Budget Travel: Special approach needed for big cruise ships

By Arthur Frommer

The constant growth in size of cruise ships — some now carry 6,000 passengers — has forced the cruise lines (and not simply the cruise passengers) to adopt a wholly different set of tactics and policies. And sometimes these new experiments in cruising have failed miserably — as Royal Caribbean Cruise Line recently discovered.

When Royal Caribbean found out that its giant new ships could not contain a single main dining room for the greater number of its passengers — that room would have to be far too large — it adopted a policy known as “dynamic dining.” Instead of building one large dining room, the company cut the space into four smaller dining rooms, each with a different menu. Passengers were asked to make different reservations for the mini-rooms for every night of their cruise.

The result was sheer bedlam. Passengers complained about the complex planning required of them. And this month, Royal Caribbean canceled “dynamic dining” (which it had hoped to install on every one of its humongous ships). Henceforth, passengers will be asked to make one reservation for one small dining room, and to present themselves at that same dining room on every day of the cruise. Passengers and the cruise line all breathed a sigh of relief.

The procedure for boarding these giant new ships also requires some planning. When you deliver your suitcases to the cruise line when you first check into the giant ship, the time required to deliver that suitcase to your stateroom is sometimes enormous (10,000 suitcases might be ahead of yours). You often do not see your suitcase again until it is delivered in the early evening to your cabin. In the meantime, if you have left your bathing suit in your suitcase, you are unable to make use of the various swimming pools on the ship all throughout your initial day aboard the ship.

The resulting lesson for smart passengers: Pack your bathing suit into your smaller carry-on luggage, which stays with you on the day you board the ship. That way, if you feel like taking a swim at, say, 4 p.m., you have a bathing suit for that purpose.

Now, let’s assume that you plan to leave the ship and sightsee onshore during one of the days of your cruise. To your surprise, you will find that most of these new, gigantic, 6,000-passenger ships are unable to disembark their passengers at certain port locations in some of the smaller islands (like Santorini) visited on your itinerary.

Instead, passengers wishing to go ashore are “tendered” to shore — that is, they are moved from ship to shore on successive small “tenders” (boats holding 50 or so passengers), a slow process that sometimes takes hours.

And guess what? The passengers given priority on such tenders, and thus able to go ashore within the first hours when the tenders are operated, often are those cruise-ship passengers who have paid money for an organized tour of the port. They go ashore right away, while the independent sightseers await a later turn several hours on.

Call the cruise line in advance of boarding the ship. Ask to be advised of those port stops where passengers will be tendered ashore, and consider buying a ship-sold excursion in order to receive priority in the tender.

To successfully cruise aboard these monstrous new ships requires that you scheme and plan. It’s better, in my innocent view, to book aboard one of the smaller, traditional ships.

— Arthur Frommer is the pioneering founder of the Frommer’s Travel Guide book series. He co-hosts the radio program, The Travel Show, with his travel correspondent daughter Pauline Frommer. Find more destinations online and read Arthur Frommer’s blog at frommers.com.