Brenda Moran
Cruise Ship Passenger Blacklisted
Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines Attacks After Bad Review
Cruise ship forums have been a place where passengers from the past, connect with passengers from today and the future. Passengers post reviews of cruises, and they help each other wade through the murky waters of passengers' contracts. Now, in a new turn of events, they are the stomping grounds of passengers about to be blacklisted.
I have said before, and will likely say many more times, the forums are full of Pumper's. "Pumper's" are industry professionals and profiteers. This may include cruise industry employees who work for the corporate office, travel agents, tour guides, and those friends, family members, neighbors and co-workers who organize a group of cruisers, so they can cruise free of charge. For these people, every cruise is a great cruise.
They can sail in hurricane churned seas, with 15% of the passengers and crew aboard puking from Norovirus, can get locked in their cabin and left there for half a day, can miss two ports of call, have items stolen from their luggage the last night of the cruise, and miss their flight home when the ship returns late because of engine failure and it was a "fabulous cruise".
These are people, who if drunk or doped up enough, could have an excellent time sitting atop an asteroid headed for immediate contact with earth. To some degree, I admire them. It must be nice to be so stress-free, that when everything is going to hell in a hand-basket, you can smile in the face of disaster, and live it up, turn around, and take a little more where the sun doesn't shine.
This is where I need to stop, and give fair credit where credit is due. Not all non-complainers are drunks or druggies. You have to look at things from a different prospective. For some, the cruise is an adventure. They book it and are up for whatever comes their way. The wilder the ride, the better they like it, because the after-cruise stories are going to be outrageous for all those who come near enough to hear the tale. You just can't pay enough for outrageous dinner party fodder.
Collectively, I call these cruise industry forum squatters, "Pumper's". These people have made it their job to pump up the industry, no matter what, in the online forums and anywhere potential cruisers might stop to read about the industry. It is all about the money. Pumper hang-outs are not a good source for finding out about the dark side of the industry. They are however a good place to find a great deal on a cruise, their pages plastered with a half dozen to a dozen cruise industry ads and since that is their only real agenda, they protect the cultivating fields at all costs.
But, among the Pumper's, there is a sub-group, I call the Cyber Rambo's. These are forum squatters who have one agenda, and one agenda only, to disagree with everybody and anybody on any and all topics. The love to make people cry, watch them tuck their tale between their legs and run away never to return again. They rejoice in other's grief and they tend to travel in packs, much like wolves on the hunt.
These forums are a great place to see a dog pile. A dog pile results when a poster makes a negative comment about something that happened on a cruise, perhaps a cruise they only heard about, and the 'Regular Pumper's' jump the poster and batter them verbally, until somebody at admin breaks up the personal attacks, shuts down the thread or at minimum deletes offending posts. My guess is alot of the attacks in these forums are fueled by logic, hours ago lost to excessive consumption of alcohol and/or illegal drugs.
The really sad thing about the evolution of the web, has been major news web sites adding comment areas to the bottom of their lead stories. Those threads are full of cyber rambo's, that not only disgrace the society they live in, but the web site that allowed the posting of hateful personal opinions.
Now to the point. Brenda Moran is an avid cruiser. She and her husband Gerald had taken six cruises with Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines (RCCL). Of the six, there were no perfect cruises, no surprise there. We do not live in a perfect world, and the overall work ethic around the world has taken a major dive in the past two decades. The problems were not 'little' things, they were major and Brenda would give honest reviews, both good and bad, unlike the Pumpers.
On one occasion Mr. Moran was locked out on the balcony of their cabin, when the door jammed and he couldn't get back in. That took several hours for the crew to resolve. Several hours of cruise fun missed by Mr. Moran. This is somewhat of a common problem on cruises, as the walls heave and bind on openings while the ship bounces from wave to wave.
On another occasion, the toilet malfunctioned in a Radiance of the Seas cabin, resulting in the restroom floor being covered with sewage, which then spilled onto the cabin floor. After the crew cleaned the carpeting, it still stunk and the couple had to leave the balcony door open in 40F ° weather for the rest of their cruise.
This too is rather common problem and is the worst possible thing that can happen to the occupants of a single cabin, other than bed bugs. On a scale of 1-10, it rates a 10 for failure of the host.
All along, good customers the Morans, RCCL continued to woo them, and offered compensation for their troubles, and rightly so. But, all that changed when Brenda Moran posted her latest review on Cruise Critic, as she always does, post-cruise, and a bunch of back-biting, hate mongers began to complain to the Cruise Critic admin, and went so far as to call RCCL corporate to complain there.
These Cruise Critic posters apparently felt that compensation was an outrage, and getting a $500 plus 20% discount offer from the line amounted to heresy. The sewage problem was just the cost of cruising for these dark hearts, and was undeserving for this level of compensation. In my view, this was a 100% compensation scenario, nothing less. It was an insult for RCCL to offer so little.
It is not a wonder, there are so many conflicts in the world, when people have such warped judgement, as to want to dictate to others how much suffering and loss of enjoyment they endured due to sewage contamination of their cabin? What kind of people live like farm pigs, finding this type of accommodation perfectly acceptable? I shudder to think.
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