Cruise or Luxury Resort?

Cruising is one of the fastest-growing sectors of the travel industry, if not the fastest, particularly in Europe and Australasia, where the market is considered to be a long way from mature. The USA, too, has plenty of room for expansion, which is all too clear from the rate at which new ships are being built.

So cruise lines are desperate to expand their market share. Yet they say their biggest competitors are not other cruise lines, but luxury hotels and resorts. The cruise market will only grow, they say, if holidaymakers switch from a fortnight in the Maldives to a vacation at sea.

To this end, cruise lines are always pointing out the benefits of cruising over luxury resorts. It’s true that there are many. On a cruise line, all food and entertainment are included and it is undeniably good value for money, even at the luxury end. You can, at a push, get away without spending anything at all on board if you are so inclined. The service is almost always superb on cruise ships. The onboard spas are of an extremely high level. The drinks prices are usually duty-free. Children’s clubs and babysitting are free and again, usually of excellent standard.

And yet…much as I love and appreciate cruising, to my mind, there are elements of a cruise that do not compete with the experience in a luxury resort. Sometimes these are for practical reasons because of the sheer number of people carried on cruise ships. But if cruise lines really want to compete with places of comparable cost ashore, they could pay attention to the following!

At a luxury resort, the resident photographer, if there even is one, doesn’t insist on snapping you when you look your worst, staggering through the door after a long haul flight, and then display the horror in a photo gallery.

Luxury resorts do not bombard their guests in their rooms with annoying announcements in many languages.

In a luxury resort, guests are not assaulted with constant sales messages, from tacky art auctions to reels of cheap gold, branded T-shirts on trestle tables in the corridors and bizarre and expensive detoxifying treatments.

In a luxury resort, nobody tells you how much you should be tipping, automatically adds tips to your final bill for people you may not have even met, or blatantly leaves an envelope marked ‘tips’ on your bed on the last night.

Finally, no luxury resort kicks you out of your room at 6am on departure day, herds you into a holding area and then makes you wait in line until you are allowed to leave!

Do you have an opinion on this subject? If so, please contribute to the discussion forum.

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