Slow learners

To many people!!

beautiful ship.

I couldn't be paid to go on one of those things. I'd rather be on a nice island down in the Philippines.

That should have been the warning sign right there. Captain Steubing isn't in charge any more.

Are there any of these lines that haven't had some sort of problem? Or are they all, as the poster above me put it, cattle cars?

They have a good reputation and I know from experience that they're totally OCD about hand sanitation on their ships. But when you have that many people in close quarters, stuff spreads.

I was thinking about Seattle to Alaska. But I'm having serious doubts about that lately. Maybe if several years go by without incidents, I'll reconsider. But I'd never go on any Carnival line.

I don't believe that your chances of catching something on a cruise ship is higher than anywhere else--it's just that once a virus gets onboard, it spreads quickly in close quarters. I've been on one cruise. It was on the Explorer of the Seas, one of the ships that had an outbreak. The cruise was pleasant enough but we're not, as it turns out, cruise people. Some people love cruising. Our reaction was "meh."

ships, and sailings worldwide, incidents like this are the exception rather then the norm. Boarding a cruise ship expecting to get norovirus is like boarding a plane expecting that it may crash. I have sailed on 12 cruises with five different companies (including 7 with Carnival and 1 with Royal) and I never had a problem with sickness run amok on th ship. Carnival used to offer really good rates for solo cruisers which is why I sailed with them so much. Once they raised the rates so that, even on the most inexpensive cabins, solo cruisers were having to pay the equivalent of 2 tickets I stopped cruising. Given a great deal, I would sail again.

I

did I. But I noticed soon after the rapid expansion of cruise ships that the professional services on board and prior to boarding began to significantly deteriorate. During the 70's and 80's on the ships we sailed (even Carnival) had one steward and one assistant dedicated to each cabin. The quality of the dining room service was outstanding. We were even told by some of the crew that we would encounter on return cruises that the standards for hiring were being lowered because of the need for more and more service staff. The training became less intense and the cruise lines began hiring different kinds of service staff. We had been used to having seasoned, middle-aged cabin stewards. Around 1994 cruised on two different lines and noticed that our cabin staff were young Scandinavian girls whose main objective was flirting with the male staff and had no inclination to clean or tidy cabins professionally. On both these cruises we had items taken from our cabin (clothes and a watch and costume jewelry) Mind you this was on two different cruise lines. (Century and Carnival). On the Century line we learned that the cabin stewards had roving assistants instead of being paired permanently to a cabin. This meant that it was unlikely to be able to hold anyone accountable whereas previously with assigned stewards you always knew who had been in your cabin. It really did it for me when on one Carnival line they put out packaged Twinkies and pies. This may have been safer to some but you pay for gourmet food on cruises. When we asked about the items taken from our cabins we were told that our complaints would be investigated. But nothing ever came of it...complimentary bar tickets from Carnival....nothing from Century.
Year
We had cruised on Carnival in the 70's for three or four consecutive years and actually had some of the same dining room staff on three different ships. One of them told us that he was supporting a family of five and didn't mind working hard because the pay was good and his job was fairly secure as long as he received excellent ratings. Years later the services were poor and staff were younger, higher percent of singles, no real sense of responsibility or professional customer service. Lot's of complaints from cruisers etc. We stopped cruising in 2003. We are by no mean wealthy...just saved our money every year for the one thing we enjoyed most at bargain prices. We enjoyed playing "rich" by cruising and having people wait on us after a year of waiting on others. The last cruise we went on the ship was so big I never did get to see all of it in a week. The quality of food was fair to good. The entertainment was good. The cabin service had slipped in our mind from excellent to good. Thank god we never experienced getting sick...lucky, I guess.

the instances of norovirus outbreaks on cruise ships is more frequent than plane crashes, so statistically it is more probable that you will experience an outbreak on a cruise ship than crash in a plane.

Still rare, but more frequent based on passenger miles traveled.

Greed still drives decision making, and the cruise industry's quality of food and services has declined in my experience over just the last ten years. Another poster in this thread does a good job of documenting the effects of constant cost-cutting to maximize profits.

The airline industry has been lucky of late, in that its constant cost-cutting hasn't resulted in more crashes. But, sooner or later, that lucky streak will run out.

and jumping onto the next one

Been doing it for centuries

It's how an unrelated illness, bubonic plague, spread

A rat in every port

______________________

Complete Genome Sequences of Novel Rat Noroviruses in Hong Kong

http://jvi.asm.org/content/86/22/12435.full

Yuck.

they are generally on smaller vessels and with fewer passengers. Still I wonder if this could be a problem with river cruises in European waterways as well. The thing is, of course, that with most river cruises you are closer to a port than out in the ocean some godawful place. A norovirus would be awful but you could quickly get to help and get off the damn ship.

Of course, you can get a virus on an airplane trip, too. I have a personal story about that...the gentleman who contracted it (probably on the plane coming over) became quite ill at a welcome dinner of our group on a tour of northern Italy...many of us got what he had and it wasn't pleasant...