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10 Biggest Cruise Rip Offs To Watch Out For
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Jan 28, 2025
Discover the 10 biggest cruise rip offs that you need to watch out for, and tips on how to avoid or overcome them. There are a number of things that, if you are not careful, you could find you are being ripped off and spending too much on. These are the 10 main rip offs that I have seen and watch out for when I go cruising. SUPPORT THE CHANNEL BY: Buying my Cruise T-shirts: http://bit.ly/TFTStore Booking your next cruise with CRUISEDIRECT.COM: http://bit.ly/TFTBookCruise WATCH THESE POPULAR RECENT VIDEOS: 10 Cabins to Avoid: https://youtu.be/PgTGLma919A European River Cruise Watch-Outs: https://youtu.be/oqhz54wStyk 5 Cruises To Avoid: https://youtu.be/CNiPzK4IRWA Alaska Cruise Need-to-Knows: https://youtu.be/Tn7dpNw5kSI Things Cruise Lines Don’t Want You to Know: https://youtu.be/cs5UKha9ALc Rules Passengers Break Most: https://youtu.be/djZLZ3XV_f0 Things You Can’t Do On A Cruise Any More: https://youtu.be/zas6F4wMD0Q Should You Pay Cruise Gratuities: https://youtu.be/QBYzqxXjEXQ Gary Bembridge's Tips For Travellers aims to help you make more of your precious travel time and money on land and when cruising the oceans or rivers of the world. To help you, in every video I draw on my first-hand tips and advice from travelling every month for over 20 years and 74 cruises to date. Follow Tips For Travellers on:
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0:00
What are the 10 biggest rip-offs on a cruise
0:03
And how can you avoid them, get around them, or reduce them
0:08
I'm Gary Bembridge. This is another of my tips to travellers. I'm currently cruising. I'm here in my cabin
0:13
And I've been thinking about the things that cruises get ripped off the most on a cruise
0:19
starting with this one. Wi-Fi is a huge area where you can get ripped off
0:25
Wi-Fi is generally not free on a cruise, and it can cost you any way between 40 cents
0:29
to 75 cents or sometimes even more per minute. Now you can buy various packages to
0:35
help reduce the cost but you can easily be spending per person for one device
0:40
$200, 300 on a seven-night cruise. So how do you get around that? Well first of all
0:46
really think about whether you need to be connected. If you're on a very port
0:49
intensive cruise you can use Wi-Fi when you're on land and just switch off
0:54
when you're actually on the ship overnight. Or you could perhaps choose increasingly one of the cruise lines that are offering Wi-Fi within the fair
1:02
So Virgin Voyages, Oceania, Saga cruises that I'm on now, they include Wi-Fi within
1:08
the package. It tends to be though as you go more and more premium. So really watch
1:12
out Wi-Fi could add many hundreds of dollars onto the cost of your cruise. Also very
1:18
importantly is make sure that when you are on the cruise that you switch off
1:22
data roaming so you don't get any surprise charges from your provider. Wi-Fi can be a massive
1:28
rip-off. We all expect on land it to be free and available but it's not on a cruise
1:32
So really carefully look at the prices and make sure that you are minimizing getting
1:38
ripped off when it comes to Wi-Fi. The second area to think about is excursions
1:44
You can easily be spending $100, $200 per person per excursion. That can mount up to
1:49
many hundreds of dollars across the course of a week-long or longer cruise
1:54
There are loads and loads of alternatives to cruise. line excursions, which will always tend to have a slight premium in them, partly because they
2:02
do guarantee that the ship will wait for you if the excursions are running late
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I like to look at a couple of things to avoid paying a lot of money on excursions
2:11
First of all, I look wherever there are for hop-on hop-off buses
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I'm a big fan of hop-off buses. They often come to the cruise port, they're relatively expensive if you get some commentary
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It's going to take you to all of the key sites. Also you could look at third-party providers
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They'll often provide the same tours as the cruise line. be normally much cheaper and also have smaller groups. The other great thing is tours
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by locals. There are many many companies set up which will have locals that live, work
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have grown up in an area and they will take you around often for free and you just pay then
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a gratuity as a thanks for those tours. You can find all of those online if you just search
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things like tours by locals and the port that you're going to. A key thing when you are
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looking at cruise excursions to avoid being ripped of is take a look at just how close places are to the port You can often find that some of the excursions are very easily walkable
3:06
from the port and there's actually a big premium by being taken by the cruise line there
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If you want things like a day at the beach, take a look at things like resort passes
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You can often find them online either directly through the hotel site or again you can just
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search for resort passes in the place you're going and you'll find you can often go to the same resort
3:26
or similar resorts for significantly less money than you're going to be paying the cruise line
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So definitely take a look at different alternatives. You may end up that you decide you want to stick with the cruise line because you like the security
3:37
of knowing that the cruise ship will wait for you if the excursion runs late
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which all the other options, the cruise line does not guarantee they will wait for you
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The third area for me that I think does verge on the rip-off area is spa treatments
