Fred. Olsen cruise line charges for wifi. And it ain’t cheap: £120 for the whole cruise, or £12/day. As recently as our last cruise three years ago I wouldn’t have cared at all about having email or internet access, and in fact only ever used the ship’s ‘business centre’ to check in with family periodically, but when you combine travelling alone, leaving Scout with people I don’t know really well, this blog, and researching upcoming cities stops online, well I need my wifi. (I’d have been perfectly happy with 10 minutes/day on one of the ship’s own computers, but Fred. Olsen doesn’t have a business centre for the passengers’ use.)
I came up with a work-around (a cunning plan, as Baldrick would say) – I decided that every second or third day I would sign up for one day of wifi. I would sign up at noon, and have 24 hours of access, meaning I could check in with my sisters in the first afternoon and then again the next morning. I could post updates on my cruise over a two day period, so they wouldn’t pile up. A maximum cost of £36 instead of £120. Hah.
When it was announced that our cruise was changing and I wouldn’t be able to get to the shops I wanted in Szczecin, I wanted to do some research into what to do in Copenhagen. I would have used the travel guides in the library here, but (a) someone keeps stealing the pertinent books each day and not replacing them until we’ve left the relevant city – I suspect one of my dining companions (mainly because he told us that was what he was doing); and (b) one of the Scandi-specific travel guides I did find on their shelves was a Fodors (good) from 1992 (bad). I had just finished up a 24-hour paid wifi session and didn’t really want to have to pay for another one so soon. And why should I have to? They changed the cruise destination, I didn’t.
So I went to the Guest Services desk and said I wanted one day of free wifi to allow me to make changes to my plans and research Copenhagen. The clerk said she would raise it with her boss. I went back the next morning to renew my request and was told, yes, management had cleared a one-time, one-day free wifi access for me. The young man diffidently explained that management was only doing this for me and hemmed and hawed, until I said, “You’d prefer that I not broadcast this to the other passengers, is that right?” He sighed with relief and said yes, exactly. No problem at all from me. I left quite pleased with myself (and I am not posting this until after the cruise is over – not that any of the other passengers know of my blog).
I want to be clear – I know spending an additional £12 on a cruise costing over £2,000 shouldn’t matter and I’m just being petty. If they hadn’t been charging us for every, single solitary thing, I wouldn’t have felt so strongly about it. But I still resent having had to pay for an ice cream cone beside the pool – I think that was the proverbial straw that made me nickel and dime them right back.