The CEO Has Spoken

[serendipity1499]

Paul..Thanks for posting the thread..That open letter will go a long way & is the cheapest advertising he could get..

 

I too am very impressed with Mr. Del Rio...Perhaps someday we will get to cruise on Oceania..Thanks again..Betty:)

[sailorbill]

Having once sailed on Renaissance in 2000 and loved the experience, I have followed the demise of Renaissance and the emergence of Oceania with much interest. If I am not mistaken, Frank Del Rio became head of Renaissance when it was already heading on its way to bankruptcy. Renaissance failed because of a too ambitious and rapid ship building program and a bad marketing strategy. Then 9/11 happened and Renaissance went belly up very quickly. The Renaissance ships went back to the bankers and financiers and have slowly been bought or chartered by various cruise lines. Oceania was started with two of the Renaissance ships and now has three. Many of the features of Renaissance have been continued with Oceania such as open dining, no children facilities, no formal dress, no smoking (well, almost no smoking) and very port intensive itineraries. To this Oceania added upscale features like better beds, linens and toiletries and higher quality food and service. In pricing and quality Oceania is positioned as a premium cruise line between the mainstream lines and the luxury lines. (HAL provides a mainstream cruise line experience despite all the blather and puffed up pretense that it is a premium line.) I would love to do an Oceania cruise but just cannot bring my bargain oriented miserliness(?) to pay the extra tariff required for sailing as a single. I can get a fine cruise experience on HAL for about half the per diem fare of Oceania, and I don't mean the phony Oceania brochure fare. Oceania's standard fare is two for one with free air, but it has a 100% single supplement.

 

Having been head of a failing cruise line, Frank Del Rio must be enjoying himself as the head of an apparently successful, if smaller, cruise line. His hands on involvement is not too surprising when one considers that Oceania has only three small ships carrying approximately 2050 passengers when full. By contrast the president of HAL oversees 13 ships carrying approximately 20,000 passengers when full and the CEO of Carnival Corp. oversees several cruise lines with around 80 ships carrying over 150,000 passengers. A bit of bad publicity makes a bigger impact on Oceania than it does on HAL or Carnival.

[matterless]

What kind of company do you work in? Do you think the "employees" have decided on the bumping policy!!!!!!! No - that comes right from the top. Also if the CEO has decided to apply a bumping policy to the company, it is up to him to have a training policy that ensures the staff can do it with the least amount of impact on the customer.

[Tricia724]

I agree that Mr. DelRio's action on behalf of our CC posters certainly was impressive, but I find myself wondering how many other cruisers there are out there who do not have access to a public forum such as this who were bounced from this cruise and left without other options. What I would like to know is whether Oceania reviewed all of the cuts that were made and attempted to rectify the situation. I think it's highly unlikely that our two CC people were the only ones affected in this case.

 

Just a thought.

[lizf]

There are probably two sides there. Were all of the passengers so affected taken care of so gallantly? We don't know. If the folks who brought up the situation hadn't stayed and put up with the terrible name calling, would the same outcome have happened? I do know that DH and I took one of those wonderful Oceania cruises and looked forward with great anticipation for all of their luxury. To make a long story real short........We didn't find any of it. It was the worst cruise we ever had. The gourmet food was a joke and we rated it below any of our experiences on NCL.

It was through that experience that we came running back to try HAL again, after 10 years. Thank goodness we did. We just did the 25 day Amazon Explorer on the Prinsendam and from there we booked the 46 day Taste of Two Continents. We luxuriated in every day aboard the Prinsendam and still shudder to remember that other terrible trip.

I won't go into detail because there isn't any point in bringing it up now, and I still fear the attacks that come for doing so. Those things do not happen on this board, but as you could see, other boards aren't so nice. I've seen times when posters over on that board got flamed if they said the slightest negative. We didn't write to the CEO, we put all our complaints in our comment sheet and complained while still on board, as did other passengers. We were never contacted by anyone about it after we got off the ship. We didn't pursue it further because there was nothing we wanted from them. If we got a free cruise we wouldn't have taken it. Cruise board credit, not going back for any reason. You don't take a chance when its that bad to start. We met many passengers on that trip that were upset by their experience there. So as Dr. Phil says.......no matter how flat you make the pancake, there are still two sides to it.

[HeatherInFlorida]

I'm not sure I've ever read a thread that long all at once before. Thank you so much for the link, Paul, because it was a real eye opener for me in many ways.

 

As somewhat of a cynic myself on these boards, I can understand why some initially questioned the OP, but couldn't believe how long it continued even after verification of the incident was so clear!

 

Hope everyone saw Carolyn's (Editor-in-Chief of CC) article on this. If you're not up to reading the entire thread, ths is a great synopsis: Cruise Critic News: Can Cruise Lines Bump Passengers ... at Will?

 

I'm just so glad it worked out for Donna and Margo in the end ... and good for Mr. Del Rio for going "on the record" on CC. My hat's off to him for sure:)