The Washington Post’s travel columnist relays a pretty terrible story–and culprit Princess Cruise Lines deserves a rich public shaming for letting it happen. Seems a 78-year-old woman of meager means had been saving for 10 years for a cruise to Alaska. She paid $2,500 for the cruise, plus $559 more for airfare. She ended up missing the boat due to a series of delays that hit her three connecting flights between D.C. and Anchorage.

Princess says they get to keep her $2,500, and it seems that their claim holds up in the fine print of whatever it is you sign when you book a cruise with them. I think it’s pretty stupid of them to hold her to it, particularly since she missed the boat through no fault of her own. It’s even stupider that they’ve stuck to their guns after being contacted by a Washington Post writer about the woman’s plight. The article implies (but doesn’t specifically state) that the rather roundabout way of getting her to Anchorage was also booked through Princess. So you could argue that they’re in part to blame, or at least more to blame than she is.

What’s particularly galling, though, is what happened to the woman’s airfare. The airlines at fault for causing her to miss her cruise refunded her money, but strangely, that money also went to Princess Cruises, because, according to a spokesperson, Princess negotiates rates with the airlines for people taking their cruises. I’m not sure why that matters. Had she made the boat, her $559 would have stayed with the airlines, not gone to Princess. Perhaps it is in her contract with Princess that the cruise line gets to keep her airfare if the airlines don’t get her to the boat on time. And maybe the Princess spokesperson is right that such a policy is the “industry standard.” If so, it’s a deceptive, counterintuitive, anti-consumer policy that they ought to be ashamed of, and that they ought to change.

Princess should also give the poor woman a spot on another cruise. That they haven’t yet makes them pretty damned dumb. And it makes me certain that not only will I never book a cruise with them, I’ll be bad-mouthing Princess Cruises anytime I’m involved in a conversation where cruises are mentioned.

I’d stop well short of the Washington Post writer’s call for congressional hearings. We don’t need Congress nosing in on every deceptive business practice anecdote. Even if you don’t subscribe to the same limited government principles I do (i.e., the cruise industry is none of Congress’ business), congressional grandstanding on these sorts of issues generally makes things worse, not better.

What we need is lots of bad publicity for Princess Cruises.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 27th, 2007 at 12:13 pm by admin and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.