Undercover assessment

[DingoMom]

Hello, Ms. Hodges,

 

Have you considered an ‘undercover cruiser’ to provide an honest assessment to your Executive Office on the various types of cabins / ship experiences? For example, I know that you and your Executive Staff are too well-known to attempt to do an ‘Undercover Boss’ experiment. However, when you DO sail, the entirety of the ship knows you are on board, and I expect that you receive the best of everything (as is proper). But if you had a proxy that is not in an upper suite, as well as one who was not in a suite at all, who could give you HONEST feedback about the experience, perhaps it would provide some good data points for you going forward. I think because the crew / staff is generally so great that none of us wants to give less than a “10” on our surveys, you are not getting legitimate feedback on the Celebrity cruise experience. There are several threads on Cruise Critic that echo this point.

 

(I have several upcoming cruises, and I would be delighted to be your ‘secret shopper’ on any of them.)

[Laura Hodges Bethge]

Thank you for the question and your offer! We always want guests to provide us with their honest review so that we can continuously improve the experience. In addition to post-cruise survey ratings, we leverage many other sources for feedback including survey comments, focus groups, social media sites like Cruise Critic, and more. And we do have non-executive auditors who assist in testing the guest experience onboard.

[luckyinpa]

I just retired from being an auditor and never have heard of the ones mentioned here. I'd love to come out of retirement and test the guest experience!

[Ipeeinthepools]

On 7/18/2024 at 6:12 PM, luckyinpa said:

I just retired from being an auditor and never have heard of the ones mentioned here. I'd love to come out of retirement and test the guest experience!

 

I'd love to join the ranks of the non-executive auditors.

[The_Big_M]

Well, post cruise reviews have very limited provision for comments (and the purpose of those is to track rating trends rather than get feedback, so individual details are not generally captured).

 

Focus groups would most likely be US based. Which means very limited feedback from the various customer bases.

 

CC is only a small proportion of cruisers, and is not monitored in detail as the resources were pulled away from there. Certain big ticket issues will be visible, but again individual details will not be picked up.

 

And auditors report on specific tests, not give their own judgement and opinion. 

 

[DaKahuna]

14 hours ago, Ipeeinthepools said:

 

I'd love to join the ranks of the non-executive auditors.

 

You and hundreds to thousands of others of us..   

 

 I would not even make them pay for my cruise. 

 

[rosecbud]

My husband and I are longtime Celebrity cruisers starting in 1995 on the Zenith, before Celebrity purchased the line. We introduced many friends to the company over the years with family and friend cruises to the Med, Caribbean, Greece, etc. Over this many years we have experienced every other major cruise line but would plan a celebrity cruise at least every year. Since Covid, the Celebrity experience has been less thrilling and more expensive. The specialty restaurants, spa, internet, drink packages, shore excursions have increased in price dramatically. Another cruiser said that with all the other options out there, Celebrity is losing its loyal customers and I wholeheartedly agree. It’s hard to win back business but maybe the Brass don’t care because they think will get new customers anyway. The loyalty status doesn’t offer much except a complimentary happy hour and a few small discounts (slow internet packages). The CEO says they listen to the critiques on the surveys and that may be true but it doesn’t seem as though they make any meaningful changes or respond to passengers’ issues with regard to a poor experience.