3:53
Spar treatments on cruise ships seem to me to be. incredibly expensive for what they are, even when you compare them with premium prices in places
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like London, for example. So one of the ways to avoid that is either not go to the spa at all
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or wait until a port day. You'll find huge reductions on spa treatments on port days because less
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people go. You can often get 40% or more of a spa treatment. So if you do really want to go to the
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spa and you find the costs too high, then make sure you go to port-day. Also be really, really careful
4:26
that you're not going to get on top of that charge a gratuity charge. So you'll find
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many cruise lines will charge you what I think of very high prices for the SPAR treatment
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but they will then add on 18% gratuity charges. And also the people doing the treatments
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are incentivized to sell your products. So they do quite a hard sell at the end. So one
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of the things I find with SPAR treatments is in some ways they're almost stress line in the sales because they are pretty expensive and you have that upsell. So
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make sure if you don't want to be ripped off, you're really clear with that you don't want to buy any products and go on port days. Another area that I do personally
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think is crazy are photographs. Photographs taken by the ship photographers are pretty expensive to buy and you can get around that by taking your own
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photographs, particularly if you wait till a port day, perhaps down the ship when the ship's
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quieter and you basically go around and take your own photographs, even if you don't
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have a Zootie camera. Bear in mind that mobile phones have incredibly good cameras
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So actually take your own photographs, spend some time going around, particularly as I said on a port day when it's quieter, and do your own photographs
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Because buying the photographs from the ship can be incredibly expensive. Now you might want to splash out on one because you want a picture with the captain, for example
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on formal night. But it is really, really expensive. Take your own photographs
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look at the locations that they're using around the ship, and go there when the ship is quiet and take the same photographs for much
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much less. Nothing, just time. Another big group of I believe is bottled water Now this is actually starting to evolve because instead of cruise lines selling plastic bottles they moving more and more to refillable bottles So hopefully over time this will disappear However bottle water is really
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expensive and you can buy packages and spend a lot of money. The water itself on a cruise ship
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is perfectly drinkable. A lot of people worry about whether they can drink the water on a cruise
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ship. It's perfectly 100% high-grade water that you can drink. If you're worried because you
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think you might not like the taste, why don't you take sort of little sachets of flavoring
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and have flavored water. That way you could probably even save on sodas. On the positive side
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as cruise lines look more and more on how they can reduce the use of plastics, they're increasingly
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giving you refillable water, which is the water that you can be drinking anyway out of your
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tap or some of the water stations around a ship. Bottle water, big rip off in my view
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when you can drink the water on the ship. If you travel quite a lot by yourself
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make sure that you don't get ripped off by the single supplements
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If you go on many cruise lines, they will charge you 50% to 100% surcharge for single occupancy of a double cabin
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There's no need to do that because increasingly cruise lines are launching ships with solar cabins
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So, for example, I'm on Saga. 20% of their cabins, 109 cabins, are solo cabins
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All the big new ships coming are increasingly having solar cabins. However, if the cruise line that you're a big fan of doesn't have solo cabins
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sign up for or ask your travel agent to watch out for single supplement deals
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So you'll find a lot of the cruise lines on specific sailings will slash right down to 20%, 10
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or sometimes even no supplements for solo travelers. So that's what I particularly do on some of the cruises that I book when I know I'm going to be going to be going to be going to be paying
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nothing or very low supplements. There's no need to pay more. Of course, if you're very clear that you want to go on a very specific setting or a very
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specific ship at a specific time, you are going to be ripped off in my view by the big surcharge
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By being clever, you can avoid that. Also avoid the onboard shops
