If it hadn’t been for social media, and the threads on Cruise Critic, I would have been at the mercy of an overly friendly shower curtain on our recent cruise on the Norwegian Sun. Thankfully, the community of cruising fans at that site gave us the insight to keep the curtain behaving like a gentleman on a first date.
For the un-initiated cruiser, planning one’s first cruise can be a daunting task. Even though they are an excellent asset throughout the process, peppering your travel agent (TA) with 50 or 100 questions a day for several months doesn’t lead to stellar relationships with the TA. If you push that relationship too far, you may find yourself sailing on a container ship to Somalia, instead of being on board the latest and greatest cruise ship.
Fortunately, the world now has the internet and social media sites like Cruise Critic to aid cruisers, and save your TA from hours upon hours of questions about things they probably don’t know. A good TA will send their clients off to message boards and review sites they’ve come to trust, themselves.
The Cruise Critic message boards are the first place I turn when I begin my cruise vacation. Want to know what a ship or its crew and hotel staff are like? Check the message boards. Want to know what hotels in the port city are like, and which ones are in your price range? Check the message boards.
Message boards themselves can be just as intimidating to wade through, as the actual planning of the trip can seem. No one on the message boards uses their real names, and rarely their own photo for their avatar – the little thumbnail sized icon that provides a visual identity for their posts on the forum.
One of the more fun aspects, however, of using online social media in planning a cruise with social media help is the realization that there are real people behind the screen-names and silly avatar photos.
One of the threads on the Cruise Critic’s forum I spent a few evenings perusing as my wife and I attempted to settle on an excursion off-ship in one of the ports to take, was a thread by a fellow cruiser and Cruise Critic member, “Mitsugirley.” She had recently taken two cruises, one right after another, with the first sailing on the Norwegian Sun, our chosen vessel for the trip.
Her extensive reviews of beaches they visited on their excursions, as well as her photos of the various areas of our ship, gave us some of the insight we needed as we designed our trip. In our case, neither my wife nor I are very enthusiastic about sipping cocktails or beer on a beach. Snorkelling sounds fun, but one of us isn’t a strong swimmer, so I haven’t pushed her to explore that hobby with me.
The key to using a social media resource like Cruise Critic, is to figure out how the entity is structured. Cruise Critic is large enough, and very popular with the cruising vacationers, that the message boards (or forums) are divided into many sections. There is one main board for each of the cruise lines. Want to cruise on Royal Caribbean or Princess? Norwegian or Holland America? There are message boards specific to each one of those cruise lines.
What city is your ship departing from? What’s a good hotel in the area? You’re arriving a day early, or flying out a day after, and want to get insights on activities and eateries in that city? There’s a board for North American Cities – each with their own sub-board such as Miami departures, one for Tampa, one for New Orleans, one for Houston…. What about the destination cities and ports? Don’t worry, there’s a board for those as well, with more sub-boards for each major destination.
Don’t worry, if you’re brave enough to actually post a question as you plan your first cruise adventure, the helpful moderators review the posts – and will move the errant “What hotel should I look at in New Orleans?” posts that you drop into the Royal Caribbean Cruise Line’s section over to the New Orleans board where it’s supposed to go. Or, if you ask such inside of an established thread, another cruiser is sure to provide direction to the appropriate board.
However, based on my own research, conducted across six Caribbean cruises, on five different Norwegian Cruise Line ships, I can seriously recommend that you do your shower curtain research well ahead of time. The one day that I forgot to leave the bath door open showed me that the folks who post to the Norwegian Cruise Line board on Cruise Critic weren’t lying. That shower curtain is a randy little fellow. Without the door to the bath being open, the curtain becomes your new best friend and gets all clingy.
Thanks for the help fellow Cruise Critics! Together, we’ll keep those pesky shower curtains in check.
