So, since this website is a personal site, since it’s got no affiliation links, no adverts, no incentive to sugar-coat things in the hope of not ostracising ourselves from people or the possibility of freebies, and since it is in essence a blog in the sense that the word originally had, I feel it’s time to get a few things off my chest. For whatever sort of posterity the internet has. Because venting is good for relieving stress. I have no expectation that anyone other than some web spider will read any of this below and that’s good because this is more a capturing of my thoughts for me for sometime later to look back on. And possibly add to over time, because I’m sure the world hasn’t finished with finding ways to irritate me.
I’m going to mention a few things that cruise lines and cruise bloggers have done that have irritated me and I’m going to mention a few historical incidents with some cruise bloggers too.
I’ll start with Sail Away Magazine who I have to say I thought were a bunch of good guys with a lot of similar attitudes towards aspects of cruising as me and my wife. And then they posted something cryptic on Instagram about some PR company getting in touch with them upset at something, along with a link to their site. Sorta clickbait, but sorta limited by how much you can say on a single post on social media when there’s a fuller explanation on the site, or so I thought. But no. No more information on the site, just a “we’ll never be silenced” declaration and nothing more about who was upset at what. I mean, it’s possible to guess given what they’d previously published (a Carnival cruise with a shitty room, and frequent negative comments about P&O and the way it’s been run in recent years), but this “we’re being attacked” followed by absolutely no further calling out of the people involved? Ah no, no thanks. Victims who don’t want their accusers to get upset more in case there are ramifications? Why not just say nothing at all instead of drawing attention to vague outrage?
Anyway, unfollowed all their stuff and no big loss there to either party. I also posted a message on Instagram about it – deliberately cryptic for a laugh too – but another fun fact about that account is that it never looked at any Instagram Stories I ever published. Not once. I generally check those who are posting stories to see if they’re reciprocating views (since you can tell this) or if they’re the sort that publishes and runs (i.e. not social). Now, there are some accounts who follow too many people so likely can’t see your content – and I don’t tend to follow those unless they’re super-interesting – but there are others who follow a small enough number to not have any excuse not to genuinely be social. Their choice, but if you’re not even looking at what someone you’re following is posting then why follow them? Oh, yeah, now I remember. Anyway, I try to keep on top of this and unfollow those who aren’t in it for the same thing as me. We’ve got to make the internet work for us and cut out the bits that don’t.
Update: after posting this, the guys behind the magazine got banned outright from cruising with Carnival for five years. On the face of it this did feel like it was a little over-the-top from the corporation when it felt like simply blocking all the freebie trips and ship invites etc. might have been a more proportionate response that still would have delivered the message to other cruise bloggers getting this sort of access that it came with expectations despite all the very many, deluded protests of honest reviews. However, we only ever saw one side of the story and I wasn’t the only person to mention it. Actually, you’d be very surprised how many people replied to an Instagram story on this by me with decidedly less-than-sympathetic views towards the bloggers. Interestingly, that same story was actually viewed by the guys – a first – and they replied with a suitably egocentric response before realising I didn’t follow them so they could unfollow in return.
Update 2: even trying to ignore the pair of them the news keeps trickling through via other sources so it now transpires that the ban is only really for the main UK-based brands of Carnival (that’ll be P&O, Princess, and Cunard) which lends credence to the theory that the ban wasn’t because of the Carnival review but instead because of negative commentary against P&O’s head.
Now for a moan about a cruise line, or possibly CLIA, or some PR company somewhere. I don’t know. What I do know is that Hebrides Cruises invited Tom and Dom (cruise bloggers we follow and whose videos we generally enjoy) for a cruise. I have a question I’d love to see answered. Why? What did Hebrides Cruises get out of it? Was there some data about the Tom and Dom followers demographics they had access to that suggested small boat cruisers prepared to spend around £500 per person per night would like the take of a couple of guys who I have trouble believing would pay for a cruise like that themselves? It’s not as if the cruise company is short of bookings if you look at their calendar, after all, so I’d just like to know why companies pick the people they do. That would be something that would be handy to see in all these freebie cruises people get. In the same way that some adverts on some social media sites have information along the lines of “You’re seeing this ad for boots because you’ve indicated you like science fiction and we’re pretty sure people in those stories wear boots” then it would be nice to see a “We’ve been invited on a cruise down the Nile because someone with the username Pharaoh666 recently commented on a video of ours so maybe there’s a sale there somewhere.”
