61 of 66 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Main Lesson - Tip with Kindness, June 16, 2005
This review is from: Cruise Ship Blues: The Underside of the Cruise Ship Industry (Paperback)
In Cruise Ship Blues by Ross A. Klein, you are given the gritty underside of the cruise industry world. Klein says he chooses to no longer cruise, but you have to wonder if cruise lines would let him back on!
First, let me say that I respect greatly what Klein is doing here. There are trillions of dollars being spent on convincing people to take cruises, to "live the life of luxury". Hardly any money is spent on telling people what a cruise is REALLY about, what to REALLY expect, what is not included, what the problems are. You can dig through forums, but there is no coordinated Consumer Reports of the cruise industry. Klein uses his 300 days of cruise ship experience plus research to draw together the state of cruising.
That being said, I think that exposing the cruise ship industry as one that is doomed to fail because it is socially and environmentally irresponsible is alarmist. These things have been going on for CENTURIES. If you look back through resort life and travel, it has always been the wealthy that go, and the extremely poor that serve. That is hardly the "fault" of modern cruise ships! I've been on trips through europe, Costa Rica, Cancun. You have mega-hotels with gorgeous foods - and you have incredibly poor waiters and housekeepers who grind day and night to scrape out a living and survive in a one-room shack.
I'm not saying that is good! But I'm saying to blame the cruise industry for it makes no sense. It's a matter of supply and demand. Resort travellers - be they on land or at sea - whine if the price is too high. So the resort supplier tries to find the cheapest employees that they can. Those employees tend to come from third world nations where there is little hope for money in any other situation. Those people WANT to work at the resorts, because the peanuts they make is still better than the starvation they face otherwise. The resort then makes money because they pay little to the employees, but get good money from the visitors.
On lines where they employ waiters that demand higher salaries, the fare is therefore higher, and people pay more. Those expensive lines certainly exist. But as long as people demand bargain-basement prices and push for those low fares, the lowest wage individuals are going to be hired.
I do think this at least makes it clear to cruisers why they MUST PAY GOOD TIPS. Those poor waiters and room cleaners are barely making $2/hr in many cases. They work 7 days a week, 12 hours a day, for tiny amounts of money. You whine about your $10/day tip - but to those workers, that is their life's savings that is going back to support their entire family at home. In many cases they are away from that family for a year or more, working hard daily to support them.
Yes, cruise ships dump waste into the sea, that is what boats do. It's allowed by law. We can change the laws if we want - where will the waste go? Will local ports "accept" that waste for free, to process it? Can they even handle the waste if they were paid to do so? These are issues that can be debated, but again to yell at the cruise ships for doing something legal and normal makes little sense to me.
Certainly, small towns have a love-hate relationship with cruise boats. The cruises bring in money, but bring in large volumes of tourists. This is hardly unique with cruises, though. I see this *exact* same thing at small skiing towns, at local islands, at Cape Cod. Just about anywhere that there is natural beauty, you have the locals and the hordes that come in on vacation. It's always been something I've pondered, but what can you do? Lock the tourists out? Insist only locals can enjoy the natural beauties?
This is a good book to rent from the library, to feel that you've gotten the whole story about cruising. But I really don't see this as an indictment of the cruise industry as much as a commentary - ongoing for centuries - about how the middle-class and wealthy are so tight fisted that they whine about tipping the staff even as they spend hundreds of dollars on "leisure activity" - while around them people starve. A cruise is never necessary. If you're going to cruise, at least consider the people who make it possible and reward them as liberally as you can for their part in your experience.
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46 of 54 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Let him walk the plank - You go read something else, August 2, 2005
This review is from: Cruise Ship Blues: The Underside of the Cruise Ship Industry (Paperback)
At the end of this diatribe, the author admits that they don't want him back cruising. And I don't blame them. He is just one of those passengers that you can't please no matter what. Is he fussy? Let facts be submitted to a candid world: Quote: "On the ultra luxury Radisson Diamond, the same waiters that served my partner and me were also serving a table of senior officers and VIPs. Their mineral water was poured from a bottle wrapped in a white napkin; our mineral water - the same brand (how did he know if theirs was wrapped?) -- was poured without the napkin." Holy cow! Mineral water without a napkin - How dare they! At the same sitting, the author complains of a fish head that has fish eyes staring out at him and, guess what, the fish smells fishy! That's an earthquake! More complaints: The food isn't any better than a three star hotel! (Ever stay at a three star hotel in France? The food is super.) More whines: The VIPs get special treatments and special parties (Shocking!), the music around the pool is too loud, too rap and hard rock, the free wine on board only costs the cruise line only $2, he cracked a tooth and the cruise line wouldn't pay his dental bill until he got a lawyer friend who obtained the money plus "a meager compensation." But the thing that bothered me the most was his inconsistency. He berates the industry for alleged mistreatment of their employees and yet he himself seems to cause those employees more trouble that 99% of the other passengers and he can't figure out why those employees, like the bartender on page 157, whom he nagged for several days, hate him so much. He berates the passengers and ships for causing pollution, yet he himself has taken (and presumably will try to take) multiple cruises. The massive improvements in waste management and sanitation and pollution control and fuel efficiency are dismissed as not enough. He nitpicks about occasional oil spills but fails to mention that according to the US Coast Guard 99% of the oil pollution of the seas comes from natural sources, mainly undersea vents. But what's this? The author's website which is billed as a "noncommercial site regularly updated with links to reports, investigations, and new developments regarding labor, ship safety, and security" is not functioning. The website isn't function just the way this book isn't functioning. The best treatment for the likes of him is to throw him overboard or make him walk the plank. If you want to know about cruising, instead of reading this piece of junk, get a hold of any book by John Maxtone-Graham. His "The Only Way to Cross" is a classic.
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18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Other Side of the Medal, February 21, 2004
This review is from: Cruise Ship Blues: The Underside of the Cruise Ship Industry (Paperback)
The problems of mass-tourism and fast growing industries are widely known. Ross Klein points out the specific problems of the cruise industry, like the strong demand for onboard workforces or the constant pressure to reduce cost, and he does that with much accuracy and much emphasis on the sources.
Of course, any account of all the negative aspects must result in a somehow distorted picture of the cruise industry, but after reviewing all the sources available on the internet which Ross Klein mentions in his footnotes, I must say that there are several problems associated with the cruise industry which need to be solved if cruises should remain a popular form of travel.
Most aspects Ross Klein talks about, even the environmetal issues, have an impact on passenger's satisfaction. So any cruise line executive should read this book to be aware of the problems which - quite certainly - all cruise lines have to deal with - sooner or later. Even if only a few cruise lines do not pay attention to these negative aspects, all others may get into troubles too, especially if the passengers start to feel that they get less than they have paid for.
And to potential cruise passengers the book might show what they can really expect from a mass-market cruise line. It is not all gold that glitters.
It is an excellent book, despite the fact that it is in contrast with the glossy cruise brochures published by cruise lines. There is much going on behind the scenes - and that makes the book a most interesting reading.
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