My First Luxury Cruise

My wife and I just got back from a cruise to Alaska. It was my first cruise and I had been looking forward to it for months. I was eager to see all the sights, the on-shore excursions, the marvelous food, the great entertainment and all the fancy amenities shown in the travel brochures.

The magnificent scenery of Alaska – especially being "up close and personal" with the Hubbard Glacier was a never-to-be-forgotten experience. We also enjoyed visiting the unique towns of Juneau, Sitka and Ketchican and the too-short visit to Victoria, British Columbia. I enjoyed the fishing trip out of Ketchican even though our party of four caught only one 15-pound silver salmon.

I must be getting old and crotchety because there were lots of things about the cruise that disappointed me.

First of all, the food. On our ship there were three places you could eat; the Lido Deck which was a cafeteria-style restaurant open 24 hours a day, the formal Vista dining room for dinners and the Pinnacle Grill for lunches and dinners for those willing to spend the $20 cover charge for dining there. The food and service in the Pinnacle Grill was simply great. In the Vista dining room, the service was fine but the food was somewhat skimpy and the quality was spotty. As for the 24-hour food on the Lido Deck, let me put it this way – I’ve had better at Denny’s. A little disappointing considering the cost of the cruise.

I was annoyed to find out at the end of the cruise that it cost us $2.88 per day ($23.04 for the eight-day cruise) for the bottled water that room service supplied unasked. For me that was a good example of being "nickel and dimed" to death. When you’re spending thousands of dollars for a trip like this, shouldn’t you expect them to furnish the water at no charge? Conversely, the cruise line should simply add the few bucks to their trip package up front price if they are working that close to the profit line.

But my biggest annoyance was being sold something everywhere we turned during the trip. There was an "art gallery" that aggressively promoted the sale of their various paintings under the ill-concealed guise of holding "How To Bid At An Art Auction" classes. There was a photographic studio that equally aggressively promoted color pictures taken of guests here and there during the trip by their cruise paparazzi. Then there was the highly-touted lecture on How To Save Money When Shopping Ashore which turned out to be an hour-long infomercial steering us toward several selected jewelry and knick-knack shops who (we discovered later) have paid the cruise line to be "sponsored" by them. ( I get enough of this kind of thing at home by phone almost every day. I really don’t need to be subjected to it on a cruise that is costing me big bucks.) Then, at almost every dinner we were subjected to walk-around vendors trying to sell us souvenir cruise line shot glasses of Bailey’s or creme de menthe or some other tschotke or another. Perhaps the most irritating incident concerned another so-called educational experience involving our captain. Here is a man who is in complete charge of a multi-million dollar, zillion-horsepower ship with about 1900 passengers and a crew of around 800 who is enlisted to teach us how to cook salmon – after all that’s the big thing when you’re in Alaska. I am sure the captain is well trained and well qualified as a sea captain. A showman he is not. A chef he is not. And then it turns out that this cooking lecture/demonstration is nothing more than an hour-long commercial trying to sell us an over-priced freeze-packed, direct-to-your-door package of salmon steaks and crab cakes. Irritating as hell and I haven’t even told you about the "end-of-season specials" in the ship’s gift shops, the charge of $12.00 for a half glass of cheap champagne while we were all on deck admiring the Hubbard Glacier or the half-price-package special by the ship’s spa and massage studio.

But I got some great shots of the glacier.

copyright 2008 by Paul Burri