Cruise Passengers Receive Full Refunds After Company’s Drunken Work Conference Ruins Trip
Some families were so aggravated with the experience that they retreated to their cabins for the duration of the cruise.
When Indian-based company Kamla Pasand held a three-night work conference filled with raucous partying and burlesque dancers dressed as Playboy Bunnies aboard a Royal Caribbean cruise, passengers complained so heavily about the rowdy 1,300-person group that the cruise ship company agreed on full refunds for the affected passengers, Yahoo reports.
The families aboard described the atmosphere as more of a bachelor party than an even-keeled, casual cruise ship experience, with some of the passengers on board taking to their cabins for the entire duration of the cruise.
“Their doors would be open, and you would walk past and be like, ‘What am I going to be looking at when I walk past this door?’” Cassandra Riini, a passenger, explained.
Meanwhile, Manager of Global Corporate Communications for Royal Caribbean Cruises, Owen Torres, released a statement to the Sun Sentinel explaining the course of events and the assuaging countermeasures taken on behalf of the company thereafter.
“After a three-night sailing from Singapore on Sept. 6, several guests shared their concerns with us about the behavior of a group of other guests aboard the ship,” Torres said. “We were able to quickly provide them with a satisfactory solution to their concerns. Royal Caribbean operates with the safety of our guests and crew as our highest priority. We are continuing to review this incident to ensure that our guest conduct policy is applied appropriately.”
As someone who’s never been on a cruise, I can’t tell you how disparate the actual experience may be from the commercialized idealism it uses to sell people on, but I have heard enough troubling stories to steer away from spending my holidays on a floating shopping mall.
The Drive’s own Will Sabel Courtney covered a slew of unfortunate cruise ship experiences in 2016, with some of these coincidentally occurring on Royal Caribbean ships. So if you think you’ll be the master of your own domain aboard one of these ships, you may be right when it comes to your own cabin, but will have to share the rest of the ship with people you’ve never met at your own risk.
