Arthur Frommer's Blog, page 45

As A Gracious Bonus to Its Passengers, Royal Caribbean Cruises Will Permit Them to Tour the Inner Workings of Their Ships -- For $150

The press release seemed to announce a stunning change in policy: starting with departures in July (this month), Royal Caribbean Cruises will permit its passengers to tour "behind-the-scenes" of their cruiseships: the bridge, the galleys of the various restaurants, the engine control room, the dressing rooms and backstage areas of its theaters (the "All Access Tour"). What an exciting bonus! But in the last lines of the release came a depressing after-thought. The charge for enjoying such a tour will be $150 per passenger.

Rarely has the growing tendency of cruiselines to "nickel and dime" their passengers been more sharply illuminated. On every cruise I have ever taken, passengers have been offered a free-of-charge tour of the various kitchen galleys on the ship. Now, the insatiable desire for added revenue has made an expanded version of those kitchen galley tours a profit center for the cruiseline.

Turns out that with no such publicity, several other cruiselines -- Norwegian, Princess, Carnival -- have been permitting their passengers to take similar tours of the inner workings of the ship, but for a usual charge of $95 per passenger. Royal Caribbean has upped the ante. There is no limit to commercial greed.

The Canadians Have Again Created An Under-$2K Base Price for Round-Trip Air to South Africa and Six Hotel Nights

For all those travelers who recently cancelled their plans to travel internationally because of high air costs, there's an air-and-land departure to South Africa for only $1,999 per person, valid for departures during the short period from September 13 to 26. Lion World Travel of Toronto (whose clients are heavily from the U.S.) is the tour operator, and can be reached at 800/387-2706 from the U.S. or 800/668-9968 from Canada.

In U.S. dollars, you pay $1,999 per person for: round-trip air on South African Airways between New York or Washington, D.C. and Cape Town, South Africa (via Johannesburg), transfers to your hotel (the President, at Bantry Bay overlooking the sea in Cape Town), four nights with breakfast daily in Cape Town at the excellent President Hotel, then transfers to the airport for a flight to Johannesburg and Pilanesberg National Park for a two-night stay in a luxury lodge, escorted games drives for two days at the park, breakfast daily, dinner daily at the lodge, and return air transportation from Johannesburg to New York or Washington, D.C.

I regard this offer (to which $175 additional needs to be paid for government fees, taxes and fuel surcharge) as special enough to deserve mention in today's blogs.

Mediterranean Cruises in Spacious, Premium Ships, Will Hit New Lows in Price Towards the End of this Year's European Cruising Season

I'll get to those prices (which include round-trip air between New York or Miami and Barcelona, Spain) in just a few paragraphs from now. Let me first discuss the character of the ships where unusual bargain rates (reflecting a crisis in Mediterranean sailing) are now available.

Increasingly, the cruiseships carrying 3,000 and 4,000 passengers fall into two categories. There is first the ship constructed to standard designs, with not much space per passenger, and a tendency to develop crowded facilities and lines. On a day when the ship is simply at sea, and it is raining outside, the overcrowding of inside facilities -- lounges, restaurants and bars -- becomes worrisome, a condition that detracts from the enjoyment of a cruise.

And then there are the 3,000 and 4,000-passenger ships that were designed to offer spaciousness and uncrowded facilities. These take their cue from the Celebrity Solstice launched nearly three years ago, which established a whole new level of comfort in cruising, and which has since been emulated in several other ships all referred to as "Solstice class." I sailed on the dignified Solstice two summers ago and was impressed by the fact that you never stood in line or experienced overcrowded restaurants, bars, or lounges.

(I thought about this difference in ships when a friend recently returned from a cruise of Eastern Canada and New England on a 3,000-passenger ship designed to the old standards. She talked of competing with crowds at the breakfast buffet, having to wait your turn to reach the dishes on display, looking for a place to sit in lounges, standing in line for other facilities. When it rained outside, and the entire complement of passengers needed to stay inside, the crowding was noticeable and unpleasant. She has determined not to cruise again.)

