Time and time again, the same comment is often posted on sites like CruiseCritic: "they (insert cruise line here) are trying to nickle-and-dime me!"
If you've stayed at an all-inclusive resort, true - you may find paying for your drinks to be an additional expense. Then there's the casino, photographs, shore excursions, spa treatments, specialty restaurants, and gift shops to consider. However, no one is forcing you to actually purchase any of those. At no time does any cruise line say "if you don't buy the photo we took of you on the gangway with your eyes shut we won't let you board!"
To read comments from some posters, you'd think the line took them by the heels and tipped them upside down to see what loose change fell out. The only conclusion I can draw is this: those people have never stayed at a hotel.
After spending a weekend at a major upscale resort hotel - which has been very nice, but which shall go unnamed for various reasons - I appreciate cruises all the more. The beds are comfy here, and the staff are polite and attentive, but opening the mini-bar in the room might bankrupt me. The inescapable charges are also beginning to pile up. Parking is $28 per day. Sure, I could park up the hill and walk fifteen minutes back, but that's going to get tiresome - and the hotel knows that I, like most of the guests, am lazy. Wireless internet: $20 per day. OK, fine. Wait - I just spent almost $100, not including applicable taxes, and I haven't even had my first dinner.
Feel like a little pre-dinner martini? Amble up to the bar and discover the cheapest, simplest martini on the menu is a whopping $17 - plus 15% gratuity, plus applicable sales tax (another glorious 13%). You know, I'm not as thirsty as I thought. Maybe something small - whisky on the rocks. Will you look at that? It's the same amount for a tumbler of whisky as it is for two days worth of parking.
The most expensive Martini I ever had on a cruise was $10, which is well on par with most land-based restaurants and bars. Everyone knows the mini-bar in a hotel is a crapshoot that you're better off shutting and never opening, so no surprise there. It's in the little charges - the extras, the things you need and can't do much about - that reveal the 'nickle-and-diming' aspect of a hotel stay.
Local calls? $1.00 - per call - even if you get an answering machine or a dial tone. I never fully understood that. Long distance - that makes sense. You don't want a guest calling Dubai for three hours, but why nail you for making dinner reservations? Now that most people carry a cell phone it's a moot point, and I compensate for it by making off with all the little soaps and stationary I can reasonably cram into my luggage.
Hungry? Sure, you can dine in the hotel. The menu looks delicious. However, like most guests, you'll drop it like it's on fire once you scan the prices. This is done for two reasons. Hotels hold thousands of guests, and their dining spaces rarely seat more than a few hundred. If they dropped the prices, they'd have a line of angry guests out the door a mile long who are tired of waiting. So they raise the price to discourage throngs of people from coming - and it works. I've dined in a couple hotel restaurants, mainly after long flights - and can only think of maybe two experiences where I felt it was worth the money. One in England, one in New York. That's it.
Compare that to a cruise, where you're treated to a multiple-course meal with attentive service, including dessert and coffee - that you don't have to pay for! Sure, arguably you already paid for it, but therein lies the biggest difference between a land vacation and a cruise vacation: the land vacation has a cheap price supplemented with a lot of add-ons, and the cruise price is more expensive with fewer add-ons.
So are you nickled-and-dimed to death onboard a cruise ship? Not even close. We enjoyed our little weekend getaway - but it has made me appreciate the value of a cruise vacation all the more.
Now where's that cart with those little soaps on it?
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