In it, the author and his wife just returned from their first cruise, which was aboard Norwegian Pearl to Alaska, and he recounts some of the things he learned. One of them was:
Don't take wine. We paid $31 in Seattle for a 1.5-liter red and a 750-milliliter white but on boarding were charged a $15 corkage fee for each. A Corona beer was $5.18; a snifter of Courvosier, $8.91; a glass of Duckhorn Chardonnay, $12.36; a bottle of Ridge Lytton Springs Zinfandel, $52. We didn't drink much alcohol.
OK, he learned about the corkage fee the hard way. But what prompted him to pick up two bottles of wine in Seattle (a stopover on the trip before boarding the ship) to take with him? In the beginning of the article he says they have vacationed in the Caribbean a dozen times. He didn't seem to pick up a couple of bottles of wine to take with him into the restaurant at that resort. So why does he feel this is the thing to do, or that it's OK on a cruise? My guess is that he doesn't take his own wine when he goes to a restaurant at home in New York, so why is he thinking it's OK on a cruise and is then surprised they're going to charge him a corkage fee?
Sure, the prices he mentions for drinks seem expensive, but they are comparable to what you'd pay in a first-class resort in the Caribbean - or near home in a New York hotel, so why make out like they're prohibitively expensive? Yeah, there's the comparison between the white wine for $52 a bottle and the two bottles he bought in the Seattle store for $31, but where isn't it true that if you go out to a restaurant, you pay considerably more than if you buy the same thing in the grocery store? When you go into Burger King and spend a buck and a half (or more) for a Coke, do you ever say to yourself that you could have gone to the grocery store and bought a 2-liter bottle of Coke for half the price?
He also finds that the internet via satellite is three times more expensive than the internet cafe ashore. By the same token he never mentions the $2.50 local phone call he can make from a New York hotel, either.
On the plus side, he loved the free shows, but he didn't make the hotel comparison there either, and mention that to see a show like that in a resort in the Caribbean, you'd easily pay $30 or more.
The point is that when people (including amateur reviewers on bulletin boards) write about a cruise, and are surprised by the onboard prices, they need to remember other vacation options such as staying in a first-class resort hotel and what they would pay for the same there - and then put the cruise prices in perspective. Of course then, there wouldn't be the dramatic shock value and they'd have to do some honest-to-goodness research. That's harder, but that's what they're getting paid for.
