Blue Odysseys

Archive for April, 2010

We went on a Carnival cruise in August 2009. After cruising on Royal Caribbean just 4 month prior and having a wonderful time, our expectations were high. Boy were we let down – our experience with Carnival left something to be desired. The room itself was really nice, the balcony terrific, but that’s pretty much where the positives end. We were on the ship name Carnival Legend, and how apropo because how bad this cruise sucked is already legendary to us. Let’s break each horror down one by one, shall we?

• The food. We thought people who went on cruises always talked about the food, the food, the food and how much weight they gained. We BOTH lost weight this week. Since neither of us are morning people we decided to have room service for breakfast on the first day. The only choices were cereal, a banana, milk, coffee and not much else. Big fat whoo. The next morning, we decided to go upstairs and figured breakfast food is pretty safe, right? Wrong.. The eggs and bacon were SO greasy because they didn’t put anything under them to CATCH the grease, they just left it there to sit and soak. *yum*. I had milk in a little kindergarten lunchroom container and prayed for better luck at dinner. Well my prayers fell on some pretty deaf ears because in an entire WEEK, out of all the nonsense they put out, the pasta with plain sauce was the only thing that didn’t make me nauseous. Of course they only served it ONE TIME. Yippee for me. My friend, who is braver than I, tried a variety of these culinary disasters only to have one bite and push away the plate.They had numerous desserts, and I love desserts and am not picky about them, I will eat cake made from a box mix and be happy. I tried them all and can’t say I liked (or finished) ANY OF THEM!! HOW DO YOU SCREW UP CAKE? Seriously? HOW? These people did DAY AFTER DAY. WTF? You can get pizza and cheeseburgers 24-hours a day but they even FUCKED UP PIZZA!! How gifted do you have to be to do THAT? I can make Ellios pizza from a box in the toaster oven and not like it but it was still better than that undercooked NONSENSE. It should at LEAST BE WARM. The burgers had zero taste (which may have been a blessing) and once again, cheese isn’t melted and it isn’t even WARM. WTF? We even ordered a grill cheese sandwich, again from room service and the cheese was NOT melted. How does that make it a grilled cheese sandwich? So pack a lunch folks if you plan on going anywhere with Carnival.

• The casino : 9000 machines, all of them THE SAME. All boring and OLD! Whippee again. And hey, let’s not say anything about the CHILDREN constantly running around who were brought in by their parents darting in and out of the Texas Hold “Em room or running back and forth to the Follies theatre. Thought there was a law against that but I guess not. The other folks we talked to were not having too good a time either because every single slot machine was jinxed against the player – HAH!! No wonder Carnival cruises are so cheap!!! On the last day the hideously perky cruise director said, and I quote, swear to god “Why not spend some time in the casino and try to win back some of the money you lost?!!”. Need I say more? Actually I do, but the entertainment choice for the casino is getting its own number, which brings us to number 3.

• Tony Ray. Yes, Tony Ray. While passing around a crack pipe at  annual “Carnival cruise think tank” meeting, some idiot came up with the brilliant idea that the casino needed live music. ????????? WHY would you want music to be louder than the sound of the slot machines which encourage passengers to play? Oh, that’s right, they never pay out anyway, so you might as well have music. They then decided to make a bad idea even worse and hire Tony Ray, a band of one, to deliver his “smooth sounds” that are probably the soundtrack playing in HELL. He picked all the favorites folks, and delivered them in an order that made zero sense.

  How do you go from Lionel Ritchie’s “Hello” to Ozzy Osbournes “Crazy Train” and for God’s sake WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT? His vocal range is non-existent, and we want to know is if he is the cousin of someone who works for carnival cruise lines or if he made a deal with the devil. Even the devil and all his powers couldn’t get this dude a gig better than a carnival cruise ship in the casino! He had a captive audience!!!! If you wanted to gamble you had to suffer through 5 hours, 5 grueling hours, of Tony Ray. He even had a SHTICK. Think Bill Murray doing the lounge lizard singer Jerry Vale on Saturday Night Live! We would have been thankful for Bill!!!! Actual line uttered by Tony Ray : “Yes you once, twice, six times a lady”. I have WITNESSES!

• If you are not an American citizen, any my friend is not,  be prepared to be UP and OUT of your room at 6:15 AM on the last morning of your cruise to go through Immigration. They don’t tell you this until about 8pm the night before by leaving a piece of paper on your bed. If you don’t read it, you are screwed, so you better fucking read English AND it says that they will not start unloading the boat until ALL non-US citizens have done the Immigration walk. Great time for them to take a chance like that, don’t you think?

• Before you get on the ship and actually go on the cruise you get NADA, NIL, NOTHING. Nothing telling you where you have to go to get on the ship, what time you have to be there, what you can and cannot bring, tips, rules, what to expect, warnings about tony ray, NOTHING. We had to look it up online and even that was bleak because the goddamned website was problematic. They should send something to your house, in advance, like Royal Caribbean does, so you know WTF is going on!

