This has been sitting in my drafts folder since mid-2015, so the information in it re: UBP charges, menu contents, etc. are all outdated at this point, but I think it’s still a good representation of how our first cruise went. Suffice it to say, I need to be more timely with these – we’ve since gone on a Bahamas cruise on the NCL Breakaway in December 2016, and have a different Caribbean cruise planned on the Epic during December 2017. So even if there are some negatives here, clearly we’ve gone back so it can’t be that bad.
I’ll try and note in the article where things have changed.
In Which We Decide To Cruise
In 2015, Kayla and I got tired of the snow and wind and ridiculously cold temperatures in Southwestern Ontario, and decided to get away to a warmer climate. We’d been to BlueBay Villas Doradas in the Dominican Republic to do the all-inclusive resort trip with a few friends last year and while we liked it, we wanted to try something new before falling back to the same thing. We’d also discussed various Sunwing-promoted destinations flying directly out of YKF to Mexico, but the available resorts in our price range were either too new to have a decent amount of feedback, or had recently begun “focusing on a new concept.”
Then the idea of taking a cruise came up and we started looking. A few years ago in a hotel room in Prague, I’d seen a documentary that was pretty much an expose of the entire cruise ship industry. I managed to locate it after returning – it’s CNBC’s “Cruise Inc: Big Money on the High Seas” (2009). It went over a cruise on the Norwegian Pearl, describing how passengers are basically just walking ATMs and that the cruise line is constantly running the numbers on every aspect of shipboard operations. The conclusion was that on the last sea day, the operator broke even for the cruise, in no small part to making up $21K in alcohol sales. Being shaken up and down for cash constantly didn’t really appeal to me.