In the latest video on his Tips for Travellers YouTube channel, cruise ship expert, Gary Bembridge set out six warnings to all passengers after he spoke to crew members.
Rule breaking
When it comes to rule breaking Gary said that there are three areas that particularly irritate the crew. The most important of which is not becoming a ‘pool deck chair hog’ as he says: “Pool deck chair hogs put crew in an impossible situation. Most cruises I’ve been on there are always people reserving loungers by leaving items on them in the prime pool locations before disappearing, sometimes for many hours.”
While most cruise lines have rules saying that crew will remove items on loungers left unoccupied after some time. It drives the crew crazy becuase often if they remove people’s items, they get aggrevation from passengers whose items are removed.”
Meanwhile, he also noted that passengers who don’t follow the dress code on board, as well as parents who don’t correctly monitor their children’s behaviour, can get passengers into hot water with the crew.
Hand washing
He also highlighted the importance of maintianing good hygiene on baord, as to stop the outbreak of any viral infections that can not only have a knock on affect to fellow passengers, but also the crew members who will be tasked with extra jobs on board as a result.
He said:”If it spreads through the ship, and it causes an outbreak, it creates an enormous amount of extra work on top the crews existing duties. Because they are then allocated extra cleaning tasks, they might have to start serving food in the buffet, they have to provide more room service for people isolating and there’s extra duties for cleaning for people who are isolating.”
Removing gratuities
Another key thing to understand when travelling on board a cruise ship is understanding gratuities. He claims that the paying of gratuities to the crew is often misunderstood.
He added:”Another thing that drives crew crazy is when passengers remove gratuities as it’s a real misunderstanding about what role they play. Most cruise lines that don’t include gratuities in the fare ouhgt to add gratuities to your passenger on board accounts. But, if you pay attention you’ll see they’re now not called gratuities these days, but things like crew service charge, crew appreciation fee, things like that.”
Timing
Another area of annoyance for crew members, he says, is the punctuality of guests, or rather the lack of it in some circumstances. He said that a failure to be on time or take too long on certain parts of the cruise can ‘simply mess up their job’.
Complaints
Whilst talking about passenger complaints, he said: “Crew find it frustrating when passengers have issues and don’t raise them with them first to solve, but instead raise it with their supervisor or more senior crew, because they think more will get done and quicker.”
This angers crew as: “First of all, if you raise it with them, they have a chance to solve it, but secondly if it gets escalated they’re more likely to get into trouble.
Language
He also said that language and the crew’s ability to understand various different accents is something that cruisers should be aware of when talking to staff.
He said: “Most crew we interact with, we have to remember come from countries where English is not their first language. Not only do they have to learn and work in English, but also, importantly they have deal with understanding what cruisers are asking or saying when we all have a wide range of accents, which can actually be really, really challenging.”