Big news on the cruise pricing/advertising scene! In case you didn’t know, cruise companies can be misleading when it comes to their advertising. Some are worse than others, but they all do it to some extent or another.
Case in point…Cruise Line A advertises a 4-night cruise for $149. Great deal, right?! Not so fast my friend! The devil is in the fine print and what they don’t tell you upfront. First, that price quoted is $149 per person, based on double occupancy. This means the price of the advertised cabin has already increased to $298.
Next, they neglect to mention government taxes and port fees which vary based on cruise length and ports visited. For this example let’s go with an average of $100 in taxes and $50 in port fees. Oh, and did they bother to mention taxes and fees are per person? Yep, they are and this $300 doubles the cost of the cruise to $598.
Last, but not least, they typically hide in the fine print that this no longer not so low price cabin, is not for the beautiful balcony room shown in the ad. Nope. It’s for a guaranteed inside cabin. In other words, the advertised price is for the lowest rated category on the ship and you won’t even have the opportunity to choose where on the ship your cabin is located.
However, thanks to the state of California, some of this lack of transparency is going away. Effective July 1, California’s Consumers Legal Remedies Act goes into effect and requires the cruise lines to comply.
What this means moving forward is instead of simply displaying the cruise fare price, cruise lines will now have to include several fees that used to be hidden and then added during the booking process. These include applicable taxes, port fees, and other charges that are typically excluded in their advertising. This adjustment doesn’t affect the total price you pay. It simply adds clarity and transparency to the actual price you’ll pay when completing the booking processes.
Hopefully, at the end of the day, enactment of this new law will make cruise shopping a little easier when it comes to comparing apples to apples. However, your best option is to let me wade through all the offers out there and come back to you with a cruise that provides you and your family the absolute best value!
Ready to engage and get the search process going? If so, CLICK HERE to schedule your personal discovery call and I’ll get to work for you!
