What are the 10 biggest
ripoffs on a cruise and how can you avoid them, get around them, or reduce them? I'm Gary Bembridge, this is another of my tips tips of travels. I'm currently cruising,
I'm here in my cabin, and I've been thinking about the things that cruisers get ripped
off the most on a cruise, starting with this one. WiFi is a huge area where
you can get ripped off. WiFi is generally not free on a cruise, and it can cost you anywhere
between $0.40 to $0.75 or sometimes even more per minute. Now, you can buy various
packages to help reduce the cost, but you can easily be spending
per person for one device $200-300 on a seven-night cruise. So, how do you get around that? Well, first of all, really think about whether you need to be connected. If you are on a very
port-intensive cruise, you can use WiFi when you're on land and just switch off when you're actually on the ship overnight. Or you can perhaps choose increasingly one of the cruise lines that are offering WiFi within the fare. So, Virgin Voyages, Oceania,
Saga Cruises that I'm on now, they include WiFi within the package. It tends to be though, as
you go more and more premium. So really watch out, WiFi could add many hundreds of dollars
onto the cost of your cruise. Also very importantly is make sure that when you are on the cruise, that you switch off data roaming so you don't get any surprise
charges from your provider. WiFi can be a massive ripoff. We all expect it on land it
to be free and available, but it's not on a cruise. So really carefully look at the prices and make sure that you are minimising getting ripped-off when it comes to WiFi. Second area to think about is excursions. You can easily be spending $100, $200 per person per excursion. That can mount up to
many hundreds of dollars across the course of a
week-long or longer cruise. There are loads and loads of alternatives to cruise line excursions, which will always tend to
have a slight premium in them, partly because they do guarantee that the ship will wait for you if the excursions are running late. I like to look at a couple of things to avoid paying a lot
of money on excursions. First of all, I look wherever there are for hop-on hop-off buses. I'm a big fan of hop-on hop-off buses. They often come to cruise port, they're relatively inexpensive, you get some commentary. It's gonna take you to all the key sights. Also you could look at
third party providers. They'll often provide the same tours as the cruise line, they'll
be normally much cheaper and also have smaller groups. The other great thing is tours by locals. There are many, many companies set up which will have locals that live, work, grown up in an area, and they will take you
around often for free and you just pay them a gratuity as a thanks for those tours. You can find all of those online if you just search things
like tours by locals and the port that you're going to. The key thing when you are
looking at cruise excursions to avoid being ripped off is take a look at just
how close places are to the port you can often find that some of the excursions are very easily walkable from the port and there's actually a big premium being taken by the cruise line there. If you want things like
a day at the beach, take a look at things like resort passes. You can often find them online either directly through the hotel site or again you can just
search for resort passes in the place you're going, and you'll find you can
often go to the same resort or similar results for
significantly less money than you're gonna be
paying for the cruise line. So definitely take a look
at different alternatives. You may end up that you decide you want to stick with the cruise line because you like the
security of knowing that the cruise ship will wait for you if the excursion runs late, which all the other
options the cruise line does not guarantee they will wait for you. The third area for me that I think does verge on the ripoff
area is spa treatments. Spa treatments on cruise ships seem to me to be incredibly expensive
for what they are, even you compare them with premium prices in places like London, for example. So one of the ways to avoid that is either not go to the spa at all or wait until a port day. You'll find huge reductions
on spa treatments on port days 'cause less people go. You can often get 40% or
more of a spa treatment. So if you do really want to go to the spa and you find the costs too high, then make sure you go on a port day. Also be really, really careful, check that you're not gonna
get on top of that charge a gratuity charge. You'll find many
cruise lines will charge you what I think are very high prices for the spa treatment, but they will then add
on 18% gratuity charges, and also the people doing the treatments are incentivised to sell you products. So they do quite a hard sell at the end. So one of the things I
find with spa treatments is almost stressful in themselves because they are pretty expensive, and you have that up sell. So make sure if you
don't want to be ripped off you're really clear that you don't wanna buy any products and go on port days. Another area that I do personally think is crazy are photographs. Photographs taken by
the ship photographers are pretty expensive to buy, and you can get around that by
taking your own photographs, particularly if you wait until a port day, perhaps stay on the ship
when the ship's quieter, and you basically go around
and take your own photographs. Even if you don't have a
DSLR camera, bear in mind that mobile phones have incredibly good cameras. So actually take your own photographs, spend some time going
around, particularly, as I said, on a port
day when it's quieter, and do your own photographs, because buying the
photographs from the ship can be incredibly expensive. Now you might want to splash out on one because you want a picture
with the captain, for example, on formal night. But it it is really, really expensive. Take your own photographs. Look at the locations that
they're using around the ship, and go there when the ship is quiet and take the same photographs
for much, much less. Nothing, just time. Another big rip off, I
believe, is bottled water. Now this is actually starting to evolve, because instead of cruise
lines selling plastic bottles, they're moving more and
