Essential Travel Health Tips for Cruise Ship Trips - How to Choose Your Travel Agent by Christoph Lombard - HTML preview

Christoph Lombard

Essential Travel Health Tips for Cruise Ship Trips -‐ How To Choose Your Travel Agent

Essential Travel Health Tips

for Cruise Ship Trips – How

To Choose Your Travel Agent.

By Christoph Lombard is licensed under a Creative Commons

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Christoph Lombard

Essential Travel Health Tips for Cruise Ship Trips -‐ How To Choose Your Travel Agent

Introduction!1

About me !4

About cruise lines !7

1. Carnival Corporation!7

1.1 Carnival Cruise Lines!7

1.2 AIDA Cruises!8

1.3 Costa Cruises!8

1.4 Cunard Line!8

1.5 Holland America Line!8

1.6 Ibero Cruceros!8

1.7 P&O Cruises!8

1.9 Princess Cruises!9

1.10 The Yachts of Seabourn!9

1.11 Windstar Cruises!9

2. Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd!9

2.1 Royal Caribbean International!9

2.2 Azamara Club Cruises!10

2.3 Celebrity Cruises!10

3. Norwegian Cruise Line!11

3.1 Norwegian Cruise Line!11

3.2 Star Cruises – caters for the Australasian market.!11

3.3 Oceania Cruises!11

3.4 Regent Seven Seas Cruises!11

4. MSC cruises !11

5. Disney Cruise Line !12

6. Fred Olsen!12

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Essential Travel Health Tips for Cruise Ship Trips -‐ How To Choose Your Travel Agent

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7. Crystal Cruises!12

Cruise Themes !13

1. Expedition cruises!14

1.1 Lindblad Expeditions!14

1.2 Quark Expeditions!14

1.3 Hapag-Lloyd Cruises!14

1.4 Aurora Expeditions!14

1.5 Oceanwide Expeditions!14

1.6 Cruise.co.uk!14

2. Coastal cruises!14

2.1 Norwegian Fjords!14

2.2 Cruise.co.uk!14

2.3 cruisedirect!14

3. River cruises !14

3.1 Cruise.co.uk!14

3.2 Viking river cruises!14

3.3 AmaWaterways!14

3.4 AvalonWaterways!14

3.5 Nile cruises!14

4. Trans Atlantic crossings!15

4.1 Cruise.co.uk!15

4.2 cruisedirect!15

4.3 co-operative travel!15

4.4 expedia.com!15

Online DIY Dangers !16

About travel agents!18

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Essential Travel Health Tips for Cruise Ship Trips -‐ How To Choose Your Travel Agent

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1. UK regulating authorities!18

1.1 Passenger Shipping Association (PSA)!18

1.2 Leading Cruise Agents (aka Guild of Professional Cruise Agents)!18

1.3 Association of cruise experts (ACE)!18

1.4 Association of British Travel Agents (ABTA)!18

1.5 Air Travel Organizersʼ Licensing (ATOL)!18

1.6 International Air Transport Association (IATA)!18

2. USA regulating authorities!18

2.1 Cruise Lines International Association (CLIA)!18

2.2 National Association of Cruise Oriented Agencies (NACOA)!18

2.3 National Association of Commissioned Travel Agents (NACTA)!18

3. Discussion topics !19

3.1 Is your travel agent credentialed?!20

3.2 Can your online quote be beaten?!20

3.3 What are the hidden ticket costs?!20

3.4 What are the common on board hidden costs?!20

3.5 What is the cruise line loyalty program perks?!20

3.6 How to find cheap cruises?!20

3.7 What are your preferred cruise season?!21

3.8 What are the travel safety and security requirements?!21

3.9 What kind of ship would suit you best?!21

3.10 Which cabin would suit you best?!21

3.11 What about the view?!22

3.12 Are you prone to motion sickness?!22

3.13 What about Noro virus?!22

3.14 Do you have any dietary requirements?!22

Christoph Lombard

Essential Travel Health Tips for Cruise Ship Trips -‐ How To Choose Your Travel Agent

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3.15 What health requirements do you have?!23

3.16 Do you need a safe for valuables?!23

Conclusion!24

How To Make This eBook Your Own 24/7 Cash Machine!!25

Christoph Lombard

Essential Travel Health Tips for Cruise Ship Trips -‐ How To Choose Your Travel Agent

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Introduction

There are many reasons why you’ve stumbled upon my website

or by default - this eBook. By pure accident?

