Cruising is back, but it has changed in unexpected ways

Cruising is back, but it has changed in unexpected ways.

The experience may seem the same to the undiscerning, but to our eye there is a decline in value for money paid.

This change in the "value proposition" of a cruise ship vacation is present at all price points, from budget and mid-market to what the industry promotes as luxury.

While mass market cruise lines may advertise low bargain base prices, say for a week in the Caribbean, many companies have also boosted prices for gratuities, drinks, and other items that you might consider routine and essential. Your total cost for a vacation may turn out to total twice the base fare.

The surprises are not entirely financial.

Cruise lines continue to suffer from the way Covid reduced availability of experienced staff onboard, and on shore where local companies called destination managers sell them guides, coaches, and the rest of the port experience that customers receive.

For example, our Seabourn Mediterranean cruise last July was obviously short handed, but worse, most of customer-facing crew and managers seemed very poorly trained and unaware of the standards Seabourn once set for a premium experience. Inexplicably there were screaming infants aboard and young children running unsupervised in companion ways who are prohibited by Seabourn policy.

Now, six months later, we are sailing around Asia on Regent, with better food and better prepared crew, but with disappointing experiences in most ports where excursions are handled by local destination managers who had little work across two years of Covid.

The fallout of these difficult years extends to what you may remember pre-Covid as your favorite ports, or your well-researched bucket list places to visit.

For example we expected to dock in central Saigon as we have on past cruises. Instead Regent got stuck with in a small, obscure industrial port far from the Saigon we knew. No facilities, no taxis, no walking, just coaches an hour to town or for tours.

The same outside Bangkok where for years Silversea seems to have virtually exclusive access to the central Bangkok port. Regent was relegated to a huge industrial port about two hours or more from the city. No facilities, no taxis, no walking.

And in Paris last summer we returned to two of our favorite restaurants only to find they were no longer special or even appetizing.

The biggest disappointment from the Regent Explorer has been the excursions, a selection of which are included at no additional charge in the "luxury" all-inclusive fare.

The tours we chose have what we'll call, to be charitable, "aspirational" descriptions, but most took us to tertiary or worse attractions that do not reflect the real nature of the Asian countries or the best their people have to show tourists. Over the years we have seen better and hope that those prime sites will return to cruise tours and the over-hyped rest will disappear from the menu.

Today Diane and I start the second month of our 62 day Grand Asia Inspiration sailing on Regent Explorer.