For just slightly more than the lower categories of cruiseships charge, you can cruise in late, late autumn on a ship like the Solstice (or the several ships in the same design category) and enjoy spacious conditions at a remarkably low cost. Because sailings in the Mediterranean have suffered greatly from a diminished demand (too many ships were assigned there, and the discounts have been amazing), you can go for 12-days in the Mediterranean on the Solstice leaving November 4, round-trip from Barcelona, in a balcony cabin, no less, for $1,899, including round-trip air transportation to Barcelona from either Miami or New York. The cruise broker (Travel Themes And Dreams, tel. 877/870-SHIP) even throws in a free night at a four-star Barcelona hotel on November 3, the night before departure. Also included are transfers between airport and hotel, hotel and port, and port to airport in Barcelona at the end of the cruise.

That air-hotel-and-transfers-included-rate has to be the lowest per person charge in memory for a balcony cabin in a premium ship, with round-trip air to the departure port and overnight hotel included. Additional: $199 for government taxes and port charges.

And round-trip air add-ons from cities other than New York and Miami are: $100 from Chicago or Dallas/Ft. Worth, $150 from Los Angeles or San Francisco. The ports visited (apart from Barcelona) in the course of the 12-night cruise: Livorno (Italy), Rome (Civitavecchia), Naples, Chania (Greece), Kusadasi (Turkey), Piraeus (Athens), and Malta (Valetta).

Gate 1 Travel Expands Its Coverage; Now Offering Awesome Rates to Such Far-Off Locales as Thailand, Moscow and India

We've grown accustomed to Gate 1 Travel packages costing an amazing $699-or-so to Central America or the closest of European destinations. But all within the past two weeks, the same tour company has listed deals for an equally amazing $699 to Moscow (airfare and four nights there), $1,199 to Thailand (airfare from Los Angeles and seven nights in Bangkok, Kanchanaburi and Ayutthaya), and $1,149 to India (six nights in New Delhi, Agra and Jaipur) -- prices that you don't normally find to such remote destinations.

Most departures are scheduled for late fall and early winter, and the details are all set forth at Gate1Travel.com or by phoning 800/682-3333. These are exceptional travel opportunities.

One of the Largest Tour Operators to Cuba Has Just Received a License to Immediately Resume Its Trips There

Although the Obama Administration announced several months ago that it would again permit educational, religious or cultural tours to Cuba, it has been slow to issue actual licenses to the various tour operators who have applied to operate specific programs. But though several well-known companies in the field of such tour programs are still awaiting permission, another -- Insight Cuba -- actually received its own go-ahead document last week. Result: An impressive and varied program is immediately available, enabling Americans to visit that Caribbean nation within the next several weeks.

Insight Cuba, a division of Cross Cultural Solutions, claims that it was the largest tour operator to Cuba in the years prior to 2004, when the Bush Administration significantly tightened the regulations governing such trips. It plans, apparently, to be especially active once again, starting within the next several days. On its website, it has listed six different programs and scores of departures that it will begin operating in the days ahead:

Havana & Colonial Trinidad: eight days, seven nights, $2,995-$3,395 per person (the price varying according to whether 4-star or 5-star hotels are used), all-inclusive arrangements (hotel, meals, escorted sightseeing), but not airfare, which is extra.Havana & Scenic Piñar del Rio: eight days, seven nights, $2,495-$2,995 per person, for the same above arrangements and conditions.Bay of Pigs: Havana/Playa Giron/Cienfuegos/ Santa Clara, eight days, seven nights, $2,745-$3,095, same as above.Cuban Music & Arts Experience: Havana/Santiago de Cuba/Bayamo, nine days, eight nights, $3,395-$3,795, same as above.Havana Jazz Experience: with Jazz Times Magazine, eight days, seven nights, $3,395-$3,795, same as above;Weekend in Havana: four days, three nights, $1,695-$1,995, same as above.
As you will see, tours range in cost from a hefty $400 to $500 a day, and airfare -- usually from Miami, by charter flight-must be added to the above prices (at still-to-be-determined rates). When passengers call to book and choose from the several dates of departure per month, they will be advised of the air prices and arrangements available to them which, at the outset at least, will be usually from Miami.

Justifying those substantial costs is the fact that everything is included: all meals, fully-escorted touring, and extensive daily activities from morning till night; moreover, groups are limited to 15 persons per departure, which insures a better-quality experience.

The full details are found in a well-designed website at www.insightcuba.com (tel. 800/450-CUBA). Until licenses are awarded to the many other tour companies that have applied to operate such packages, Insight Cuba's arrangements will set the standard of what's available. It should be noted that Insight Cuba brought some 25,000 passengers to Cuba prior to 2004, when such travel effectively ended, and it will be a major player to that country in the months ahead.

