How do you get around the minefield of cruise offers and is cruise-line marketing misleading or just difficult to work out?

Hello everyone

Very often during my working day I get a call from a customer who is confused, non-plussed or just downright angry about how a cruise fare has been advertised. Mistakes happen in all travel agencies and advertising isn’t always a 100% accurate art form as availability changes so quickly once a campaign gets underway and every cruiser usually has a different set of specifications it wont always match exactly what is being advertised. To add to all this an agency is just at the mercy of the cruise operators and how they advertise and they do make mistakes occasionally too!

The view from the pool could be a lot more than you expect sometimes if you read the marketing.

So this leads me to my point and how some campaigns are staged and how they are received are different.

For example Royal Caribbean have currently replaced their free parking and WiFi campaign with a drinks package and buy one get one half price campaign at the start of September. On the face of it just a different offer for a new month but obviously for a lot of people the drinks package is a big draw but it is really the buy one get one half price offer (BOGOHO) that aggrieves people and I can understand why. Firstly they take the fare and the first person is say £2000 and passenger 2 is £1000, there isn’t a way we can do this on our marketing as its always done as a per person price so its a Agents marketing department nightmare to start with. This means people look at our website, see the BOGOHO info and think that it would be the per person price + half of it, not so as the only way (rightly or wrongly) we can advertise this simply would be by averaging but the two fares so £1000 +£500 / 2 = £750 per person. To me that makes sense as I see how the fares work but on paper next to buy one get one half price  I can understand why people might question it.

Secondly the fares do seem to be inflated so that “free” drinks package isnt really free at all and what might have been £1000 at the end of August would now be £1500 per person instead. Some of this just seems like semantics to me and it does in reality cause a bit of upset for people who are not versed in what cruise fares are and might not know a good deal from a standard one.

NCLs all inclusive, is it cheaper than their old price structure?

That is not to pick on just Royal as other cruise lines do similar things and it truly is a minefield for the consumer (and the agent too in all honesty). Celebrity do the same with their fares with regards drinks. NCL have recently changed their fares  to all inclusive, what I have found, though is that now they have done this it means their general fare is just higher all-round and there is no option to not be all inclusive, if you don’t drink alcohol for example, so in some ways cruise line marketing and gimmicks can put barriers in front of their customers and that is just one example.

Fares are totally fluid and go up and down regularly in reality, sometimes you get an amazing deal booking early, sometimes you get an amazing deal booking late. The truth is the cruiselines, like airlines control pricing because of supply and demand and time of year.

There are always good reasons for all things marketing but not all cruise lines make it easy  with their pricing structures and/or marketing so really its best just to approach things with a clean slate, know what price you want to pay and if it isn’t falling within that, simply book with a different cruiseline that meets your spec and does!