I’d like to make it absolutely clear here: fair play to Tom and Dom on getting that cruise. That’s why you’re CLIA members, paying to produce that promotional material for them and get a subsidised holiday in return, after all. It looked a lovely little trip.
This reminds me of Emma and how many years ago we used to be friends on Twitter but then she got offered a cruise with Saga and I made a similar comment as above, something like “Why are Saga picking a girl in her twenties to blog about her time on a vessel that will likely be scrap before she’s old enough to actually pay for a cruise with the line? What makes Saga think the opinions and experiences of someone in their twenties will translate to the elderly cruising market?” I thought then and still think it’s a valid question, and as with Hebrides Cruises, it was a “What’s in it for you?” query to the company and not in any way anything other than “Congratulations” to the cruise bloggers themselves. Hell, I used to get free stuff all the time in the 90s and 00s because of my site. Crap stuff, but free! I was young(ish), the internet was also young(ish), free stuff was free stuff.
But anyway, Emma either took the question the wrong way as being about her (people in their twenties, eh!?) or she didn’t want to be associated with a miserable cynic like me (and who can blame her?) so the walls came down, comments were ignored, mentions vanished, all that stuff. I can at least respect that decision even if it came across as tantrum-like.
That was quite a handy thing in retrospect because it meant we felt no inclination to introduce ourselves to her when we ended up on the same cruise as her on three occasions and that proved very beneficial in finding out a little bit more about one of the more well-known cruise bloggers out there. We’ve made a habit of keeping ourselves to ourselves, not letting people see what we look like, and it’s not just because we’re hideously ugly (although that’s certainly a factor), and it’s not just because we’re terribly introverted (but that’s part of it for sure), and it’s not in any way because we sometimes don’t think we’d have anything in common with certain people because of age or interests so let’s not make it awkward for everyone (but maybe we should consider that), and all that means we can catch people off guard and get more of a feel for what they’re truly like when they’re not showing the world what they want the world to see.
So, we were sat at a table with cruise blogging friends who knew Emma (and Rich and Helen (they’ve gone to corner the luxury cruising market now) who were also there, and some others in PR and blogging too) and as everyone came in they acknowledged our friends, Chris and Sandra, but there was never any invitation to them to join them on their table next to us, and of course nobody else knew us and we didn’t let on who we were so we were nicely ignored. And the evening progressed and there was laughter and chat from us, and there was laughter and chat from the table next to us which we could overhear quite nicely, and then those cruise bloggers to one side of us posted some photos for social media. “Having a lovely time here on this ship with these people!” That sort of thing. And then, afterwards, on Twitter, Emma posted “Oh, just realised Chris and Sandra were here too in the background.” Just realised? That was a lie. It was the second one she’d posted online from that ship because one had gone up earlier in the day saying how amazing it all was after we’d sat across from her for half an hour wondering just why she, her boyfriend, and her parents were all sat together in silence with faces like they’d been given 24 hours to live.
I caught a video interview that Emma did with Sail Away Magazine (before I stopped following them, obviously) where Emma mentioned that she picks and chooses the free cruises she gets offered based on what she thinks her followers would be interested in, and I thought that was admirable. But then she said she didn’t really book excursions when she could go for a walk so I guess the interests of her followers who might like to know whether a certain trip was good or not suddenly counted for nothing. Or would need to be paid for. One of the two. Wink.
