Even experienced cruisers make mistakes.
I can't count the amount of times I have left my cabin without my key. That's a minor trangression that's easily fixed by a stop at guest services.
The problem is that sometimes the line of angry passengers at the guest services desk can make that a long wait for the five seconds it takes for a guest services officer to print you a new key.
Related: Carnival Cruise Line just dropped a popular discount
Many cruise ship fails are frustrating and some are expensive.
If, for example, you forget to buy a drink package, internet service, or book shore excursions before your cruise, you will pay more for them. That's a least a private fail where nobody will know your personal shame.
Elana from the Life Well Cruised YouTube page shared some fails she has experienced so you can avoid making the same mistakes.
Everyone can identify with these cruise fails
Transcript:
From setting off a fire alarm to taking an unexpected fall to medical emergencies, this year has had its share of cruise fails, embarrassing moments, and mistakes that could have been avoided.
Hi there, I'm Elana from the website LifeWellCruised.com. Welcome or welcome back to my channel. Now I'll tell you, cruise travel is not as picture-perfect as it sometimes looks on Instagram or Facebook, or even in YouTube videos.
I can tell you I've had my fair share of some even mortifying, embarrassing moments, some excursion blunders, and even a personal situation. Well, that, thank goodness, did end well, but there were some lessons that I learned. Okay, so I have a total of seven that I picked out to share with you today, and I am going to one of the more embarrassing ones, sort of for midway, because I even have to like work up the courage to tell you, I have not shared this with anybody outside of my immediate family so far.
All right, so cruise fail number one, and this was definitely embarrassing. I didn't even know what happens when you set off the fire alarm on a cruise ship. So yes, I was blow-drying my hair on Freedom of the Seas.
It was an ocean-view cabin, so we didn't have, you know, a window or door that we could open. I was blow-drying my hair. I thought things seemed pretty normal when all of a sudden, there was smoke coming from the blow dryer, and it was one of those blow dry brushes.
Well, the fire alarm went off. It was so loud. I didn't know if sprinklers were going to start spraying the cabin, which didn't happen.
What happened, however, is that it probably took less than two minutes, but more than a minute, for somebody from security to knock at her door. And so a security person came, and she had a little camera actually on her. So when she came in the room, she could see what was going on.
And she told me that it actually happens more often than I would think, but I really just didn't know what would happen. Now, I have to tell you, other than delaying us from leaving the cabin and going to dinner, it really wasn't the end of the world. Security was very understanding.
And she did tell me that a lot of times the vanity area or the desk is right under the smoke detector. So it is something to kind of maybe watch for to try not to blow dry your hair right under that, or you risk what happened to me.
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Don't make any cruising assumptions
Our kayaking excursion in Norway.
Now I have to say this was an absolutely wonderful, beautiful excursion. The scenery was just incredible, but I kind of saw or learned two lessons on this one, partially because of what happened to us and the other part, well, what happened to somebody else during our excursion?
So, first of all, don't assume that you have kayaking lessons, at least a beginner kayaking lesson, when you book a kayak excursion. That is what I found out when we did get into the kayaks.
I assumed they were going to give a quick lesson to maybe some of the people who didn't know how to kayak. That did not happen. So they said, you know, just start rowing, and then we're going to catch up, and we're going to, you know, get into what we're going to do in just a couple of minutes.
Well, Frank and I started to row and then we ended up going further than we thought. And they were saying, well, come on back, come on back. And we honestly didn't know how to coordinate well enough to get back.
So that's a little bit of a lesson. I probably should have let the guide know beforehand that we really needed a lesson. I was very serious about it.
But the other thing happened to somebody else on our excursion. There were an odd number of people on our excursion, which meant that one person would go on their own in the kayak. And somehow, it ended up being a girl that looked like she was about 12 years old.
Now, the guide did say that nobody, almost nobody ever flips over in a kayak. But what happened? This poor little girl did flip over. Now, honestly, thank goodness she was safe.
And she was also a really good sport. She was wet. Oh my goodness, poor her.
Now, the rest of the excursion she spent with a guide in the kayak and I think she was much happier. But I do think it is a little bit of a lesson for the guide and even for the parents. I don't think younger people should be on their own on excursions.
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Some cruise fails will cost you
All right. Now, this one was 100% my fail and it honestly ended up costing me extra money. I am not happy with myself for doing this.
I forgot to book my flights for my Carnival Celebration cruise. I forgot to book them until about two and a half weeks before the cruise. The worst part was that I had booked this cruise about eight months before and I got a really good price.
But probably all of the savings that I had, I actually ate up with the fact that I didn't book my flights. Now, I think what happened is that I had several cruises and trips that were planned between August and November. We were so, so busy.
And because of the Air Canada potential strike, I had money in like the Air Canada wallet, and I already knew about my flights and I think I held them, but I never ended up booking them. So, in my mind, they were booked, but they never were. Anyway, thank goodness I did end up booking them in time.
I just paid a little more than I wanted to. Now, of course, I should have taken my own advice and actually used my checklist. Now, I do have as part of the Life Well Cruised Ultimate Cruise Planner, it's 47 pages by the way of cruise planning forms, cruise packing lists, and more, but I do actually have an entire form for my flight information.
So, if I actually had used my cruise planner, this never would have happened. Now, by the way, I will leave all of the information about the Life Well Cruised Ultimate Cruise Planner. It is a printable cruise planner that you can use again and again for as many cruises as you do go on.
