Are Art Galleries on Cruise Ships a Rip Off
At the going prices, cruises can be extremely good deals. Whether a lower-deck inside stateroom or a elevation-deck suite, a cruise cabin itself is almost never a rip-off. That's specially truthful when you track the many promotions you run into advertised on information websites such every bit sister site Prowl Critic, on big online cruise-agency websites such as CruiseDirect and CruisesOnly, or fifty-fifty through practiced travel agents.
Cruise Rip-Offs and How to Shell Them
The rip-offs come when you start buying the extras or conforming to the manufacture'south standard practices. That means if you lot're careful and you avoid the many temptations thrown at you, you can avoid most rip-offs completely. Sadly, lots of people don't desire you to avoid the rip-offs, and then diligence is the best defense. Here are 12 prowl rip-offs to wait out for.
Single Supplement
The biggest rip-off in the prowl business organization targets travelers who want to cruise by themselves—those who don't accept a spouse or companion and don't want to share a cabin. The penalisation is occasionally as loftier as 100 pct—when you pay two per-person rates—merely is more often in the range of 50 to 75 pct. Even that, however, is strong enough to deter many solo travelers.
Although y'all may run across a single supplement every bit a rip-off, the cruise lines don't run into it that style at all: Nearly the unabridged industry is hardwired to serve couples and families, with cabins accommodating two to four people, at rates based on the longstanding "per person, double occupancy" pricing formula. Cruise lines can rightfully merits that getting less than both two-person rates for a ii-person motel represents lost revenue they can't recapture.
Cruise lines eagerly point out how you lot can "salvage" by sharing: If yous tin can't notice your own cabinmate, a cruise line—or a 3rd-party matching service—volition find one for you. But, for defended solo travelers, that's not the point. You're looking for a good bargain, non a cabinmate.
Avoiding the Rip-Off : Prowl-line promotions occasionally drop the unmarried supplement to a figure in the ten to 25 percent range. A few cruise ships have a few cabins designed for singles. And Norwegian Prowl Line recently built several new ships that have studio-cabin sections outfitted for solo travelers as well equally associated lounge areas.
No Inexpensive Liquor on Board
This is a rip-off by rule rather than a price rip-off. Near ships prohibit y'all from buying liquor onshore and taking information technology to your cabin. Some include wine in the prohibition, others allow i bottle, assessing a corkage charge if you lot want it in the dining room. Just if you want a martini, a scotch and soda, or a mai tai, your only choice is to buy it at the send's bar—and pay shoreside restaurant/bar prices.
This rule is especially galling when you lot stop at a port that features inexpensive tax-free liquor. You might see a canteen of Johnnie Walker Black for less than $30, merely to pay that much for but 3 or four premium scotch and sodas in the bar.
Fugitive the Rip-Off : Presumably, you tin can effigy means to sneak a canteen in your pocketbook or bag, but—also presumably—the cruise folks know how to spot it. And if they spot it, some take information technology and give it dorsum when you get off the ship, but others merely take it—catamenia. The message is clear: Don't.
Charges for Soft Drinks, Ice Foam, and Such
These days, at least on typical mass-market prowl lines, y'all pay shore prices for a wide variety of snacks. Mayhap the most galling is paying $one.25 to $1.fifty for a soda from a dispenser. According to what I find online, the toll of serving a 20-ounce cup of soda from a fountain is around twenty to 25 cents, including soda, cup, water ice, and straw. The aforementioned goes for expensive ice foam concoctions and other snacks. Cruising is supposed to include nutrient service, and that should include ordinary snacks. Charging annihilation for them, and specially charging landside prices, is a rip-off.
Avoiding the Rip-Off : If you want to snack, y'all really tin't avoid paying. Your only defense is not to snack, which is not an bonny selection, especially if you're cruising with kids.
Useless Souvenirs
Many travelers return from cruises schlepping loads of trinkets, "local" garb, and "beautiful" items they know they'll probably never apply—and maybe never look at over again—after they return. Model sphinxes from Arab republic of egypt? Nesting dolls from Russia? Watercolor paintings from local "artists" based on coloring in pre-printed outlines? Straw baskets and hats? Local "traditional" handicraft trinkets mass-produced in People's republic of bangladesh? "Rolex" watches that are likely counterfeit? Feh! Anything remotely useful that you find while on a cruise y'all can probably purchase for less, and with less risk, at Target, All-time Buy, Costco, or Trader Joe's.
Avoiding the Rip-Off : Elementary: Look, but don't buy.
Related: 9 Dirty Little Secrets of the Travel Industry
Recommended Shore Shopping
This one is a riff on the more general souvenir category. Many ships let locally based "port lecturers" to lath and supposedly provide information and "insider" hints about what to practise onshore. For the well-nigh role, these folks are really shills for onshore merchants who pay for mentions. The more than honest cruise lines call them "shopping ambassadors" (a wonderfully creative euphemism) to distinguish them from genuine local authorities that the cruise line might also arrange.
Don't misfile port lecturers (or shopping ambassadors) with these cruise-provided local authorities, especially on themed cruises or cruises sponsored by educational organizations. These authorities typically have independently established credentials, and they remain with the prowl and get gratuitous transportation in substitution for conducting seminars and making presentations (or, every bit the case may exist, dancing with single ladies).
Avoiding the Rip-Off : Never patronize whatever shop praised by a port lecturer. You know that a good bit of the price you pay represents a kickback to the lecturer and perchance a chip to the cruise line, too.