Perhaps.There you are, just surfing along… here for a moment, and then you’re gone.

But wait! Before you go, please click that bookmark tab at the top of your web browser and save me under your favorite sites, will you? Please make a note: this is the site to visit next time when planning a trip, holiday or adventure.

I don’t believe in random acts of fate. Everything has a reason and will impact on our lives - be it now or later. This eBook and my website will make your travels easier and more enjoyable.

And that’s the reason why you’re reading this eBook.

Which brings me to the strange title of this eBook: ”Essential

Travel Health Tips for Cruise Ship Trips - How To Choose Your

Travel Agent.”

Those familiar with SEO (Search Engine Optimization) will recognize it immediately for what it is: a key word based title that will hopefully lead to a place on the first page of Google, Yahoo, etc. - where I can reach as many people as possible through my website and eBooks. My hope is to help passengers avoid the common travel pitfalls and have their best holiday ever!

And you can help. If you like what you read, then please pass it

on to friend.

Is it possible though? Can a Travel Agent adversely affect your health? Of course!

What do you think happens to your blood pressure when your cruise holiday is circling the drain? It shoots through the roof!

Is that healthy for you? Of course not!

And is it conceivable that a Travel Agent might just feature somewhere in your cruise holiday plans and could possibly contribute to your unhappiness?

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Luckily though, in the majority of cases, Travel Agents are not the usual culprits. To the contrary: 80 percent of cruises are booked through Travel Agents. A cruise passenger in trouble is much more likely to regret not following the travel agent’s advise or not consulting one to begin with.

We hope to escape the misfortunes and disappointments of every day life when we close that front door and jump into the packed car. Off for a holiday!

As we slap that airline ticket down on the check-in counter do we ever wonder, “What can go wrong now?”

Standing in the queue, waiting to board, looking up at that immense cruise ship, do we perhaps sigh with premature relief?

“Made it! Paradise, here I come!”

Remember, Old Murphy will always be there too. Invisible.

Silently brooding…scowling at the exuberant laughter of excited kids - smirking in secret anticipation of the havoc to come…How do you know he’s not taking a turn in the copilot’s seat today?

Are you sure there is not a hurricane brooding in the Caribbean even as you cross the gangplank onto that big, beautiful cruise ship?Surfing the Net, you’ll soon experience information overload and analysis paralysis. 30 000 cruises and 2000

worldwide destinations, hundreds of travel websites and insurance options—where to begin?!

First step: get yourself a copy of a reputable cruise guidebook.

Cruising & Cruise Ships, 2011 by Douglas Ward would be an excellent choice. Douglas granted me one of his very rare interviews in early 2011 when we met in England. What a pleasure it was to meet this gentleman of the seas in the delightful

Westover Hall Hotel in Milford-on-Sea, a beautiful seaside resort on the English South Coast.

Douglas has done it all. He started his career back in 1965 on

Cunard’s RMS Queen Elizabeth, at 83 673 tons, then the largest cruise ship afloat. (Compare that to Royal Caribbean’s

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latest, the Allure of the Seas , weighing in at a staggering 222500

tons—almost three times as large! (The Allure is 2 inches longer than her twin, the Oasis of the Seas - making The Allure currently the largest cruise ship in the world.) Over the next 17 years, Douglas worked for eight different cruise companies and bowed out on a high note as a cruise director. In total, he’s spent more than 5000 days at sea and is in his own class completing almost 150 trans-Atlantic crossings. And he’s still at it. For almost 200

days a year he’s at sea pursuing his first love: cruising and cruise ships.

I like his book because he asks the right questions and gives sound advice. Somewhere among its 720 pages and 285 profiled vessels, you’ll find what you’re looking for.

There are many factors to consider when planning a trip. Your health is but one of them - albeit a very important one. For if there’s one complication that will change your budget in a heartbeat, then it’s an unplanned illness, accident or injury. It’s a tragedy, as many of these unforeseen medical costs could have been avoided. So pour yourself a glass of red wine tonight, sit back and leisurely ruminate about all of the things that can go wrong. Put your plans in place before you start your journey. You won’t regret it - it will prevent a lot of pain later.

