Eh, worse things happen at sea, you know.
I read the paper today, and this definitely sounded like a miserable experience. Toilets wouldn’t flush (I imagine that after a couple of days an unflushed toilet is pretty unpleasant), couldn’t use the swimming pools (because some necessary pumps weren’t working), dark rooms, waiting hours to get food (and the last people in line only saw tomatoes and lettuce left at the buffet table) - if the description is accurate, then I would be complaining too.
At least the cruise line refunded the money, but in the case of someone with limited vacation time (most US companies start off at about 10 vacation days a year) it’s a real downer to use up your vacation time for an experience like that.
Hmm - I have 3 different backpacking stoves, and 2 different camping stoves. I ALWAYS can have hot food and coffee on campout.
One replacement cruise is hardly recompense for this suckatude. It only gives them what they already paid for and doesn’t address the crap they had to deal with. They deserve 2 cruises at least for no new money.
I think they are refunding the money for this trip too, so they will get their vacation after all and for free.
The thing is the huge difference between what they were expecting and what they got.
Expecting a week of luxury and getting four days of ‘camping’ is a pretty big swing.
They might not even have been obligated to do that much. I read an article recently (I think it was in the Los Angeles Times) saying that for most contracts you sign when you book a cruise, it’s pretty clearly said that there are not very many reasons that require a refund. One of the examples they had was changing the cruise destination (e.g. because of weather) - that didn’t mean you could demand to get your money back.
They may not have asked you, but you can bet they poll all the time, and measure ratings on a story by story basis. If the news were targeted to you and me and the average Doper, it would all look like NPR and the NY Times.
Gee, when I was in the Boy Scouts they taught us how to make a fire.
They had a nice big fire. They just didn’t have any marshmallows.
I almost started this thread myself, but a later news report changed my mind. When I first started seeing this on CNN, it was stated very early in the article that the power outage was the result of a fire. Now, perhaps my understanding is wrong, but I think you don’t want a fire on a ship. You want to get that sucker contained five minutes ago, otherwise everyone’s screwed. So it sounded like a good thing that all they lost was power, and I wondered why the passengers weren’t just glad to be alive and eating anything, on the ship and at least limping back to port.
But this morning, there was an update which added that, apparently, the crew presented the power failure as just a power failure for no specified reason, instead of the close call I’m speculating it was. As such, it just looked like incompetence. And if that’s so, I can’t blame the passengers for being aggravated. Can’t expect them to say “We’re alive; pass the Pop Tarts” if they didn’t know that they were not in the worst-case scenario.
What I don’t get on this story is Carnival couldn’t or didn’t do more for their customers. What they ended with is a full week of negative advertising towards the cruise industry.
Sure accidents happen they had a fire and lost power but they didn’t have any logistics or contingencies to account for bad things happening?
With all of Carnivals money they couldn’t get another boat out there or helicopters delivering generators.
The boat is a giant resort, to me I think they could have easily kept people happy if they were willing to pay out the nose to do it, instead they will forever be tainted wih the news reports of the incident.
It was probably faster to tow the ship home rather than wait for an empty (if they even had one) cruise ship to get there. Those things are not fast.
Procuring generators and helicopters take time along with installing the generators. Where on a cruise ship is there even room for the generators needed?
They need to get to work on installing nuclear generators on all cruise ships. Chop chop! Get on that!
Magicians? Here you are, dirty and smelly, undernourished because you skip meals to avoid lining up, and going through caffeine withdrawal. Then a wandering magician accosts you on deck, thinking that however exhausted you may be, you are not too beaten down as to be unable to select a card–any card–from the pack they offer.
(Actually I kid, I love close-up magic of any kind, particularly card tricks.)
Maybe the magicians could have started pulling rabbits out of their hats. The bastards probably ate them all themselves, though. But it could have been worse. It could have been a clown conference.
Maybe it’s been a slow news week where you live.
It has been getting pretty cold at night, here in SoCal, down to the upper forties. I may have to put the lining back in my overcoat. 
You are so doing it wrong. 
I’m pretty sure the media has exactly one priority, which I can sum up thusly:
$
People dying in Chile has fuck-all to do with the average American’s life. If you have a problem with the media making money, well, all I can say is that reporters’ kids have to eat, too. Besides, you can always tune in to NPR instead of a local news channel if you want world news. Or get your news from the internet.