• Free ice cream for 24 hours a day! Yay! The first problem is they are so well hidden you will need a treasure map to find them. The area is such a mess you would think 98 gremlins came and trashed the place. Every time we saw it, it looked as though the machines exploded. Three flavors were available. THREE. No sprinkles, nuts, topping, nothing. Guess buying a vat of sprinkles would have broken the bank.

• The captain needs some people skills too. He never made a single announcement that we heard, so we never heard his name or his voice. We never got a “This is your captain…” WTF? When he walked through the casino and we caught a glimpse of him he made ZERO eye contact with ANY passenger on the ship or said hello, he was too busy hanging on and kissing some lady that he was obviously involved with and the next time he was talking with another member of the crew. No gold stars for him when it comes to friendliness, but we sure heard enough, and we mean ENOUGH, of our cruise director… good thing we never saw the bitch, we would have thrown her overboard!

• Children running and screaming in the hallways – why do parents allow this??? We did not do that when we were kids, we were not allowed!

• We don’t want to buy your stinking diamonds. Even at 50% off!! Even with the additional 20% off. Yes, cruise director shoved this bullshit down our throats hourly. Why the FUCK would we go on a cruise to buy god damned diamonds???? Hell, every fucking port you stop at the god damned cruise villages, that were obviously built with the help of the cruise lines, have DIAMOND INTERNATIONAL. Why oh WHY do I want to buy diamonds in Belize, Cozumel, Honduras, Grand Cayman AND on the fucking boat. Knock if off with the fucking jewelry sales already.

• Cruise photographers… we just wanted to stab them. You can’t even get on or off the boat without some stupid fucking Kodak moment with either Mayan warriors, Mexican folk dancers, a parrot, a pirate or the stupid Carnival smoke stage super hero. WTF? ENOUGH already. I won’t buy it so leave me the fuck alone and get out of my face.

After our Carnival experience we will only be sticking with Royal Caribbean in the future for all future sailings… so if you want to avoid us, make sure you book your cruise with Carnival!

I’m never flying American Airlines in this lifetime, and neither will anyone I know after they hear what a bunch of rude, unhelpful monsters they were for something that was NOT OUR FAULT.

We had a trip planned through Expedia.com (who are also fuckers, but that is another topic) for three of us to fly to Mexico. All tickets and connections were purchased through Expedia. The first person, my cousin, was flying Continental from London to Texas where he would meet my buddy, and they would both fly to Florida (where I am). The next morning the three of us would fly to Mexico on an early morning flight. The initial tickets we purchased from Expedia were to fly out at 9:00 AM, a reasonable hour, BUT, American kept sending us flight updates during the two months before departure, our final departure time being 6:00 AM – this is HOW we got SCREWED in the first place.

There was, of course, a snafu. My cousins plane couldn’t land due to foul weather, and when it did land, they of course pulled HIM out of the regular line to do an extensive “are you a terrorist” search, even though he was wearing his police ID. WHATEVER. Anyway, Continental KNEW he had to get on a flight and they were trying to find him in time to get him and my buddy on the flight to Florida. Of course the 10 min we needed we didn’t get and the plane left without them. It was the last flight out for the day.

The next flight coming to Florida was arriving too late the following moring to allow us to catch the flight to Mexico. We are all in a panic, I am in Florida and my friend with my limited English speaking cousin, stuck in Texas. I called Expedia. They would have been happy to change the flights for Mexico for a small fee, but AMERCIAN AIRLINES WOULDN’T LET THEM. They called American Airlines. I called American Airlines. The people that worked for Continental in TEXAS called them and told them they should do all they could to help since it was not the passengers fault.

Know what they said? Tough, you want to change tickets it is $700 dollars PER PERSON. They all called a supervisor who said the same thing. NO ONE at American Airlines cared, was helpful, NOTHING. Know who saved the day? CONTINENTAL AIRLINES. They felt very bad for us and found a way for us all to go for 400$ TOTAL COST TO ME. So, American Airlines, you have forever lost a customer and for what you put us through I will tell anyone that will listen how shitty your service is and not to fly with you. American Airlines should be ashamed of themselves. CONTINENTAL AIRLINES on the other hand, went above and beyond the call of duty to help us and saved our vacation!

If you ever travel to Europe, specifically Pisa, Italy do NOT ever rent a car from these ASSHOLES!!!! We made arrangements in advance for a rental with them with a quote of about $330 for 5 days and it ended up costing us a total of about $650 because they are too lazy to do their jobs!!

IF YOU SEE THE BLUE SIGN WITH THE WHITE ELEPHANT – TURN AND GO THE OTHER WAY!! THEY SHOULD BE CALLED LOCO-AUTO – BECAUSE THEY ARE CRAZY AND THEY WILL SCREW YOU OVER BIG TIME!

