What are the eleven most common and costliest mistakes that cruisers make,
and how can you avoid them? I'm Gary Bembridge, and this is another of my tips
for travellers. Cruisers make a lot of mistakes that cost them a large amount of
money, and you're about to discover what they are and, more importantly, how you can
avoid or mitigate against them. The first of these is
not having travel insurance. A lot of people go on cruises and they don't see
the need for travel insurance. However, if something goes wrong it could cost you
an enormous amount of money, many thousands of dollars of
costs. It's worth taking out a travel insurance policy, and it's not going to cost
that much in the scheme of things. But if you fall ill on the ship, and they force
you to disembark, all the costs are yours for the hotels, the hospitals and getting back
home. None of us plan to fall ill or have something happen to us when we're on
vacation, however, if it does the costliest mistake you could ever make is
not having travel insurance. One of the biggest on costs on a cruising vacation
is excursions. You could be spending a hundred to two hundred dollars per
person per day on excursions, so one of the costliest things you could do is not
look at the alternatives even if you end up going with the cruise line. Some of
the things that I love to do is hop-on hop-off buses. They're inexpensive,
they'll often come to the cruise port and they give you commentary and
take you around the key sights, and then normally bring you back to the cruise port. Hop-on Hop-off of
busses are a great alternative to look at. Secondly, there are independent providers
that will provide similar excursions to the cruise lines normally
for much less and with smaller groups. A lot of those will also offer
guarantees that if they don't get you back to the ship in time they will cover
the cost of you catching up with the ship. The other thing to bear in mind is
most cruise lines will have port talks, port guides and a lot of the ports will
have tourist information desks at the port.
A costly mistake you can make is not look at alternatives to cruise line
vacations, as it could save you a lot of money and you could do some amazing and
different things. One of the costliest mistakes that you could make
is not switching the roaming off on your mobile phone.
If your phone connects to a foreign country network where you don't have
a deal with your provider or it connects to the ship maritime system, you
could find you're spending $6 per megabyte and 75 cents to $1
per call. It could cost you an enormous amount of money, particularly if you've got
Apps running in the background. So, really important when you're on a cruise
switch off roaming and rely on Wi-Fi. Saying that, also be extremely cautious
about being connected on a cruise as most cruise lines charge for Wi-Fi and it can cost
anything from 40 cents up to 75 cents or more per minute. If you want to
mitigate, or get around that, you can of course buy packages however you could
easily be spending $200 for one device across a week-long trip.
How do you get around that? A couple of things you can do is when
sailing at night you plan to not be connected and
save that money, and when you get to port you can either use the port Wi-Fi or
coffeeshops Wi-Fi or what you could choose a cruise line which includes
Wi-Fi. For example, I'm recording this onboard Saga Cruises and
they include Wi-Fi, new Virgin Voyages includes Wi-Fi and many of the premium lines
include Wi-Fi within the fare. I think increasingly we're gonna find the demand
and pressure by cruisers, because they want to be connected, is that Wi-Fi costs are going to be
coming down. Another costly mistake could be buying a drinks package.
I have a whole series of videos about drinks packages which go into this in
more detail, however drinks packages could cost you anything between $60 and
$100 per day. You have to drink a huge amount to make them worthwhile.
One of the things I recommend is avoid the drinks packages and buy
drinks ad-hoc. you find you're probably going to drink less and you're going to spend
less and you're going to save more money. Drinks packages could be very costly in
my view, so avoid them. One of the costly mistakes that some cruisers have made is
is not paying attention to what is ship time and all-aboard time. Don't let your
phone automatically find the time zone. Manually set it to wherever you are
because you could find that ship time and the
local destination time are different times.
If you miss the all-aboard time and you're not on a cruise ship excursion, the ship
will leave without you. They do not wait for passengers that come back late. The
only exception to that is if you are on one of their organised excursions. If
you don't pay attention to the time and you have not made sure that your mobile phone is
is on ship time and you miss it, you could end up being one of those people that
appear in videos running down the quay side as the ship pulls away.
Importantly, make sure you're on ship time and you know what the all aboard
time is to avoid the costly mistake of trying to get yourself to the ship at
the next port. Another way of avoiding a costly mistake on a cruise is to
take the daily program with you. On the daily program it will
have either the ship telephone number or the port agent. Really
important is to either take it with you or, what I do, is I take a photograph every
night when I get the daily program so have a picture on my phone of the port
agent. This is important because if you get lost or something happens like you
have an accident or perhaps miss the back time on an excursion and the guide
or the bus leaves without you, you know who to contact and to make sure first of all
go to the exact right port you need to go back to and how to get there,
and also to alert the ship that you have a problem, whatever that may be whether
it's an injury or you're just running late, as there is a small chance that if you
let the ship know they will wait for you. On the last
cruise I was on, a couple got separated and lost from an excursion and
didn't have the port details with them, they found a taxi and it cost
hundreds of dollars but they went to the wrong port as there was more than
one port, and eventually they did manage to track down somebody who was able to
contact the ship but it was a very convoluted and very expensive process.
