Hi I'm Gary Bembridge of Tips For Travellers. In this video I want to tell
you five types of cruises that you should avoid and explain why.
So first of all, ships on their maiden voyages. Now a lot of people like to sign
up and go for cruises on maiden voyages of ships. They want to be the first
people on board a ship to experience it. However, things generally do not run
totally smoothly on a maiden voyage. It's a brand new ship. It's heading out to sea
for the first time with a full complement of passengers, and things can
go wrong. The crew is just settling in, learning the processes.
They're still learning the ship. You might find that all the facilities and
are not in place or, for example, they haven't got the whole dining sorted out. So as I
said, unless you are a big fan of a cruise line and you want the badge
you're going on a maiden voyage, I recommend you avoid maiden voyages. Let
the ship bed in a bit more. The second thing to avoid is ships that have come
out of a dry dock. The very first cruise after a dry dock. A dry dock is when
ships go in for maintenance, repair and upgrades. By law ships have to go in
every couple of years into a dry dock. Sometimes they're just go in for purely
technical reasons but usually the Cruise Lines use it as an opportunity to change
things around, update things or they may add new decks, new cabins and sometimes they
even cut a ship in half extend it! They don't want to take the ship out of
service for too long, because obviously they'll lose revenue, so they will tend
to put it on dry dock for a very tight amount of time. The amount of time to
work on the ship to make these changes is very limited. So often ships will leave
a dry dock with things not bedded in and things not really working. I've often
heard of people on cruises after dry dock where there are still workmen
on board and things are still being fitted and changed. So
wait for a couple of cruises after ship has been
in dry dock and then go on. The third thing I recommend you avoid are
actually those short cruises. I used to recommend you go on these taster cruises,
you know one or two nights or three nights on a cruise line. Especially
if you are new to cruising, it was a great chance to get a sense of what the
cruise line is like or if you were perhaps thinking of finding an alternative cruise
line and want to try it out. But they've really become party cruises. Normally those
cruises are pretty low cost either per night or for the overall
package. People come aboard and they really want
to party and so what you tend to find happens is you don't get a true
experience of the cruise line. So particularly avoid cruises at
holiday times, long weekends or spring break. Be very cautious of using
them - unless of course you're looking for a short relatively inexpensive time to
go and party! Because you probably will have exactly that on a short cruise.
The fourth cruise I recommend you avoid, unless you're going because of it, are
themed cruises. What is a themed cruise? So basically what happens is
either the cruise line, or increasingly outside parties, will charter some or all
of a ship to have a conference or some sort of celebration. So it might be
themed around motorcycle enthusiasts or Game of Thrones or knitting or it could
be a wide range of things. The reason you don't want to go is often what
happens is, if they've chartered a large part of the ship, a lot of facilities may
be closed to you. There may be special events going on and so you
end up, although you spent the full amount to go on a cruise,
finding yourself not getting access to everything and not getting everything
that you want to do on the cruise. How do you know if there are themed
cruises? First of all, if you're booking through an agent - ask the agent
to check. Secondly, there are websites that actually document themed cruises.
An example of that is themecruisefinder.com who list pretty much
all types of themed cruises. Or the other thing to do is just put in the
name of your ship and the dates into a search engine (like Google) and search.
If there is a themed cruise on your particular cruise the fact that you
put in the ship name and the dates will list if there are any themed
cruises. My fifth set of cruises to avoid are ones which are linked to
seasons. I'm gonna give you two very important examples. If you're
thinking of cruising in the Mediterranean, one of things you should
probably avoid is all cruises in the peak of summer. So that's sort of the end
of July into August. Now the reason is those cruises will
take you to places like Rome, Venice, Barcelona, Florence but these places will
be absolutely packed - because not only will there be lots of cruise ships going
there but also there will be lots of
land-based travellers going there. So the places will be absolutely packed. It'll
be hot and will be uncomfortable. Another example would be Alaska. The
Alaska season is quite tight, so the very first cruise in the very last cruise you
probably want to avoid those because by then you're getting into very high
probability of not great weather. Try and avoid the beginning and the end because
those are probably really where the cruise line has chosen them kind of on
the cusp of reliability. The way I really look at it is: you're going to go on
one cruise a year or maybe two cruises a year and you can spend a lot
of money so you want to make sure that the cruise you go on is likely to be the
most amazing thing a possible. And by avoiding those five types of cruises you
should have a great experience. I hope you found that helpful. I'd love it if you
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