All the latest cruise news from the man in the know

Food for thought on Oasis of the Seas

You would expect there to be plenty of watering holes on the world's biggest cruise ship - it's called the Oasis of the Seas, after all. But there will be an equally impressive number of restaurants, as the latest announcement from Royal Caribbean reveals. So many, in fact, that you could be on board for three weeks and eat in a different restaurant every day. As the ship will mostly be sailing seven-night cruises from Fort Lauderdale to the Caribbean when it comes into service at the beginning of December, that means most of the 5,400 passengers will eat in [...]

By John Honeywell| 2017-06-15T16:00:42+00:00 25 June 2009|Cruise News, Cruise Ships|0 Comments

Ship blaze leaves Lorraine homeless

For most of the passengers on board cruise ship Royal Princess when it caught fire last week, the emergency brought a premature end to their holiday. For one passenger, however, the engine-room blaze which crippled the ship meant she was homeless. Lorraine Arzt (left) has lived on board Princess ships almost permanently for more than seven years. When she decided to move to the Royal Princess two years ago, Carnival Cruises boss Micky Arison invited her to act as godmother at a champagne-drenched ceremony in Portofino, Italy. She spends more than £70,000 a year on her own suite, and has [...]

By John Honeywell| 2017-06-15T16:00:42+00:00 23 June 2009|Cruise News|0 Comments

Let down by a cruise ship lift

I have been attuned to all things Celebrity Cruises since spending a fascinating day on board their beautiful new ship Celebrity Equinox at the weekend. So when another reference to Celebrity popped up in one of my regular internet searches, I was drawn to it immediately. I soon began to wish I hadn't bothered. It was an announcement from a Finnish firm to say they had won a contract to supply lifts for two more of Celebrity's Solstice-class ships. Not lifts, of course, but elevators. And, in the words of the press release from KONE Corporation, the company will supply [...]

By John Honeywell| 2017-06-15T16:00:42+00:00 23 June 2009|Cruise Gossip, Cruise News|0 Comments

First meeting of the three Queens

In January last year I stood on the terrace of the Ritz-Carlton hotel at the southern tip of Manhattan to watch a historic meeting of Cunard's three Queens - the veteran Queen Elizabeth 2, the magnificent Queen Mary 2, and their new sister, Queen Victoria. QM2 put on an extra-special display, performing a 360-degree pirouette right in front of us (above). It wasn't quite such a historic event as billed, because a repeat meeting took place a few months later in Southampton. It could never happen again now, because the QE2 has since sailed off to retirement in Dubai. But [...]

By John Honeywell| 2017-06-15T16:00:42+00:00 22 June 2009|Cruise Deals, Cruise News|0 Comments

Equinox makes a spectacular entrance

The Meyer-Werft shipyard at Papenburg in Lower Saxony, north Germany, is surrounded by flat, green fields. Apart from the giant construction sheds – the largest covered dry-docks in the world – the nearest building of any size is a greenhouse as big as a football pitch. It’s 26 miles from the open sea, and possibly the last place in the world you would expect to see a giant 122,000-ton cruise ship gleaming white and bright in the weak June sun. Those 26 miles present a huge logistical problem for the shipbuilders and for Celebrity Equinox. How do you get a [...]

By John Honeywell| 2017-06-15T16:00:42+00:00 20 June 2009|Cruise News, Cruise Ships|0 Comments

Royal Princess cruises cancelled

After the engine room fire on board the cruise ship Royal Princess, owners Princess Cruises have announced that the ship is being taken out of service for repairs. Passengers who were half-way through a 12-night voyage to the Holy Land when the fire broke out as the ship was leaving Port Said in Egypt have been taken to hotels in Cairo, and arrangements are being made to fly them home. The 30,000-ton ship's current cruise, and the next voyage due to sail on June 25 have been cancelled, but there is no news yet on the cause of the fire, [...]

By John Honeywell| 2009-06-20T22:44:44+00:00 20 June 2009|Cruise News, Cruise Ships|5 Comments

Engine-room fire on Royal Princess

A fire broke out in the engine room of the cruise ship Royal Princess (above) as the ship was leaving Port Said in Egypt this evening. The boutique-style ship, carrying 733 passengers and 393 crew, is in the middle of a 12-night Holy Land cruise from Rome to Athens, and was due to dock at Ashdod, in Israel tomorrow, for excursions to Jerusalem. A Princess Cruises spokesman said: "At approximately 8:10 pm local time, an engine room fire broke out aboard Royal Princess, as the ship was departing Port Said, Egypt. "The fire is now extinguished, and the ship is [...]

By John Honeywell| 2017-06-15T16:00:42+00:00 18 June 2009|Cruise News, Cruise Ships|0 Comments

Plain sailing for Oasis sea trials

Royal Caribbean's chairman Richard Fain is back from sea trials for his giant new cruise ship, Oasis of the Seas, and from the report posted on his blog, you would think the only disappointment was that fog denied him a good view of his baby as he flew in by helicopter. There were just 350 workmen on board the ship, which will carry almost 8,000 passengers and crew when it enters service in December. Preliminary speed tests showed that the 220,000-ton ship is comfortably able to surpass its planned cruising speed of 20.4 knots and is capable of travelling about [...]

By John Honeywell| 2017-06-15T16:00:42+00:00 18 June 2009|Cruise News|0 Comments

Double trouble for Falmouth

It's not a good time to be an ambitious cruise port called Falmouth. There are problems for two towns of that name on both sides of the Atlantic. Our very own Falmouth, in Cornwall, sits on one of Britain's finest natural harbours, but if it is to attract more business from visiting cruise ships, it needs a multi-million pound dredging scheme which has already been the subject of a £410,000 environmental impact assessment into work on channel deepening and the construction of a cruise terminal. But the South-West Regional Development Agency has announced that because it has been forced to [...]

By John Honeywell| 2009-06-17T22:01:40+00:00 17 June 2009|Cruise Destinations, Cruise News|0 Comments

Going overboard is no accident

Two passengers have gone overboard from cruise ships in the Gulf of Mexico in the past couple of days. One of them had ignored all the warnings and had slipped after climbing on the ship's rail to get a better view of a pilot boat's approach as the Carnival Inspiration was returning to Tampa, Florida at the end of a four-day cruise to Mexico. How do we know this? Because that's what he told his rescuers who found him clinging to a navigation buoy, before anyone on the 2,000-passenger ship had even reported him missing. US Coast Guard officials said [...]

By John Honeywell| 2009-06-16T23:34:23+00:00 16 June 2009|Cruise News|1 Comment