It’s painful to pull up to the pump these days, even when you’re driving a cruise ship. The difference between people like us and the cruise lines is that we have no one to pay the fuel increase for us, and cruise companies do.<\/p>\n
They call it a “fuel surcharge” and if you look at the fine print of your cruise documents you’ll discover \u2014 if you didn’t already know \u2014 that the surcharge is activated whenever the cruise company feels it should be. Fuel goes up, and you pay.<\/p>\n
During the last round of dramatic increases in the cost of crude, some cruise companies activated the fuel surcharge for passengers who had already booked their cruises, and were forced to reimburse the passengers later. That led to the change in the wording of the contract that gives cruise lines the right to implement the surcharge whether you’ve booked or not.<\/p>\n
Most of them stipulate it can be done once the price of crude oil reaches $65 or $70 a barrel. This week’s price climbed to more than $91 a barrel, and still there has been no action, at least on this side of the Atlantic. So what we have is a public relations situation…when can it be done without alienating you, the customer? Either that, or cruise lines bought their fuel as futures, paying up front for a guaranteed price that enables them to delay the inevitable.<\/p>\n
Experts say that with the increased consumption in Asia and Latin American countries, the barrel price is headed for north of $100 in 2011, and perhaps as high as $150. It appears the only thing we can do to drive it back down is use less, which means more hybrid cars.<\/p>\n
Unlike the last time this happened, the world’s automakers are ready, with families of electronic vehicles.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, has anybody heard of a hybrid cruise ship?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It’s painful to pull up to the pump these days, even when you’re driving a cruise ship. The difference between people like us and the cruise lines is that we have no one to pay the fuel increase for us, and cruise companies do. They call it a “fuel surcharge” and if you look at… Continue reading Energy Costs Impact Cruise Prices<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,36,19,15],"tags":[448,86,35,449,121,450],"class_list":["post-5689","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cruise-industry-news","category-reviews","category-ships","category-stories","tag-cost-of-cruising","tag-cruise-ships","tag-cruises","tag-fuel-costs","tag-fuel-surcharge","tag-price-of-oil","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5689","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5689"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5689\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}