Cruise Bruise Blog
October 2, 2009
October 2, 2009
Royal Caribbean Cruise Line's Employee Blasts Cruise Bruise With F Bomb
I kind of feel sorry for the cruise lines, just a bit. They have people going over the rails, both passengers and crew, it is hard to figure out who jumped, who got pushed and who got blown overboard.
Naturally, the cruise lines say the person jumped and naturally we say until we see video footage proving the person jumped, we just don't know what happened. We have proof some have jumped, others have been thrown over the rail and still others were blown over the rail. Sometimes we have witnesses, survivors and/or video to tell us what really happened. Other times we have confessions.
No matter how the person went overboard, the cruise lines take it on the chin. But, what if the cruise lines knew in advance that a person was planning to jump and were able to stop that person from boarding? You would think that would a perfect solution for everybody even remotely related to the case, including the potential suicide victim who was prevented from jumping.
From a financial point of view, the single entity in line to benefit most though is the cruise line. They don't have to circle for hours, miss ports, and have passengers screaming that they want refunds and adjustments because ports and excursions were missed.
A worst case scenario is having a person jump on the last night of the cruise, shortly before the ship was to enter port. Passengers are going to miss flights going home and maybe miss work as well.
It was only days ago I alerted, with the help of Maritime Attorney James Walker, the cruise lines around the world that there was a credible threat of a jumper. The photo was distributed and we feel that we did everything within our power to avoid this unfortunate decision becoming a reality. Along the way, the cruise lines were protected, as they got a heads-up of the planned jump.
Given all this, imagine my surprise only a few days later to get an email from a person claiming to be from Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines, who was irate over a typo on my site. I admit I made the typo, and it was not done with malice. It was merely an unfortunate copy and paste mistake.
On the main page of this site I have the photos of two sex offenders. One was a convicted child molesting sex offender who had child pornography on this laptop. The other had boarded a cruise ship, Carnival Legend, a child molester who was suppose to register, but had been evading authorities instead. Both sex offenders involved crimes against children, not really that much unlike.
In the course of adding those two photos and links, I made a mistake on the head line for the Carnival Legend, and called it Legend Of the Seas. The text below the headline clearly called the ship Carnival Legend and the story page correctly identified the ship as Carnival Legend.
Now, I have been contacted by people who say they work at a cruise line before, so that they can correct me or give me an update on a situation. Normally, they are matter of fact, to the point and polite. This was not the case this time.
The hostility, with a threatening over-tone, in the email was evident from the start, and right to the end, with the shorthand "FU!", which of course is chat shorthand for "Fuck You!".
Alright, I give you I made a typo. But, it was a typo. Looking at the story, it was clearly only one time the name of ship was wrong, in the numerous other times it was mentioned. It was also not that horrendous of a mistake. Now, if RCCL ships had never had any sexual assaults on their ships nor let any registered child molesting sex offenders aboard, I could see where the typo would be so distressing.
But come on, this is the same line that got caught infiltrating the forums at Cruise Critic and banned a passenger for complaining online after they tried to verbally strong-arm her into pulling her bad review. It is the line Kimberley Dean and Samantha Romero were cruising on when both were sexually assaulted aboard. Mrs. Romero was assaulted by a RCCL employee. They are not so squeaky clean that they should be emailing editors saying "fuck you!" over typos.
While I have no actual proof this person was an employee, I have enough statistical information related to his visits to my site, to say it is my firm belief he does have some connection to Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines in some capacity, and that connection is inside a RCI office. If I did not have enough proof, I would not be writing this blog on the topic.
What the email really conveyed to me is this. The business correspondence skills of this man leave a lot to be desired. Certainly, if he is representative of the type of people RCI hires, sneaking around on my website, trying (unsuccessfully) to cover this tracks so he could lash out at me with his rancid mouth, none of us could expect much better in the handling of cruise line guest issues.
At this particular time, after reaching out to the cruise lines on the suicide threat, I find the timing of such an offensively, vulgar email very disturbing.
What I suggest to RCCL and the other cruise lines, is that they monitor their employees more carefully, instruct them on proper business writing practices and stress to them how bad it makes the company look when they write (traceable) emails to editors of websites, with such vulgar language included.
