What are the 10 biggest ripoffs on a cruise
and how can you avoid them,
get around them,
or reduce them?
I'm Gary Bembridge, this is another
of my tips tips of travels.
I'm currently cruising, I'm here in my cabin,
and I've been thinking about the things
that cruisers get ripped off the most on a cruise,
starting with this one.
WiFi is a huge area where you can get ripped off.
WiFi is generally not free on a cruise,
and it can cost you anywhere between $0.40 to $0.75
or sometimes even more per minute.
Now, you can buy various packages to help reduce the cost,
but you can easily be spending per person for one device
$200-300 on a seven-night cruise.
So, how do you get around that?
Well, first of all, really think about
whether you need to be connected.
If you are on a very port-intensive cruise,
you can use WiFi when you're on land
and just switch off when you're
actually on the ship overnight.
Or you can perhaps choose increasingly
one of the cruise lines
that are offering WiFi within the fare.
So, Virgin Voyages, Oceania, Saga Cruises that I'm on now,
they include WiFi within the package.
It tends to be though, as you go more and more premium.
So really watch out, WiFi could add
many hundreds of dollars onto the cost of your cruise.
Also very importantly is make sure
that when you are on the cruise,
that you switch off data roaming
so you don't get any surprise charges from your provider.
WiFi can be a massive ripoff.
We all expect it on land it to be free and available,
but it's not on a cruise.
So really carefully look at the prices
and make sure that you are minimising
getting ripped-off when it comes to WiFi.
Second area to think about is excursions.
You can easily be spending
$100, $200 per person per excursion.
That can mount up to many hundreds of dollars
across the course of a week-long or longer cruise.
There are loads and loads of alternatives
to cruise line excursions,
which will always tend to have a slight premium in them,
partly because they do guarantee
that the ship will wait for you
if the excursions are running late.
I like to look at a couple of things
to avoid paying a lot of money on excursions.
First of all, I look wherever there are
for hop-on hop-off buses.
I'm a big fan of hop-on hop-off buses.
They often come to cruise port,
they're relatively inexpensive,
you get some commentary.
It's gonna take you to all the key sights.
Also you could look at third party providers.
They'll often provide the same tours
as the cruise line, they'll be normally much cheaper
and also have smaller groups.
The other great thing is tours by locals.
There are many, many companies set up
which will have locals that live, work,
grown up in an area,
and they will take you around often for free
and you just pay them a gratuity
as a thanks for those tours.
You can find all of those online
if you just search things like tours by locals
and the port that you're going to.
The key thing when you are looking at cruise excursions
to avoid being ripped off
is take a look at just how close places are
to the port you can often find
that some of the excursions
are very easily walkable from the port
and there's actually a big premium
being taken by the cruise line there.
If you want things like a day at the beach,
take a look at things like resort passes.
You can often find them online
either directly through the hotel site
or again you can just search for resort passes
in the place you're going,
and you'll find you can often go to the same resort
or similar results for significantly less money
than you're gonna be paying for the cruise line.
So definitely take a look at different alternatives.
You may end up that you decide you want
to stick with the cruise line
because you like the security of knowing that
the cruise ship will wait for you
if the excursion runs late,
which all the other options the cruise line
does not guarantee they will wait for you.
The third area for me that I think does
verge on the ripoff area is spa treatments.
Spa treatments on cruise ships seem to me
to be incredibly expensive for what they are,
even you compare them with premium prices
in places like London, for example.
So one of the ways to avoid that
is either not go to the spa at all
or wait until a port day.
You'll find huge reductions on spa treatments on port days
'cause less people go.
You can often get 40% or more of a spa treatment.
So if you do really want to go to the spa
and you find the costs too high,
then make sure you go on a port day.
Also be really, really careful,
check that you're not gonna get on top of that charge
a gratuity charge.
You'll find many cruise lines will charge you
what I think are very high prices
for the spa treatment,
but they will then add on 18% gratuity charges,
and also the people doing the treatments
are incentivised to sell you products.
So they do quite a hard sell at the end.
So one of the things I find with spa treatments
is almost stressful in themselves
because they are pretty expensive,
and you have that up sell.
So make sure if you don't want to be ripped off
you're really clear that you don't wanna
buy any products and go on port days.
Another area that I do personally think
is crazy are photographs.
Photographs taken by the ship photographers
are pretty expensive to buy,
and you can get around that by taking your own photographs,
particularly if you wait until a port day,
perhaps stay on the ship when the ship's quieter,
and you basically go around and take your own photographs.
Even if you don't have a DSLR camera,
bear in mind that mobile phones
have incredibly good cameras.
So actually take your own photographs,
spend some time going around, particularly,
as I said, on a port day when it's quieter,
and do your own photographs,
because buying the photographs from the ship
can be incredibly expensive.
Now you might want to splash out on one
because you want a picture with the captain, for example,
on formal night.
But it it is really, really expensive.
Take your own photographs.
Look at the locations that they're using around the ship,
and go there when the ship is quiet
and take the same photographs for much, much less.
Nothing, just time.
Another big rip off, I believe, is bottled water.
Now this is actually starting to evolve,
because instead of cruise lines selling plastic bottles,
they're moving more and more to refillable bottles.
