CruiseCritic.Com Hoax
Poster Quotes Carnival Cruise Line Press Release
August 24, 2007
Pro-cruise industry website, CruiseCritic.com, long revered as the place to get pro-industry news, crossed the line this week when one of their posters quoted what was portrayed as a Carnival Cruise Line press release saying that Mobile, Alabama was going to become a home port for a new, larger cruise ship, the Carnival Triumph.
People in Mobile were getting excited, and city officials were wondering why this news hadn't come to them directly from Carnival Cruise Lines, instead of through the grapevine.
The press release looked quite official, and had people, many from Mobile, Alabama contacting the cruise line asking for more information about the planned addition to the Port Of Mobile.
The only problem is, according to Carnival Cruise Lines, there was no press release, and there are no plans to add a cruise ship, or bring a larger replacement cruise ship to Mobile.
The press release said that Carnival would replace the 1,452 passenger Holiday with its 2,758-passenger Triumph in October 2008. It contained a "quote" from Sheila Gurganus, who directs operations at the Alabama Cruise Terminal at Mobile, and other "quotes" from Carnival executive Vicki Freed.
Carnival's Vance Gulliksen, said the calls came quickly last week. He checked out the web site, and then he called cruisecritic.com and asked that it be removed, indicating that it was a hoax. "Right now we have no plans for a second ship or a larger ship to replace the Holiday.", says Gulliksen.
Carolyn Brown, editor of cruisecritic.com, said she's seen a rumor posted on a message board be rejected by a company, then later be confirmed.
"We do see erroneous reports and rumors on message boards. We have an entire staff that monitors those things," Gulliksen said.
If that is the case, in this latest hoax, with Carnival claiming the posting was untrue, if the opposite was true, that would mean Carnival couldn't be trusted to tell the truth, and would bring all other Carnival public statements into question. Only time will tell who is right.
The 'phoney' press release 'apparently' was taken from an August 14, 2007 Carnival Cruise Line press release on a ship change in Jacksonville, Florida.
We here at Cruise Bruise have also seen hoaxes at Cruise Critic, with passengers claiming to see a person go overboard, where no overboard could be verified with the cruise line or the U.S. Coast Guard. Postings at CruiseCritic.com should be taken as rumor, requiring further verification to become fact.
However, you can count on one thing from Cruise Critic. Those who register for the community to post or read posts in their forums get a constant flow of cruise offers unless they opt out.
When we registered with them many months ago, we were bombarded with emails that only contain promotions for cruises, no news at all, at least several times a week, sometimes daily, until we opted out. The regularity with which the emails arrive becomes so annoying, opting out is mandatory, in our opinion.
Cruise Bruise on the other hand is a spam-free website. We have no mailing lists, and never send bulk mailings for any reason. We allow our visitors to subscribe to our free rss feed, that is a summary of the last 15 cases we have added to the website, and which has no advertising at all.