They were many hundreds of dollars out of pocket, embarrassed and they just made
it eventually to the ship on time. So, always have that with you as it's a
great insurance policy if anything happens. If you are a solo
traveller and travel on trips by yourself, one of the costly mistakes you
can make is go on a ship that doesn't have solo
cabins or a cruise line which isn't promoting and offering low supplements. I
often travel by myself on cruises and one of the things I do if I'm booking is
I look for two things: first of all I look for ships and itineraries that have
solo cabins and what I tend to do even more is for all the cruise lines or
routes that I want to go on, I keep an eye out and set up alerts and talk to the
agents about alerting me when that Cruise Line is doing low or no single
supplements. You'll find many of the big cruise lines will offer that. I'm on
Saga Cruises at the moment and they have 109 solo cabins, I think something like 20% of the
ship is solo cabins. Many new ships when they come into service nowadays have
solo cabins because it's a growing demographic. Some lines, like
the last cruise I was on was Seabourn
who don't have solo cabins, but throughout the year on different
itineraries they slash the single supplement right down to either no or
very low supplements. So one way of avoiding a big cost if you're a
solo traveller is make sure that you travel either on ships with solo cabins or
you look for and talk to your agent about making sure you know when
there are low single supplements. A really costly mistake you could make is by not
washing your hands. If norovirus breaks out on a ship and you get it, you will
find that you are quarantined to your cabin until it passes, and it's a pretty
miserable experience. You spend all that money you've saved up to go on your
vacation, and you could spend it feeling lousy and confined to your cabin.
The way you can stop norovirus is by washing your hands with soap and
water, and additionally using the hand gel. The big thing is washing
your hands regularly with soap and water. A little tip that one of the captains once
gave me, is as you wash your hands sing to yourself happy birthday. That's
long enough to do a good job. If you don't, you could have a really
miserable time and it could be very costly because you're basically throwing
away all of your cruise money by being quarantined. For me, one of the biggest
mistakes that people make, and one of the costliest mistakes they make, is by
choosing the wrong cruise line. For example, I've been on a cruise with
people who hated dressing up but they were on a Cunard cruise
on a transatlantic where there were many formal nights, and we were expected to wear
dark suit & tie, tuxedo and beautiful gowns. Those people on the cruise hated
dressing up, so they're on a cruise for seven days doing the thing that they
hated enormously. I've been on other cruises where people don't like lots of
rowdy partying and they've been on fun cruise lines with lots of partying, belly
flop competitions and rowdy parties around the pool because it was a cheap
cruise. So, one of the costly mistakes you can make is to go
on the wrong cruise line if it's not a cruise line that's perfect for your
style of cruising. You are then wasting your money on a cruise so do your
research and work with an agent to help you make sure you get on
the right cruise line. Following on from that, there's another really big mistake
you can make and that's by not choosing the right cabin for you. A lot of
people like guaranteed cabins because you pay the lowest fare for a grade, and
then the cruise line allocates the cabin. That's great if you're not bothered
about where the cabin is located, the shape of the cabin or if it's a little bit
quirky or unusual. However, if you're a bit like me and you like a
quiet cabin and you don't like to be by any noisy areas or late-night venues, then I
like to choose my own cabin and I'm happy to pay a slight premium for that.
My big tip is if you are worried about cabins, is choose a cabin that is
surrounded on all sides by cabins, so above you, below you, to the left, to the
right and opposite you. These are cabins that's are going to be the quietest
cabin that are likely to get. Also importantly, when you're
choosing a cabin, make sure it doesn't have an interconnecting door so you're
not getting in noise from next door. One of the costliest mistakes that people
make on a cruise is they find themselves in a cabin which they're unhappy with
because it's too noisy or it's near some disruption or they don't get the night
sleep that they want. If you don't mind that of course it's fine, but it
could be a really costly mistake. Understand what's important to you in
your cabin, and make sure that you do whatever it takes to get that cabin.
Another really costly mistake that I see cruisers make, particularly when they're
heading to countries they are not familiar with, is not an understanding what the
exchange rate is, and also an understanding what the
charges are for using their credit or debit cards. It's very easy to get
confused in a lot of the markets and stallholders in places where there's
lots of cruise ships coming particularly. I know of lots of shop owners who will
bamboozle you and confuse you with exchange rates. Really make sure that
you understand the exchange rate, of course one of the things to do nowadays
with mobile phones there are lots of apps that work without using data that will
convert currencies for you very simply and easily. Make sure that you
understand the exchange rate because I have seen lots of people ending up
paying what ends up being the equivalent of hundreds of dollars for something
that's not worth it. Also before you go, make sure you understand the charges (if
any) that using your credit card or debit card is going to incur. A lot of the debit
cards and credit cards charge a foreign transaction fee and these can mount up
and be fairly significant, also the exchange rate that you may get is not
always a great exchange rate, so sometimes it's better to actually have
taken cash with you or one of those cards where you've loaded up cash so
you're not going to be affected by a bad exchange rate by using your card. Those
are some of the bigger and most costly mistakes that I see cruisers making with
some ideas and suggestions on how you can avoid them or mitigate them. I hope
that's been helpful, and if it has why not watch one of my many other videos of
cruising tips and advice right now?