Cruise Bruise
About Us
December 13, 2008 - Three Year Anniversary Of Cruise Bruise
It has been a busy year at Cruise Bruise. During the past year we saw many new cases, welcomed new partners and made some expansions into new areas, to provide a wider range of services to the visitors.
It was a tough year, one of the toughest in my life. While I had
a long list of new features I wanted to add to enhance Cruise Bruise, it was not to be. Back on July I was diagnosed with Cancer. While that should not have slowed me down, in the conventional sense of the disease simply because of a diagnosis, it did because I became aware of the disease during a fall in a wet parking lot. The pain was sudden and severe.
There is no other way to describe the effect it had on my life, other than to say it floored me on numerous levels. This means I spent almost the entire last half of the year unable to achieve my goals. This fact did not keep me from working on them though, and the expansion at Cruise Bruise went forth, at a much slower pace and has only this week picked up to full steam ahead.
In the past three years Cruise Bruise has received 5.3 million page views. While I know that is not much for a web site like CNN, MSNC or Yahoo, for a tiny narrow nitch web site, with no user forums, it is an amazing amount of traffic. The 5.5 million pages were viewed by 1,112,670 unique visitors. Of those 161,148 comprise the base of visitors who returned to read more.
In the past year, the interest in Cruise Bruise has remained high. There have been 54,443 visitors who return to see what is new of the 416,300 visitors who came to the site, reading a combined 1,648,482 pages.
It was a rough year for the Cruise industry, as well as industry as a whole, worldwide. There was the heartbreaking sinking of the Princess Of The Star with an outrageous loss of life. There was the cyclone battering of the P & O Cruises Pacific Star and the rogue wave battering of P & O Artemis. These are only three incidents during the year that prove the cruise industry will put profits ahead of their precious passenger cargo, every time.
We had criminals aboard cruises being chased down by police and one of the largest illegal drug busts aboard a cruise ship in history with 66 pounds of cocaine seized aboard the P & O Arcadia and seven people arrested.
Had these drugs been caught while boarding the ship, it would be a feather in the cap of the cruise industry, proof that they take the security of their ships seriously. Instead the drugs were discovered during disembarking. This means that every passenger aboard that ship was at high risk with seven drug dealers aboard protecting a very expensive cargo all the way from the Caribbean to the UK.
I am personally appalled that the biggest question on the minds of the media who reported on the case was not, "how in the world did 66 pounds of cocaine get onto a cruise ship without detection by those who are suppose to be protecting the passengers aboard the vessel?"
This single incident proves beyond a doubt that the cruise industry is still doing far too little to protect those who board their ships and that security is slack. If this was the only incident this year, it could be glossed over. But, with four cruise ships targeted by Pirates during the year, three in the past week, it is clear that making money at the risk of those who cruise with the lines, is all that really matters.
While it seems like a no-brainer to me, that you do not plan cruises that take a passenger ship right through a region known as "Pirate Alley", still at least four ships have risked that route and were attacked while one of them was seized by pirates.
I'm not sure what shocks me more, that the cruise lines offer the voyages, or that passengers fill the ships to take them.
In any event, I can't help but think there are still alot of people who know so little about world geography, history and current world events, that there were many people on those cruises having no idea they were cruising through Pirate Alley.
Then, there was the captain of the Athena, who first came on the public address system to proudly announce they had fought off pirates twice, then later chastised passengers for telling friends, family and the media back home about the attacks.
The cover-up was reported by passengers still on the cruise, some who witnessed crew members spraying pirates with fire hoses to keep them off the ship right before the captain announced the ship had come under attack. It is not so much the incidents that take place that make this web site a must read for the public, but the cover-up to hide incidents that takes place so many times.
Of course it does not help when pro-industry cruisers deliberately lie in public forums about the extent of an incident, such as in the case of the P & O Pacific Sun tossed by a large wave. Sometimes, we get lucky, and there is video to show what really happened or that interviews passengers as they get off the ship, giving us a wide range of descriptions of the incident. This was one such case.
Sadly this past spring at least five people went overboard on cruise ships, three passengers and two crew members. It is the loss of life that tugs at the heart strings, the senseless loss of life.
Death shouldn't be the ultimate penalty in the workplace nor should it become the primary topic of travelers returning home, having spent a fortune to create happy family memories. Yet it has been for far too many.
Google Map Pirate attack off Somalia in 2008
