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.