We Limit our Enjoyment of Europe by Failing to Include the Great Cities of Poland in Our Itineraries

Why don't more American tourists go to Poland? I have pondered that question ever since I visited, last week, a number of popular attractions in Warsaw that were thronged with tourists from around the world, but not by more than a handful of visitors from the United States.

Yet Poland is an easily reached country that requires no visa or other paperwork from Americans. Its cost of touring is low, its people unusually friendly, and everywhere you look are castles, palaces, opera houses and theaters, resplendent squares, art galleries, shops, and restaurants with tasty cuisine.

Why haven't these lures been sufficient to attract larger numbers of American tourists? It should be remembered, of course, that Poland was a Soviet satellite until 1989, just 22 years ago, and few Americans visited the countries of the Soviet bloc at that time. Numerous Polish cities were also widely pictured as heavily damaged by bombardments and demolitions in World War II and underwent a lengthy period of reconstruction which few tourists wished to hazard. And finally, Polish history and the Polish language are little known in the United States, where colleges and universities teach French, German, Italian and Spanish but certainly not Polish.

Those problems aside, Poland should today be visited and every American tourist I recently met there was agreeably surprised by the outstanding character of the touring experience. People raved about the historic city of Krakow, the "Old City" (Stare Miasto) of Warsaw, the surprisingly pleasant Gdansk on the Baltic Sea, and numerous other locations of strong cultural and historic interest.

It goes without saying that the history and culture of Europe all make for a great travel experience. They enlarge our lives. And they are found to the same extent in Krakow, Warsaw and Gdansk as in the more familiar European cities.

I Have Just Wound-Up a Four-Day Visit to Europe for the Purpose of Fulfilling a Lifetime-Long Obligation

Several weeks ago, my daughter Pauline mentioned that she would be using the occasion of a two-week trip to Poland, which she had planned for some time, to visit the small town of Lomza, where my long-dead mother and my mother's sisters and brothers had grown up. Neither myself nor any of my cousins had ever visited Lomza, though our childhood was filled with stories of the family's life there prior to the moment, in 1919, when they all fled the war-torn continent of Europe to a refuge in the home of an uncle in Syracuse, New York.

My mother's father, a rabbi in the Yeshiva (school) of Lomza, had died in 1911 of typhus, which he contracted by staying to treat his students with that illness in their residence hall. He left a penniless wife (my maternal grandmother) with six daughters (of which my then-nine-year-old mother was the oldest) and one son. She raised them on a pension from the school of one ruble per week (Lomza being then under Russian control).

In 1918, my grandmother also died, of malnutrition in wartime circumstances, leaving the six daughters and one son as orphans having no relatives living in Europe. My mother, then 16 years old, shepherded the entire group to Warsaw, where the U.S. embassy was then besieged with desperate people clamoring for visas to the United States. She avoided the crowd out front by climbing through a backyard window into the embassy, where she fell to the knees of an official, crying, and begging him to grant her group of children a visa. He complied, and my mother, then 16, took the entire group of younger siblings to a German seaport, where they boarded a ship with money from an uncle living in Syracuse, New York. And thus they sailed to Ellis Island in New York, and the haven of America.

 In Syracuse, my mother met another refugee from the wars and oppression of Europe, my father (a prisoner of war in Russia throughout the first world war). They had each joined the "New Americans Club" of Syracuse, New York. They married, eked out a bare living in the ensuing years of economic depression, and lived to attend the graduation of my sister with an advanced degree from New York University and my own graduation from the Yale University Law School. Talk about the American dream!

By fleeing from Europe, instead of staying in Lomza, they enabled us all to escape the Holocaust. Every single member of a large Jewish community in Lomza was either shot to death by members of the German army in a forest outside the town, or buried alive there, or shipped to the death camp of Treblinka. This history of the people they left behind in Lomza was constantly related to me and to my cousins as we grew up.

When Pauline told me she was planning to visit Lomza, I felt that I should be with her, even though I had only four days-or-so for the entire trip. On Monday evening of this week, I flew to Warsaw, devoted most of Tuesday and Wednesday to seeing that large city, then drove to Bialystok, Poland on Wednesday afternoon to meet Pauline and one of her daughters (my granddaughter, Beatrix, 8 years old) in Bialystok.