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Onboard shops are not going to be the cheapest around. If you are coming on a cruise and you see things perhaps in the shops that you want, do a
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search and check what it's going to cost you back home. or even if you're flying home and going through duty-free
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On-board shops generally, in my experience, are not particularly good value, no matter what you're buying
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So actually be really, really cautious. And if you are looking to buy something, check even in the ports what the price of those things are
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If there's something in the shops that you see that you really, really want, wait for the sales
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Pretty much on every single cruise towards the end, there will be sales and special offers
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particularly if the shops aren't hitting their targets. So don't buy things at the beginning of the cruise
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wait until the special offer and sales on If you unfortunate to feel ill or poorly and it not a massive big emergency try and avoid going to the medical centre if you possibly can Medical center on board ships are pretty expensive because it a service that they
9:08
providing and also the drugs that they sell if prescribed anything are pretty expensive
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What I would suggest you do is try and go to one of the private walk-in centers on land
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Most of these ports that you're going to call on are used to having lots and lots of visitors
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and tourists. And normally within easy accessibility of the port, you can probably easily find a walk-in
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emergency center that's going to cost you much less money and the prescriptions
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alignment cost you much less. Again, that's really more if it's not a massive big
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emergency but you can spend a lot of money using medical center on board a cruise ship
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Many cruise lines have art auctions and sell art and they sell a lot of art. However
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it's something to be extremely cautious about and avoid. First of all, because it's an
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auction process and it's also very likely that you're going to end up getting caught up
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and bidding too much. But generally speaking, all the stuff that I've read and looked at is
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the general view is that art sold on board ships is not great value and you could easily
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overspend and a lot of that is because of that whole auction process where you can
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someone to get out of kilter between what things are really worth and what you end up paying
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for them. So avoid art auctions, wait till your home, do your research, buy art at home
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The other area which I think you can easily be ripped off and end up spending money that
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you don't need to spend is in the whole area of coffee, tea, juices and ice cream
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All of those are available for nothing, included within your fare, up in the Lido buffet restaurant
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informal dining, whatever it's called. You normally will find that you're going to get
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coffee, it's often in machines with ground beans, you're going to get specialty teas to choose
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from, they'll often have juice machines up there, and they will normally have ice cream
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even if it's not available to serve during all sort of meal. times you'll have ice cream. A lot of ships will have specialty coffee shops, tea shops
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they'll have gelato shops and they will sell you premium juices from the bars. There's
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no need to do that. If you just head up to the buffet, you're going to get all of those for
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free. So don't spend money and don't be ripped off by paying for stuff that you've already
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paid for within your fare. The way to avoid being ripped off on a cruise is to look at every
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single thing that's not included in your fare as a possible area to be ripped off in
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Stuff that's not included in your fare is seen by the cruise line as revenue generation
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They're going to try and get as much money as possible from the passengers on board the ship
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So that's the area where you could end up spending too much being ripped off
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So look every single time that you spend money on something that's not included in your
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fare, approach with caution, say, can I avoid this, can I reduce it, or can I get around
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And often the answer is yes. If you found all these tips really helpful, I'd love if you
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watched another one of my many cruising tips and advice videos. So why don't you watch
12:02
another one of those right now
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