Eight out of 10 surveys talk rubbish

Opinion polls and surveys – don’t you just love them? Anyone with a new product, service or website to promote does so with pseudo-scientific research which has little merit other than to draw attention to their particular sphere of activity.
Take the recently-launched UK website which compares cruise fares and helps potential passengers get the best deal.
Is it necessarily good for them to establish that people on cruises knock back more alcohol than when they are on land-based holidays? No matter, it’s a talking point, so we get detailed statistics about the number of passengers (44 per cent) consuming between five and eight drinks a day and the 13 per cent who can force down more than eight.
That, by the way, leaves 43 per cent who do not drink alcohol, or who have fewer than four drinks a day. That’s a full 100 per cent – no “don’t knows” among this crowd of 1,198 people.
When asked if they drank more when at sea, 76 per cent said “yes” compared with 13 per cent for whom the holiday destination made no difference to their consumption.
There’s no word, by the way, on whether the remaining 11 per cent drank more on land, or just didn’t know.
Cocktails are apparently the most popular drink on board ships – presumably because they are unlikely to feature on the blackboard at the King’s Arms or the Red Lion back home. Champagne comes next, and there are quite a few who say they drink nothing else while cruising.
Most of those drinking more at sea said they did so because they felt safer. No fear of going overboard for them. In fact no fear of anything. They’re kings of the world.
I’m not sure whether Danielle Fear, managing director of CruiseCompare feels safer though, because she admitted: “It is slightly concerning that some of the respondents drink as many as eight or more alcoholic drinks each day.”
Perhaps the penny was beginning to drop about the sort of person using her website to select their holidays.
Where I part company with the survey and its findings is the point at which they said the 1,198 people questioned had been on both cruise and land holidays in the past three years.
I doubt if any of those had been to Faliraki – which I drove through today en route from Rhodes town to Lindos. The cleaned-up resort used to be notorious for its heavy-drinking teenagers, as is the Spanish resort which featured in a British national newspaper last week as a result of drunken students carousing through its streets.
“Only eight drinks a day? Is that all? We could do that before breakfast, if we ever got up for breakfast,” would be an expected response. Eight shots would be just the prelude to an evening’s descent into oblivion.
Coming soon: A new survey reveals that the average waistband shrinks by two inches during a two-week cruise. And prolonged exposure to the sun leads to a reddening of the skin among 75 per cent of holidaymakers.