And this morning, Thursday, we drove for an hour and half to nearby Lomza, which is near the border of Belorussia. We picked up a map at the city hall, toured the former Jewish ghetto from which those residents of Lomza had been sent to their deaths (none of them survived the war), saw the former Jewish hospital of Lomza, surveyed various plaques commemorating the life of that now-disappeared community, walked through the "old" Jewish cemetery of 19th century persons, and then undertook a long, long walk through a residential area to the hidden-away "new" Jewish cemetery, an area of headstones marking the graves of persons who died in the early 1900s.

And after searching for nearly two hours amidst massive piles of weeds and overturned and tilted tombs, we discovered the graves of my grandfather (dead in 1911) and grandmother (1918), both of their headstones being heavily damaged by vandals but totally and precisely recognizable. And there, I delivered a short speech to them of my gratitude for their lives, and also, staunch atheist though I am, I recited as much as I could remember of the Hebrew prayer for the dead, the Kaddish.

It has been a very emotional day for me, but one I am so grateful to have had. And I am so indebted to my daughter and granddaughter for making the trip, and thus initiating my own decision to go with them.

We returned late in the day to modern Bialystok, where Polish young people in the most modern dress throng the main city square and converse with great animation about the latest happenings in Poland (which should be visited by far more Americans than now go there).

Tomorrow I return to New York, after a short four days abroad -- but what days these have been!

I've Just Spent a Day and a Half in the Totally Reconstructed, Awesome City of Warsaw

I have just completed a fast (36 hours) but intensive stay in Warsaw, Poland, a large, dynamic and prosperous world capital that few Americans visit. With its 43 theaters with live productions, its 32 museums, and countless architectural highlights, it reminds us of the enormous cultural heritage and remarkable cultural life of Europe. But it is fully as fascinating for its evidence of the ability of human beings to overcome the worst ravages of monstrous brutality.

[image error] Photo Caption: Old Town, Warsaw.Kaushik Basu/Frommers.com Community

Some 10% of Warsaw was bombed and demolished in the earliest days of World War II. Another large part of this sprawling urban capital (its large Jewish ghetto created by the Nazy army, into which Warsaw's large population of Jews, some 340,000 person, were stuffed) was obliterated during the heroic but futile uprising of the Jewish Ghetto in 1943. And finally, a remaining part of the city was deliberately demolished -- systematically detonated and demolished by the Germans -- in the immediately aftermath of the Warsaw Uprising by local Polish forces in the last months of the war.

When the war ended in 1945, Warsaw was almost totally in ruins. And the Poles proceeded to rebuild. Over the next 50 years, they painfully reconstructed the entire city (and continue to build today; the city is dotted with cranes and construction sites, and one of the largest new buildings slated for completion in 2013 is a Museum of Jewish History and Culture).

As you wander through Warsaw, as I have over the past 36 hours, you pass every conceivable type of world architecture. You have areas as modern as in any prosperous U.S. city. You have other areas dotted with the sterile buildings and apartment houses of the Stalinist era of Soviet Russia (Poland was a Soviet-dominated country from 1945 to 1989). One building, the city's tallest, is a 40-story-high Palace of Science and Culture designed to woefully outdated Soviet specifications, where you can ascend to an observation area on the 30th floor (admission charge 20 zlotys, about $8) for a panoramic view of the city.

And most enticing, you can go to the rebuilt Old City (Stare Miasto) of Warsaw, the original city within its medieval walls, where every single building was carefully reconstructed to the exact original, ancient design. So successfully was this done that the enchanting area -- a huge market square surrounded by narrow streets of medieval and renaissance design -- has been named a UNESCO World Heritage Sight. It is full of European tourists, which it serves from dozens of sidewalk cafes and craft shops, a memorable excursion into the past, fully as fascinating as the Grand Place of Brussels or similar squares in Rome or Rothenburg-ob-der-Tauber.

Everywhere you look are monuments to the greats of Polish history: Frederic Chopin, whose several associated-buildings, statues and churches are fronted by stone benches containing a button that you press to hear a Chopin melody; Marie Curie, the first and only woman to receive two Nobel prizes in two different fields; Jan Paderewski; countless others. You pass Royal Palaces, a Castle, a Cathedral destroyed in the war and then also rebuilt to its original specifications; and too many re-constructed masterworks of architecture to be named. All this is in a large, sprawling city that would take several days to fully examine.

