurious category of cruising which naturally translates to more expensive but the interesting itineraries and that Portsmouth docking were certainly in its favour. The review covers everything we needed to know; most importantly, the smoking policy, which would be problematic for us.
Sandra and Chris list the top 7 things to try on Sky Princess as they’re taking a cruise on the next Princess ship to launch later this year. This is of interest to us as we’re cruising on Enchanted Princess next year and many of the features mentioned in their article will be present on our ship too. The interesting one for us is the removal of the late night disco venue in favour of the jazz-themed location Take Five. We like jazz so that appeals to us but we wonder just how much of an overlap there might be with what Crooners can provide; it doesn’t feel different enough. Additionally, our experience of the same location on Royal Princess many years ago was that the smell of cigarette smoke and people wandering through from the theatre was a problem that made the venue unwelcoming. We shall see.
Linda and David describe a visit to Hearst Castle, a place we’ve never heard of but which looks absolutely stunning. Beautiful architecture, weird features, so over-the-top it’s fabulous, and with an incredible list of famous people who have visited the castle over the years. I don’t know when or if we’ll ever get to that part of America but it’s something to keep in mind should the occasion arise.
Visit the Ruins of Anuradhapura: One of Sri Lanka’s Ancient Capitals with Flo. These ruins look fantastic. The photos of the monasteries, temples, and palaces all vie for attention amongst the great information in the article and it’s another of those places in the world we’d not heard of or really considered before. The heat might be an issue, though.
Finally, a video from Don, the always friendly, super-Canadian, cruise travel agent. Don’s cruising in Alaska right now on the Royal Princess. Don would never shout at anyone. Or would he?
I think Saga are simply looking to get the word out so the number of people that some of these influencers have following them is important. I’m sure if you weren’t so against working with cruise PR you could have visited too. I don’t think it’s fair to have a go at the people who were invited.
I don’t think I did have a go at any of the people anywhere in this post. I questioned what the PR people did. For the people who have been invited I’m happy for them as it’s something they’ll have wanted to see and I hope they all have a wonderful time but my argument was about relevance from the marketing perspective. I know that a younger person might think “Well, how would my parents like this?” but it’s still a case of using imagination rather than direct experience and certainly in the case of Saga it’s not something that any of these younger people will have given a second’s thought about before as they’re not allowed on the ships. It would be like inviting me (if I had large numbers of followers) to a cruise where most of the facilities are for families with young children. I wouldn’t appreciate the features properly. Further, I wouldn’t then be a source long-term for finding out about that particular vessel and its features unless I was really engaged in SEO. The very transient nature of social media and the huge failing that most people have searching for information online just makes this whole thing puzzling. I follow someone online who targets the niche of veganism and cruising. It would seem wrong to me if a cruiseline running a vegan cruise didn’t invite her and invited someone else with no interest in cruising and/or veganism simply because they had a big social media following. I don’t doubt there’d be a bigger spike of engagement but it would be so fleeting.
Again, I didn’t have a go at anyone who was invited. This was against PR decisions in general. The age element came in simply because that’s a restriction on Saga cruises but it could easily have been anything else. Regardless, thank you at least for reading.