As traveling doctor, I’ve amassed an armamentarium of practical tricks and tips that will make anyone’s traveling easier. I want to share this knowledge and that is the motivation behind creating my site.

Christoph Lombard

Essential Travel Health Tips for Cruise Ship Trips -‐ How To Choose Your Travel Agent

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About me

I’m Christoph Lombard - a traveling medical

doctor.

Medicine is my passport. It opens doors into

worlds that are off the beaten tourist track.

Practicing medicine may not be the most

glamorous of professions any more, but it certainly still has its perks. One of them

being the ability to travel and work all over the world on both land and sea. The skills that allow us doctors and nurses to unlock the secrets of the human condition, also allow us to unlock the secrets of other peoples hearts and homes.

To us, everybody is pretty much the same. Even though our languages, cultures, religions and colors may differ, we all bleed the same red-we all suffer the same agonies. Kindness, compassion and friendship are a universal language understood by all...

“Kindness is a language that the deaf can hear and the blind can read.” Mark Twain.

I trained as medical student in the public hospitals of South Africa. (These are the kind of hospitals you’ll find in a war zone -

where even today doctors can be raped and killed at work - or Oxygen supplies sabotaged.) The life saving skills I absorbed back then, now allow me to help others wherever I find myself practicing in the world. My own experiences were taken to the next level by fellow South African, Dr Jonathan Kaplan - war surgeon and author: ‘ There is no doubt that in SA there was this

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unusual combination of First World medical training in a Third

World environment. So you saw a lot of trauma and it made us

good at dealing with it. And, partly, it gave you the confidence of

knowing that if you have to deal with something you will. You

may not be able to call on a skilled senior.’

If you’d like to find out more about this fascinating man, then I highly recommend his two books: “The dressing station” and

“Contact wounds”

We like to think that everything changes when we move on to a new place, only to find that nothing has changed. As an Accident and Emergency doctor, I still have to duck the same cocktail of blood, guts and tears, even in the UK’s first world NHS (National Health Service) hospitals. But in South Africa’s public hospitals, that mix sometimes contains solids of a more toxic nature – like flying bullets! And ducking then saves more than just your shoes…what interesting skills medicine teaches its practitioners?

Traveling has always been in my blood, ever since I was a student hitch hiking across South Africa and neighboring

Namibia.

Years later, as doctor, I found myself in some other out of the way places too. I’ve felt the oppressive humidity and oven heat of the sweltering Indonesian jungle, hundreds of miles from the nearest hospital and desperately dependent on our nearest small airport,

Babo. It is a forgotten little jungle strip where wreckage of WWII Japanese bombers still litters the undergrowth at the end of the runway.

I’ve felt the biting cold of Russian ice fields too. Sakhalin Island

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has its own community of expatriate workers and their families and doctors are needed to take care of them.

But most relevant to this site, is my periodic work as cruise ship doctor. Sometimes, on these ships, I hold the hand of a luckless passenger amidst the wreckage of a ruined cruise holiday. It is then that I ask myself, “How could this have been prevented?

What can I do to keep someone else from being trapped in the same nightmare?”

And from that background, this site was born. Whether you’re a greenhorn just spreading your wings or an old sea-dog with hundreds of cruises behind you, I hope that all of you will find value here: practical travel health tips for whatever holiday, trip or adventure you’re planning. I want you to avoid the sickbay and enjoy your best cruise holiday ever. After all, traveling should be fun!

Christoph Lombard

Essential Travel Health Tips for Cruise Ship Trips -‐ How To Choose Your Travel Agent

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About cruise lines

Back in the day, booking through the cruise line itself was the only option available. Today though, almost 80% of bookings are made through travel agents. Once again I wish to direct you to Douglas Ward’s Cruising & Cruise Ships, 2011. All of the cruise

lines, destinations, options and ships are analyzed in detail in this book. I cannot hope to cover the same volume on this website and will be referring to it frequently.

Here follow links to many cruise lines and travel agents which may save you a lot of time when booking a cruise holiday.

Otherwi