more to refillable bottles. So hopefully over time
this will disappear. However, bottled water
is really expensive. And you can buy packages
and spend a lot of money. The water itself on a cruise
ship is perfectly drinkable. A lot of people worry about whether they can drink the
water on a cruise ship. It's perfectly, 100%, high-grade
water that you can drink. If you're worried because you think you might not like the taste, why don't you take little
sachets of flavouring and have flavoured water. That way you could probably
even save on sodas. On the positive side, as
cruise lines look more and more at how they can reduce these plastics, they're increasingly giving
you refillable water, which is the water that you can be drinking anyway out of your tap or some of the water
stations around a ship. Bottled water is a big rip off, in my view, when you can drink the water on the ship. If you travel quite a lot by yourself, make sure that you don't get ripped off by the single supplements. If you go on many cruise lines they will charge you 50% to 100% surcharge for single occupancy of a double cabin. There's no need to do that
because increasingly cruise lines are launching ships with solo cabins. So, for example, I'm on Saga. 20% of their cabins, 109
cabins, are solo cabins. All the big new ships coming are increasingly having solo cabins. However, if the cruise line
that you're a big fan of doesn't have solo cabins, sign up for or ask your travel agent to watch out for single supplement deals. So you'll find a lot of the cruise lines on specific sailings will
slash right down to 20%, 10%, or sometimes even no supplements for solo travellers. So that's what I particularly
do on some of the cruises that I book when I know I'm
going to be going by myself is I look for those deals
where I'm gonna be paying nothing or very low supplements. There's no need to pay more. Of course, if you're very clear that you wanna go on a
very specific sailing on a very specific ship
at a specific time, you are going to be ripped off, in my view, by the big surcharge. By being clever you can avoid that. Also, avoid the on-board shops. On-board shops are not going to
be the cheapest around. If you are coming on a
cruise and you see things perhaps in the shops that you want, do a search and check what
it's going to cost you back home or even if you're flying home
and going through duty free, on-board shops generally, in my experience are not
particularly good value, no matter what you're buying. So actually be really, really cautious. And if you are looking to buy something, check even in the ports what
the price of those things are. If there's something in
the shops that you see that you really, really
want, wait for the sales. Pretty much on every single
cruise towards the end there will be sales and special offers, particularly if the shops
aren't hitting their targets. So don't buy things at the
beginning of the cruise, wait until the special offer and sales on. If you're unfortunately
feel ill or poorly and it's not a massive big emergency, try and avoid going to the medical centre if you possibly can. Medical centre on board
ships are pretty expensive because it's a service
that they're providing. And also the drugs that they sell, if you're prescribed anything,
are pretty expensive. What I would suggest you do
is try and go to one of the private walk-in centres on land. Most of these ports that
you're going to call on are used to having lots and
lots of visitors and tourists and normally within easy
accessibility of the port you can probably easily find
a walk-in emergency centre that's going to cost you much less money, and the prescriptions
going to cost you much less. Again, that's really more if it's not a massive big emergency, but you can spend a lot of
money using medical centre on board a cruise ship. Many cruise lines have
art auctions and sell art, and they sell a lot of art. However, it's something to be extremely cautious about and avoid. First of all because
it's an auction process and it's also very likely
that you're going to end up getting caught up in bidding too much. But generally speaking, all the stuff that I've read and looked at is the general view is that art sold on board ships is not great value, and you could easily overspend. And a lot of that is because
of that whole auction process where you can sometimes get out of kilter between what things are really worth and what you end up paying for them. So avoid art auctions,
wait until you're home, do your research, buy art at home. The other area which I think
you can easily be ripped off and end up spending money
that you don't need to spend is in the whole area of coffees,
tea, juices, and ice cream. All of those are available for nothing, included within your fare up in the lido, buffet, restaurant, informal dining, whatever it's called. You normally will find that
you can get coffee, it's often in machines with ground beans. and you can get specialty
teas to choose from. They'll often have
juice machines up there, and they will normally have ice cream available, and in the dining rooms at meal times you'll have ice cream. A lot of ships will have
specialty coffee shops, and they'll have gelato shops, and will sell you
premium juices from the bars. There's no need to do that. If you just head up to the buffet, you're going to get all of those for free. So don't spend money
and don't be ripped off by paying for stuff that you've already paid for within your fare. The way to avoid being
ripped off on a cruise, is to look at every single thing that's not included in your fare as a possible area to be ripped off in. Stuff that's not included in your fare is seen by the cruise line
as revenue generation. They're going to try and get
as much money as possible from the passengers on board the ship. So that's the area where
you could end up spending too much and being ripped off. So look every single
time that you spend money on something that's not
included in your fare, approach with caution, and
say can I avoid this? Can I reduce it? Or can I get around it? And often the answer is yes. If you've found all
these tips helpful I'd love it if you watched another one of my many cruising
tips and advice videos. So why don't you watch another
one of those right now.
