Cruise News - Cruise Ship Collides with Oil Tanker, Carnival Drink Glitch, Hurricane Franklin, MSC

Well, hello there. Good morning from the carnival paradise. More specifically, good morning from Bimini. Look at this, the lush blue waters, the tropical locale set for a beautiful beach day. I already got a lot of passengers down there disembarking. It's the first port stop on our five-day cruise, and man, it's beautiful. All right, you know what time it is. Cruise news time, and well, bad weather is certainly impacting cruises this weekend. We have a crazy story about a cruise ship colliding with an oil tanker. We have a carnival cruise ship that is moving its itinerary away from the storm. We also have challenges for MSC Seaside making her way back to Port Canaveral, and we got to talk about it, right? We got to talk about this carnival drink package glitch. Cruise news and my views. Let's talk about it. Hey, what's up everybody? Welcome to La Lida Loca. I am your host Tony, here with the latest cruise news and views for your face, and hopefully you're having a great Monday morning. Hopefully you had a great weekend. Well, there's some things crashing around in the cruising space. First and foremost though, I am on location today. I am in Bimini, just about 50 miles off the coast of Florida. We made our way around the horn of Florida. Is that such a thing? The tip of Florida, and now we're kind of on the east side of Florida. We left out of Tampa. It's been a great cruise so far here on the Carnival Paradise. A couple really relaxing days, and now Bimini today, Nassau tomorrow, sea day, and then back to Tampa. That's if our itinerary is not disrupted by the storm that is bearing down on the west coast of Florida in the Gulf of Mexico. A lot of folks said, are you getting on a cruise ship that's in a hurricane? Well, certainly not yet. A lot of different models right now, but I live north of Tampa. One of the models has that storm going up near my house, so it's going to be interesting while we're out in the Bahamas on, you know, Tuesday, Wednesday. That storm should be churning kind of near where we live, so it's going to be interesting to see what happens over there. Storms, like I said, disrupting a lot of things in cruising. There's a story coming out from Mallorca off the coast of Spain, where a cruise ship was docked in Palma for an overnight stay when a crazy storm came out of nowhere, 70 mile an hour gust, and it blew that cruise ship off of its moorings, pushed the P&O cruise ship Britannia into an oil tanker. Look at this picture here. This, if you look close, I'll zoom in. If you look close, that is the railing of the cruise ship under part of the oil tanker. Reports coming off of that cruise ship talk about a pretty scary situation where families were putting the life jackets on their children, where there was a great noise, a great commotion as they floated freely away from the dock, and then there were some reported injuries. P&O did not give the exact number, but they said a small number of passengers were injured in this incident. The storm not only affected the ships in the harbor, but also planes in the air. It must have been like one of those out-of-nowhere kind of storms. There were reports out there of passengers going through some crazy turbulence as they hit that storm unexpectedly. Reports from the Britannia is that, of course, the collision site is pretty battered. The ship is now moored off the coast of Mallorca. While they examine the extensive damage, they plan to report in Palma to see if they are able to continue on with their cruise, but wow! Cruise news story number two. Passengers that embarked on the Carnival Magic two days ago on Saturday for a cruise to Bermuda were informed when they got on board that they would not be going to Bermuda because of Hurricane Franklin. Hurricane Franklin is churning its way through the Atlantic, up the east coast of the United States. Fortunately, it's not hugging the coast of the United States. It's more in the middle of the ocean. However, it is making a beeline toward Bermuda. Bermuda does stand a chance of catching some grief from Hurricane Franklin. Well, that's where the Carnival Magic was supposed to go when they left Norfolk, Virginia, but they were notified that instead of their Bermuda vacation, they would now have a Bahamas vacation as the Magic has moved to the south. Now, certainly the Bahamas is a different place than Bermuda. A lot of people have Bermuda as one of those bucket list destinations, and to Carnival's credit, they have certainly recognized that, and they are providing a $200 onboard credit per stateroom for everybody on that cruise because of the impacted itinerary, which I think is pretty solid because obviously Carnival can't control the weather. I know there's probably some disappointed people on the cruise, so hopefully the extra coin will make them feel a little better for the change. How would you feel if your Bermuda cruise now became a Bahamas cruise? Leave a comment below. Now, the Carnival Magic wasn't the only cruise that was disrupted over the weekend. The MSC Seaside, the new cruise that was starting yesterday on Sunday the 27th, also disrupted because the MSC Seaside had trouble getting back to Port Canaveral on its previous cruise because of engine issues. Guests on board the Seaside were notified that they would be delayed returning back to Port Canaveral, and guests that were embarking on the next cruise on the Seaside, a four-day cruise, were also notified that they should come to the port two hours later for a delayed embarkation. This all occurred yesterday. I was just looking at CruiseMapper, and the Seaside is further south in these waters than we are. They're further south than Bimini, so it seems like the embarkation, the delayed embarkation, happened. Were you impacted by this on the MSC Seaside? If so, leave a comment below. Now, we got to talk about the glitch that happened over the weekend with the Carnival drink package, but before we do that, let me quickly invite you to subscribe. If you like staying up to date with everything going on in cruising, please consider subscribing with the notification bell on. That way you don't miss out on any of these episodes. Doesn't cost anything. The buttons are just right there below. Subscribe, notification bell, hit the like while you're down there. A big thank you in advance. Well, here's the deal. One of the biggest decisions that many cruisers make on most cruises is whether or not to buy the drinks package, whether to get your shot at the most alcohol or the non-alcoholic beverages that you can handle on a cruise, and a lot of times that can be a pricey decision. I know that we've booked a seven-day cruise before and the drink package has been more than what we paid for the cruise, eight, nine hundred dollars. Well, to the joy of many Carnival cruisers over the weekend, they found that if they booked the drinks package, the cheers package, that they only got charged for the price of a single day of the cheers package. Many guests out there reporting that they were able to book the cheers package for a hundred and forty-one dollars for a seven-day cruise for two people, and if you know anything about these drink packages, that's a insane rate. That's a quite heavily discounted rate, and well, quickly Carnival came out and said, here's the deal. We had a glitch in our computer system, an error of some sort, and the price was displayed incorrectly. The daily price was displayed correctly, but when the final calculation came out, time to pay, that price was calculated incorrectly, and folks were only getting charged for one day of the drink package instead of the length of their cruise. Brand ambassador John Heald made a statement on his Facebook page saying that anybody who booked at the incorrect price would receive a full refund of what they paid, and they would also receive a coupon code for a discounted cheers package in the future. Now, the details of the coupon code were not released, and it's not been forthcoming when that code is coming, but the end result is that Carnival recognized this glitch, and that they are, of course, not going to sell the drink package that heavily discounted, and of course, they're, you know, sorry about it. It's not something that they wanted to happen, but now in the wake of that, there are tons of passengers upset, and it does spark an interesting conversation. What do you think? Should Carnival have honored this price even though it was way too good to be true, or is Carnival doing the right thing by not only refunding the mistaken price money back to folks, but also giving some sort of discount code for the inconvenience? What do you think? Leave a comment below. Boom! That is your cruise news. Thank you so much for checking out the show today. I sure hope you enjoyed it. This is Tony for La Lido Loca, and until the next time, we'll see you on the Lido.