I'm going to leave that information link down below in the description of this video in case you do want to check it out.
Be careful with tourist trap restaurants
Now, I want to tell you about one more before I share with you my most embarrassing and even mortifying moment. So we were in Amsterdam and I think we went to the worst tourist trap restaurant that possibly exists.
It was so bad. No, there could be more, but this was really bad. Now, it turned out we were meeting somebody else in Amsterdam and afterwards we all talked and we said, you know what? We didn't want to say to each other, this restaurant is so bad or maybe we should turn around and not eat here.
But I think you do have to go with your gut instinct when a restaurant just doesn't seem like it's going to be as good as the reviews were. So I don't know if all of the reviews for this pizza pasta place were actually fake because when we walked into this restaurant, which did again, it had really good reviews.
We walked in, it looked really dumpy, but we thought maybe it's a local place and a lot of local people love it.
Sometimes, those are really good, but they just did not look good. And when we asked about the wood-fire pizza, they told us that they did not have a working oven. It should have been a sign.
They did say that they had homemade pasta. In any case, we did order the pasta. I can tell you there is no way in a million years that this was homemade pasta.
It wasn't even passable pasta. It was truthfully one of the worst meals that I've ever had in my life. And I'm glad that all of us didn't end up getting food poisoning.
Now I do think that the lesson is don't feel bad if you offend anybody. Go with your gut instinct and get out of there.
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Don't make this embarkation mistake
Embarkation day failed.
Now on the positive side, we did board this cruise ship, but how did I board this cruise ship?
Well, it turns out that I fell into the cruise ship. So yes, we were boarding MSC Seascape and oftentimes when we board, we do film this because I want to be able to use this in our YouTube video or sometimes in our Instagram reels and shorts.
Well, what happens? Don't I trip on the way in, and, oh my goodness, definitely embarrassing?
Now, thank goodness I was okay, and honestly, the staff were super nice. They all came running. I felt so bad and definitely very embarrassed.
But I do think moments like this, they kind of do exist to keep me humble.
We always joke about that, and now I joke and say, you know what, MSC Seascape, I really fell for you.
All right, now moving on to something a little bit more serious and I don't know if I can call this a cruise fail, but definitely something that it turns out things can happen while you're on a cruise, while you're traveling.
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Don't wait for medical help
So what happened is that we were on our Enchanted Princess Love Boat cruise that we were on with my parents and unfortunately, I think about three days in, my father started to really not feel well.
Now, my father has had some different health issues over the last couple of years. At a certain point, things started to worsen a little bit to the point that we even wondered, should we get off the ship or should my mother get off the ship? Should we go to the hospital in maybe one of the Canadian ports of call? But then he seemed a little bit better, so we did wait.
Now I have to tell you, finally, he did go and see the medical center on the cruise ship, and he really didn't want to go. He wanted to just rest and again, he had some medication. So you know, that wasn't really the situation, but sometimes you do need more intervention.
Now the only thing that I will say is the medical center was absolutely amazing, so I just would not wait in the future if I was in that situation. I definitely would go. Now did it cost money? Absolutely and thank goodness this was, I guess, a lesson to be learned.
My parents did have medical travel insurance, and while they did have to pay upfront on the cruise, so you know, they put that on their credit card. Thank goodness they've already been reimbursed by their travel insurance, and my father did feel much better by the time we left the cruise, and he was able to follow up with his own medical providers once back home.
Now for anybody wondering, not to get into the details, but the treatment that he had, which was basically in the evening through a night and through the following morning, so running some tests and doing some different treatments, that ended up being a little bit over $3,000.
Car troubles can ruin a cruise
An averted disaster with our car. Now, oftentimes, I think what can happen if you're driving to a cruise port? Well, that same cruise, so it seems like it started off a little bit funny, this cruise, but on that cruise, we were driving from our hotel the morning of our cruise to the Brooklyn cruise terminal, and what happened?
We were in the Holland Tunnel, and our car almost stopped completely. Basically, it was able to go five miles an hour or about 10 kilometers an hour, and it happened all of a sudden.
Now, by the way, we had our car serviced right before we drove down. We are driving a car that's less than two years old, so this is a relatively new car. There should have been no reason for it to happen, but sometimes things do.
The only thing I can say is it's almost like somebody was looking out for us because it happened in the Holland Tunnel, and they had cameras in the Holland Tunnel. The security or the police or whatever it is, they were able to stop traffic behind us, so we never got into an accident, nor did anybody else, and we did get a little bit of a police escort to kind of get out of the tunnel and to move to the side and we were able to, albeit very slowly, still drive to the cruise terminal.
And when we got close to the cruise terminal, we could call the roadside assistance that we have with our car and during our cruise, our car was actually fixed and we were able to drive back to Montreal. So even though it was really a very bad situation, I don't even know what I could have done differently but I'm just very thankful that it turned out the way it did.
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Now I'm going to leave a link to the Life Well Cruised Ultimate Cruise Planner down below in the description of the video in case you do want to check it out and see what's included. And I'd love to hear from you. Please let me know what are some of your cruise fails or even an embarrassing moment, something that didn't go the way you wanted it to on a cruise.
Please let me know in the comments below. Now, I hope that you enjoyed this video, and if you did, please give it a big thumbs up. I really appreciate it. Please subscribe to the channel if you haven't done so already.
Bye for now, and happy cruising!
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