The last couple of days in CND we have run articles about mechanical problems on Millennium which have resulted in the ship remaining in port for several days and missing four scheduled ports on published itinerary. It's not that the passengers don't have anything to do. The ship is at Civitavecchia, and Celebrity has been running complementary buses to Rome, Florence and Naples (two of the ports that were missed) for the passengers. We've seen messages from people who say their entire trips are ruined by missing specific ports. Some say they have been planning the details of the cruise for a couple of years.
Because cruise are what they are, itineraries often get changed, sometimes as a result of a mechanical problem, sometimes as a result of weather. Each time, there are passengers who are heartbroken because they missed the perfect trip they had been anticipating.
Perhaps it's time for cruise lines to go back to the way they used to market cruises. It would certainly ease the disappointment of altered itineraries. The emphasis of their advertising used to be on the ship - with all of its wonderful amenities - being the true destination of the trip. The region was marketed as the destination, not the specific ports. The ports themselves always were mentioned as added bonuses.
Basically what potential passengers saw in the brochure was this WONDERFUL FLOATING RESORT in the CARIBBEAN - or a CRUISE in the MEDITERRANEAN where you will have all this wonderful food and these fun activities at night while you sightsee in ITALY and GREECE during the day. The itineraries would be shown in a small box, with a small map, and often the port times wouldn't even be listed. The pictures would mostly be of the ships and their facilities or gorgeous generic pictures of the area. Shore excursions would only be sold once onboard, or once you had received your documents a month or so before sailing.
This avoided the tunnel vision that many people have about the specific ports they are going to and the exact number of hours or minutes they will have there.
If the cruise lines were to put their marketing focus back on the cruise itself, when something changed, there wouldn't be the loss of things people had spent so much time anticipating.
After all, you are going on a cruise. You're not taking the ship just for transportation between ports. It's time for the cruise lines to get their customers focused on that again.