So hopefully over time this will disappear.
However, bottled water is really expensive.
And you can buy packages and spend a lot of money.
The water itself on a cruise ship is perfectly drinkable.
A lot of people worry about
whether they can drink the water on a cruise ship.
It's perfectly, 100%, high-grade water that you can drink.
If you're worried because you think
you might not like the taste,
why don't you take little sachets of flavouring
and have flavoured water.
That way you could probably even save on sodas.
On the positive side, as cruise lines look more and more
at how they can reduce these plastics,
they're increasingly giving you refillable water,
which is the water that you can be
drinking anyway out of your tap
or some of the water stations around a ship.
Bottled water is a big rip off, in my view,
when you can drink the water on the ship.
If you travel quite a lot by yourself,
make sure that you don't get ripped off
by the single supplements.
If you go on many cruise lines
they will charge you 50% to 100% surcharge
for single occupancy of a double cabin.
There's no need to do that because increasingly cruise lines
are launching ships with solo cabins.
So, for example, I'm on Saga.
20% of their cabins, 109 cabins, are solo cabins.
All the big new ships coming
are increasingly having solo cabins.
However, if the cruise line that you're a big fan of
doesn't have solo cabins,
sign up for or ask your travel agent
to watch out for single supplement deals.
So you'll find a lot of the cruise lines
on specific sailings will slash right down to 20%, 10%,
or sometimes even no supplements
for solo travellers.
So that's what I particularly do on some of the cruises
that I book when I know I'm going to be going by myself
is I look for those deals where I'm gonna be paying
nothing or very low supplements.
There's no need to pay more.
Of course, if you're very clear
that you wanna go on a very specific sailing
on a very specific ship at a specific time,
you are going to be ripped off, in my view,
by the big surcharge.
By being clever you can avoid that.
Also, avoid the on-board shops.
On-board shops are not going to be the cheapest around.
If you are coming on a cruise and you see things
perhaps in the shops that you want,
do a search and check what it's going to cost you back home
or even if you're flying home and going through duty free,
on-board shops generally,
in my experience are not particularly good value,
no matter what you're buying.
So actually be really, really cautious.
And if you are looking to buy something,
check even in the ports what the price of those things are.
If there's something in the shops that you see
that you really, really want, wait for the sales.
Pretty much on every single cruise towards the end
there will be sales and special offers,
particularly if the shops aren't hitting their targets.
So don't buy things at the beginning of the cruise,
wait until the special offer and sales on.
If you're unfortunately feel ill or poorly
and it's not a massive big emergency,
try and avoid going to the medical centre
if you possibly can.
Medical centre on board ships are pretty expensive
because it's a service that they're providing.
And also the drugs that they sell,
if you're prescribed anything, are pretty expensive.
What I would suggest you do is try and go to one of the
private walk-in centres on land.
Most of these ports that you're going to call on
are used to having lots and lots of visitors and tourists
and normally within easy accessibility of the port
you can probably easily find a walk-in emergency centre
that's going to cost you much less money,
and the prescriptions going to cost you much less.
Again, that's really more
if it's not a massive big emergency,
but you can spend a lot of money using medical centre
on board a cruise ship.
Many cruise lines have art auctions and sell art,
and they sell a lot of art.
However, it's something to be extremely
cautious about and avoid.
First of all because it's an auction process
and it's also very likely that you're going to end up
getting caught up in bidding too much.
But generally speaking,
all the stuff that I've read and looked at
is the general view is that art sold
on board ships is not great value,
and you could easily overspend.
And a lot of that is because of that whole auction process
where you can sometimes get out of kilter
between what things are really worth
and what you end up paying for them.
So avoid art auctions, wait until you're home,
do your research, buy art at home.
The other area which I think you can easily be ripped off
and end up spending money that you don't need to spend
is in the whole area of coffees, tea, juices, and ice cream.
All of those are available for nothing,
included within your fare up in the lido,
buffet, restaurant, informal dining,
whatever it's called.
You normally will find that you can get coffee,
it's often in machines with ground beans.
and you can get specialty teas to choose from.
They'll often have juice machines up there,
and they will normally have ice cream
available, and in the dining rooms
at meal times
you'll have ice cream.
A lot of ships will have specialty coffee shops,
and they'll have gelato shops,
and will sell you premium juices from the bars.
There's no need to do that.
If you just head up to the buffet,
you're going to get all of those for free.
So don't spend money and don't be ripped off
by paying for stuff that you've
already paid for within your fare.
The way to avoid being ripped off on a cruise,
is to look at every single thing
that's not included in your fare
as a possible area to be ripped off in.
Stuff that's not included in your fare
is seen by the cruise line as revenue generation.
They're going to try and get as much money as possible
from the passengers on board the ship.
So that's the area where you could end up spending
too much and being ripped off.
So look every single time that you spend money
on something that's not included in your fare,
approach with caution, and say can I avoid this?
Can I reduce it?
Or can I get around it?
And often the answer is yes.
If you've found all these tips helpful
I'd love it if you watched another
one of my many cruising tips and advice videos.
So why don't you watch another one of those right now.