Given the free publicity the cruise industry has received of late from the media and certain segments of Congress, I thought it was time to test my manhood by doing an "extreme adventure" kind of vacation. Throwing caution to the wind, I've set off on a cruise to, of all places, the Caribbean.
I will do anything for my readers, and I thought I would take a risk by subjecting myself to more than the usual few days at sea. So I decided to rough it with a 10-night itinerary aboard a ship called the Seven Seas Navigator.
The Navigator is not a new ship. She is not a large ship. I would miss the feeling of being in the middle of Manhattan while moving about from port to port. This would be more intimate than the larger ships, with less to do, fewer facilities and no Mexican food outlets.
There would be no walls to climb, no glass floors above the sea, no bowling alley, skating rink or even a movie theater. There would not even be very many people, since the Navigator only holds 490 folks. If someone really annoyed me, it is likely I would see them again in one of the dining rooms.
I was, to be perfectly honest, predisposed to find fault with this experience. I am not the Caribbean's current poster child. I have at times found it difficult to equate the value of a day in Cozumel with the value of a day in, let's say, Istanbul or Paris. How do I look a client in the eye and get as excited about their upcoming visit to Nassau as I might had they instead chosen to do Provence from the port of Marseilles?
So my expectations were minimal. I've been to the Caribbean numerous times, on and off ships, and I've always wanted just a few basic things.
I'd like a population that has some appreciation of my presence and my willingness to contribute to the local coffers.
I want some food options that will be fun and really memorable.
And I want to be able to see and do things that are not manufactured to accommodate 10,000 cruisers in town for the day.
I guess you could say I want a sense of place, a feeling that I know more about the island and its people than I knew when my ship dropped anchor.
Oh, and I want to be made to feel somehow special without the need to be surrounded by legions of folks in cutoffs and tank tops, party cruisers just off the booze cruise and ready to shop.
I know that a certain percentage of the American public is slovenly and lacks sophistication. That's fine with me. I just choose not to spend my vacation time constantly being reminded of the fact that I don't live in Switzerland.
I know that any number of tourism ministers from the islands have decried the fact that cruise passengers do not spend enough money ashore. So let me ask: Spend money on what?
Memo to every Caribbean tourism minister: We don't spend our vacations at home trudging in the heat from watch store to watch store in an effort to save $7. We can buy the bling you try to sell us online, or from a brick-and-mortar that actually cares about our return business.
So, please, close all of the jewelry outlets. Be about something more honest, more local instead of shilling for watchmakers in Bern or Osaka. And ban T-shirt sales. When you see who is wearing them back home, you might decide this is not the best advertising for your island.
Then there's the attitude. If I had an island that was operating just below the poverty level, and the cruise industry was bringing me several thousand guests a day with credit cards and a sense of openness and adventure, I might try to smile a bit and provide service that they would long remember. I might also try to come up with creative adventures and a spirit of really getting to know the local residents and their lifestyle.
Instead, the visitor off a ship is greeted too often with sullenness. This happened to me on St. John's, Antigua. I was so surprised at the lack of civility being shown visitors by local merchants that I went on a search for friendly faces. I gave it two hours and then gave up.
Worse than the attitude was the presence of store security by the front door. You found this even in some of the smaller shops. I started asking a few store managers why they felt the need for security. "Shoplifting has gone up as the ships have gotten bigger," one shop owner told me.
Having worked for a major Caribbean cruise line, I was aware of some of the intrinsic problems in the area. One island, for example, has the cheapest bunker fuel, so that island ends up on as many itineraries as possible. One fellow on another island owns enough air-conditioned tour buses to handle 4,000 guests at a time, so his company dictates what shore excursions will be available to guests.
The tour planners at the various lines meet with the locals regularly, and they try to get them to move in the direction of more creative options, more active excursions for those physically able, the training of better guides. But this takes spending at the local level, and the islands have just not been willing to invest in their own infrastructure aside from seeing to it that the piers don't collapse under the weight of so many buffet diners disembarking at the same time.
Break it down and you will see that most of the islands have three major sectors: land-based vacationers totally dependent on airlift; yachting, often self-sufficient; and cruising.
The ships keep getting larger, while the airlift to support land tourism gets more problematical, keeping hoteliers on the edge of their chaise lounges.
If we were flies on the wall of Caribbean tourism officials, we would hear a lot about per-passenger "spend" statistics. Much of the spending goes into the hands of multi-outlet store brands in the Caribbean. And it is surprisingly low. In 2011, 4.1 million visitors walked ashore off cruise ships in Nassau. They spent an average of $73. The figure rose in 2012, and so did arrivals. St. Thomas and St. Croix saw cruise passenger spend at $167.
In Jamaica, tourism figures indicate that in 2011, cruise passenger numbers jumped by an astounding 23%, but guest spend was still just $71.27.
So, as I set sail, I was expecting huge crowds and the feeling that "I'd rather be sailing into Monte Carlo." This was spring break in the Caribbean, and I feared our captain might not even find a place to park our small ship.
But as you will learn in my next column, like most things in life it just didn't turn out the way I had expected.
Contributing editor Richard Turen owns Churchill and Turen, a vacation-planning firm that has been named to Conde Nast Traveler's list of the World's Top Travel Specialists since the list began. Contact him at [email protected].