On that same cruise there was another cruise blogger we knew online. We’d been on one cruise with Marcus without making ourselves known just because he was in a crowd of people but he seemed like a decent enough bloke. And then we were on this second cruise with him. On this one we saw him come across and say hi to some other well-known cruise-blogging friends of ours early on boarding day whilst also ignoring Chris and Sandra. “That’s Marcus,” I said to them. “Yeah, we know, we’ve met,” they replied. Seemed a bit rude of him not to come across and talk to them but not a huge deal as perhaps he simply didn’t turn his head the four degrees necessary to spot them next to our other cruising friends. It could happen. But later in the evening I stepped into an elevator on this ship and both Marcus and his partner were there. Two larger people stepped in and I saw Marcus and his friend turn to each other, smirk, and make some sort of grimace face behind their backs. I mean, it was an elevator with mirrors on each wall so it was impossible to miss.
Anyway, fair to say that I didn’t like how anyone that night treated Chris and Sandra, or anyone else who didn’t quite meet some threshold of attractiveness worthy of respect. Despite everything, I tried to introduce myself to Rich and Helen as they left but was glad-handed and passed off without getting past “Hello” as if I’d bumped into a politician on his publicity walk so that was that. At least they treated Chris and Sandra fine, which was the only thing we really cared about, but the demonstration of an ego like that (later described as being due to tiredness) put an end to us making ourselves known to them in person. It’s unlikely we’d get on in real life with that set of contrasting personalities between us but we can at least still remain cordial online.
And speaking of egos, since I’m enjoying this little release of annoyances, I have to mention Jamie who has a Travel Blog but the last time we saw any of his videos they had exceeded the threshold of about 75% shots of his gurning face in front of anything travel-related going on in the background so we stopped watching them. He wouldn’t have minded (or even have cared to know about that) because he’s the one who suddenly blanked us after being quite friendly for quite a while and he seems to live in his own little universe that only extends out as far as his own gravitational attraction. I don’t know for sure what it was that we did that brought upon this change from him but I do know that he didn’t like it when I told him I would not be siding with him over a dispute he had with Gav and Luke (Welsh cruise bloggers who we’d love to meet on a ship sometime) just on his word alone and that we would continue to talk to them online as we didn’t know both sides of the story. It’s equally possible that he simply realised there was nothing to gain for him from being friends with not-exactly-PR-friendly me because there’s certainly been a ruthless tendency towards forming those more personally beneficial affiliations from what we saw before I blocked his presence as much as possible from online life. A little bit of a shame because we’d bonded over finding certain other cruise bloggers a bit two-faced when comparing them in real life to their online content, but a relief too when it transpired that he had an apparent agenda to increase his importance in the cruising world beyond the level of entitlement he already felt. Surprising (not really) to then see him on videos with some of those same people, and encouraging to have later heard other people talking about him less than positively after falling foul of his puzzling and abrupt changes of temperament towards them.
Gary is a big cruise blogger I never want to meet because I don’t like his politics. I suspect that if more cruise bloggers made their political views known then I’d probably not like them either as cruising attracts the selfish right-wing crowd but an awful lot of them seem to simply not care about the world around them which is pretty deplorable for travellers, or seem to hide their views because they know their views are abhorrent. Cowards. Gary hasn’t made his political views well known to the best of my knowledge but back when I used Twitter I used Tweetdeck and one of the features it had was showing what posts from other people that people you followed liked. And Gary liked the Tories a lot. He liked posts from the likes of Rees-Mogg and Priti Patel, and he liked posts that were anti-immigrant. Yeah, definitely for the best that we never meet.
Not specific to cruise blogging exactly, but one of the side-effects of having an Instagram presence – which I enjoy despite how crappy the app is and how incredibly crappy the site’s parent company and its owner are – is that there seems to be an explosion of travel agents online now. That’s not a bad thing if you’re after a travel agent. It is a bad thing if you don’t want to become a travel agent yourself because good luck avoiding the pitches to start your own business from home in your spare time. It smells like a pyramid scheme with more work and ever-diminishing returns for those who might sign up now in what has to be a super-saturated market, and it’s not something we’d ever want to do because there’s a lot of responsibility involved and a sense that if it ever took off in any meaningful way then there’d never be a chance to switch off from work ever again. That’s stress we could do without. Some people who’ve approached me have been understanding when I’ve said it’s not for me, and some have instantly unfollowed which lends credence to the parasitical nature of the business.
This is very therapeutic. I recommend this sort of ranting into an empty room to everyone.