I was especially touched by the comments of several official guides, all in their 20s, who obviously had not personally experienced the German depredations of World War II or the difficult life under the Soviets in the post-war years. I was especially alert to the obvious effort they made to explain the especial horrors to which the giant Jewish population had been subjected before they were almost totally liquidated. "This is part of our history," they told me, "and cannot be passed over; we must emphasize these horrors and how they came about". They also drew my attention to several Jewish festivals that were scheduled for the remainder of this year.

I can't explain why so few American tourists go to Warsaw; it more than repays a visit. It tells you something about human beings. And it is the largest city on earth to be completely rebuilt after its almost complete destruction.

Tomorrow: Bialystok and Lomza, Poland. The whirlwind tour continues.

Greetings from Poland, from Where This Blog Will Emanate the Rest of the Week

I have recently arrived at my hotel in central Warsaw, after an overnight flight on LOT Polish Airlines from Newark. And because I'm besotten (the right word?) with fatigue from an 8 and 1/2 hour flight, and also have very few new observations to make (other than that Warsaw continues to evolve as a modern, clean, and seemingly-prosperous city), I'll limit this particular post to the repeat discovery that money-changers at airports are taking an unconscionable portion of your funds.

At Warsaw's modern Frederic Chopin International, money firms were taking a cool 20% of all transactions. While the Polish zloty is officially exchanged at 2.78 to the dollar, one receives about 2.20 zlotys to the dollar at the money-changing kiosks here. Smart travelers will set out on their trip with the least amount of currency possibe, and will then replenish their cash from ATM machines found outside every bank. And with that portentous advice, I'll now go to sleep. More tomorrow from Bialystok, the real target of this trip (explanation in a later blog post), to which I'll now be proceeding by train.

Do You Have a Right to Complain When You Discover That Your Table-Mates Paid $25,000 Less Than You Did For a Cruise?

A listener to the weekly radio program on travel presented by my daughter and myself ( www.wor710.com/frommer-travel-show ) weighed in this past weekend with a serious complaint. She and her husband had booked a 101-day around-the-world cruise on a glamorous ship, for which they paid $80,000 (that comes to about $400 per person per day). They made the booking through a cruise discounter that I had highly recommended in earlier broadcasts. When they sat down for dinner the first night of the cruise, they discovered that the couple sitting alongside had paid $55,000 for the same cruise in identical accommodations -- i.e., about $275 per person per day.

And she was furious that the company recommended by me had failed to get the lower price for herself and her husband. She blamed me.

In my defense, I pointed out that I have never claimed that any cruise broker always gets the best prices for every cruise. Or that cruise prices are the same at every moment prior to the date of the cruise. The cruise industry is a dynamic place in which cruiseships use every marketing tool to fill their ships. When they discover that a particular, imminent departure still has, for instance, 20 empty cabins, they reduce the price for those cabins on their own direct sales to passengers and release those cabins to favored cruise brokers to sell at radically-reduced rates.

Years ago -- in the pre-Internet travel agency days -- one of the most elegant cruiselines was well-known for "dumping" (quietly, almost secretly) its unsold cabins at a sharply-reduced price to White Travel Service in Connecticut (I was at that time friendly with the then-chief-executive of White Travel, and learned of his relationship with that line). White Travel would proceed to offer these advantageous prices to their own favored clientele, arousing the sharp anger of local competitors who could not get the same price. In effect, the cruiseline greatly angered these competitors, but achieved its purpose of selling off unsold cabins at a bargain price while continuing to sell similar cabins at a far greater price elsewhere in the United States.

People booking an around-the-world cruise on a glamorous ship, for $80,000, should never have relied simply on the quote they received from one cruise broker. They should have looked at the prices offered by several. While this tactic might not have gotten them a $55,000 price, they might nevertheless have saved some money. They might even have used Cruise Compete ( www.cruisecompete.com ), which circulates requests for space on a particular sailing to as many as 300 different cruise agencies, which are then invited to bid for the business by revealing the cut-rate price that they can get for that departure.

When you buy travel, expensive travel, you should shop around. And the fact that cruiseship cabins are sold at different prices through different outlets should come as no surprise to anyone.