The Casino
Almost all big cruise ships accept casinos. They're much like the ones you detect in Vegas or Atlantic City, simply a lot smaller. As with land casinos, shipboard casinos are usually located so y'all have to walk through them several times a day to go to most activities.
Overall, any casino gambling is a sucker'southward game, but many online posts conclude that shipboard casinos are stingier than their landside counterparts in auto payouts and tighter about card and die game rules. This sounds plausible, but the postings are at best anecdotal and many are null more rumors. Still, my bet is on the "stingier" line.
Avoiding the Rip-Off : Don't play, or if yous enjoy it, keep your bets small.
Shipboard Boutiques and Shops
Carolyn Spencer Brownish, Editor in Chief of our sis site Cruise Critic, recently posted an excellent study on how your cruise can air current up costing as much as twice what you paid for the cabin. Among her warnings is a caveat almost onboard shopping and personal services. Clearly, those onboard shops aren't Walmarts, and they don't have to match Walmart prices. Onboard shopping can include boutique purchases such as clothing and jewelry along with services such every bit sauna treatments and massages.
Shopping and personal indulgences are seductive options on cruises, when yous may accept many hours at sea with not much else to do. That'southward merely the audition those onboard merchants want.
Avoiding the Rip-Off : Again, this is one of those "merely don't" cases. If you really run out of necessities—aspirin, batteries, and such—you'll exercise amend at onshore supermarkets or section stores. Some cruisers say that if you encounter an detail in an onboard shop, wait until the last twenty-four hours, when you may see it at a markdown or on a sale table.
Internet
Big prowl ships these days are likely to provide satellite-based Internet access in cyber cafes or possibly even in other shipboard Wi-Fi hot spots. Unfortunately, if you have a bad online addiction, you'll pay an addict's prices. Most lines charge 75 cents a infinitesimal only also sell a range of packages, with rates running every bit depression as 35 cents a minute if you lot buy the really large package (upwards to 500 minutes). In general, this is a lot more y'all pay for airline Wi-Fi, for virtually the same level of service.
Avoiding the Rip-Off : If you just can't get forth without checking your e-mail or your investment portfolio every day, Carolyn Spencer Brown recommends finding an Cyberspace cafe in whichever port you visit.
Onboard Paparazzi
You might not be a celebrity onshore, but on a cruise, an onboard photographer volition target you as if you were. The idea is that these "aboveboard" pictures take hold of y'all when you're having a good time, frequently in a group that's having a practiced time, and you lot'll be eager to vanquish out $ten to $20 for each finished shot. What the lensman doesn't tell you is that once home, you lot will probably never look at those pictures once again—and that if yous really desire to prove off to friends and relatives, it's much easier to take your own pictures.
Avoiding the Rip-Off : Take pictures with your smartphone or camera and upload them to your favorite social media website or adhere them to emails.
Tipping
Tipping has become a virtual necessity for cruisers, and it typically adds $10 to $12 per twenty-four hour period to each person'south costs. That adds up to $150 per couple for a seven-day cruise—a effigy that might well represent a substantial increase to the toll of a low-level cabin. Some lines utilise an "opt out" system of adding a tipping accuse automatically to your bill unless you specifically ask that it exist removed or contradistinct; others just mail service a list of recommended tipping amounts.
Many of usa believe that prowl waiters, housekeepers, and such should exist paid decent wages and not be dependent on tips for their livings. But except for a few ultra-luxury lines, that's not a existent-world expectation. So you tip.
Avoiding the Rip-Off : Carolyn Spencer Brown says apartment out, "Tipping is not an area where you can save money." End of story.
Special Dining Venues
A cruise is supposed to include all meals, right? These days, the answer is no. Near large new cruise ships have one or more than premium dining venues, at which you'll pay an additional $xx and $l per person to have dinner in a themed dining room: steakhouse, Italian, French, or any. A related trend is to add a surcharge for some "premium" entrees, often steak or lobster, in the conventional dining room. Some of those premium prices seem high—especially when you consider that they're not the full prices merely are instead surcharges on top of what you've supposedly already paid for—but online reports indicate that many travelers believe the premium dinners are worth the cost, at least once they're on the cruise.
Avoiding the Rip-Off : For at present, that's like shooting fish in a barrel: Just don't go. Just in the long term, I look steady erosion of the supposedly "food included" system to the bespeak that y'all might see a surcharge for any entree other than mac 'due north' cheese.
Shore Excursions
Typically, at each port, your cruise line has lined up a laundry list of port excursions to sell you lot on. These excursions can run from conventional sightseeing and visitor attractions to snorkeling, h2o-skiing, parasailing, rock climbing, bird-watching, and whatever else might be available at each terminate. Typically, the cruise line will beginning pitching you to pre-buy your excursions before you even get on the transport.
What'due south wrong with these excursions? You confront upward to three problems: Prices are unremarkably college than prices you can obtain yourself. As with any group action, the pace is dictated by the slowest fellow member, and it may waste a lot of your fourth dimension. And lastly, near sightseeing excursions include extended stops at souvenir shops chosen primarily for the size of the kickback they provide to the tour operator and prowl line.
Fugitive the Rip-Off : Go a proficient guidebook, so arrange your ain port activities. In nigh cases, yous'll find lower-cost local operators hanging around the port when you land. Online agencies, such as Viator, sell port excursions at prices generally below the prowl line's price. Or rent a taxi driver for a few hours, apply public transportation, or walk to where you want to go—and merely where you want to go.
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Editor'south note: This story was originally published in 2014. Information technology has been updated to reflect the nearly current information.
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Source: https://www.smartertravel.com/12-worst-cruise-rip-offs-and-how-to-beat-them/
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