When we arrived at the terminal there was only ONE GUY working and his name was GIOVANNI – yeah ok whatever, we were in Italy right? He told me they would hold a $1500 security deposit for the car, that I would get back when we returned it. After we finished the paperwork, he told us to go out to the parking lot to the car and notate on the piece of paper he gave me all the damages to the car. HE DID NOT ACCOMPANY US. He gave us the license plate for the car but not the slot where it would be and said to look for the LOCAUTO logo which has an elephant on it. We went through every single parked car, TWICE, where the LOCAUTO cars were parked. We did not find it. So I left my travel companion outside with the luggage and went back in. When I got there, another customer was complaining to him about the damages to their car and the fact there was only ¾ tank of gas, and Giovanni was waving his hands and talking LOUD in Italian. Hearing and seeing complaining customer should have been my big clue that this was a schiester operation, but I was so tired from traveling for 18 hours straight that I was not thinking clearly.

I told him we could not find the car and once again, he was the ONLY ONE working that day. He told me to go back out to the parking lot and wait for him. When he finally finished with the prior customer, he located the car, in the HERTZ parking area, not the LOCAUTO area with the elephant logo signs, and brought it to us. I asked him to wait because I wanted to notate the damages to the car. He said to CIRCLE where the damage was on the car, and bring it back to him inside so that he could sign it. I had no idea this was not ‘proper’ procedure. (I found out later when we returned the car that he was supposed to underline and initial where the damage was for which we were punished and penalized although we did what we were told). We found 4 separate damages to the car. I had my travel companion look very closely to make sure we noted all damage, to which she bellows.. “WTF is this? Rent a Wreck?”

1. the left rear wheel well was damaged
2. the left rear bumper had a huge hole in it and was cracked
3. the front bumper was damaged with a large scratch
4. the right rear wheel well was scratched very badly and some of the paint was gone. (this is the one that I was accused of doing although it was clearly there when we got the car)

I circled on the paper where all the damage was and went back inside. I asked him to sign the paper and put his name on there. There were no other cars available as I heard another customer come up to the counter and ask for a car. He said there were none. After he INITIALED only the paper, not where I had circled the damages but somewhere else on the paper, I went back out to the car. We loaded our luggage and started to leave. I noticed the tank was not full, but only 7/8 so I went back inside AGAIN and asked him to initialthat I would return the car with this much fuel. OMFG talk about the worst customer service anywhere!?!?!

We returned to the airport on Saturday Sept 13^th. When we returned it, it had been raining all day. The car was obviously dirty from the rain. As I returned it, there were 2 people working that day behind the counter. One of them came outside to look at the car. She said that I did the damage to the right rear wheel well and that I was lying about it since the form was not filled out properly. I told her that I did exactly what I was told to do by Giovanni. She said I was lying. This STUPID ITALIAN BIOTCH called ME, a CUSTOMER, a LIAR TO MY FACE!!! I asked her to call him and ask him. Of course he did not remember so he came up to the airport. He went out to look at the car and of course could not remember the damage that was there since he was not there on the day we reviewed the car for damages, but inside dealing with another upset customer. I pulled out the paperwork again showing them where I had circled the damages. She told me that is was not done right, that each damage had to be signed/initialed by the LOCAUTO employee. I tried explaining to them that I did exactly what I was told. They looked at me like I was stupid. They said it was not signed by Giovanni so the damages were not properly noted. I asked them how much they were going to charge my account. They said they did not know until they washed the car – because of the rain – and that I would find out when I got back to the US. I told them I wanted a receipt and the total that was being charged to my card. They refused to provide it.

We did not have much time to argue with them because we were catching a flight to Malta within an hour and a half. In essence they were holding us hostage there at the counter, refusing to give me a printed receipt and I not knowing what was being charged. This made me very uncomfortable. Once again, I pulled out the paperwork explaining to them what I was told to do and that the damage to the right rear wheel well was already there. They waved me off and sort of laughed at me. Rather than continue trying to get a resolution to something we could not resolve, and knowing we had a flight to catch, we left their counter, feeling confused and violated. The charges did not appear on my VISA statement for over a week.

When I initially rented the car, I made a deposit of 20.80 euro. The remainder of the balance was 117.76 Euro – documentation provided. When I was able to log on to my VISA account to see the total, which was finally charged on 9/17, I saw they charged a total of $673.89 for the remainder of the rental and the supposed damages that we did to the car, which we did not do.

I followed the verbal directions that were given to me by the attendant that day. Giovanni was the only one working the counter. After reviewing my experience with them as well as listening to the other customer complaining about the damages to his rental, I am not sure they are not running somesort of scam. The other customer, English male, was also told to CIRCLE the damage to his car, so it seems that were the instructions that were verbally given to customers that day so they could scam them out of funds for their own use or whatever. Clearly they were not using the extra monies charged for damages to rentals because the cars were Rent-A-Wrecks to the max. So here these assholios are over-charging customers then not using the money to fix the torn up cars? WTF? Maybe they are giving it all to Giovanni so he can get his hair done.

We have learned from this horrible experience: 1) not to rent from LOCAUTO ever again and 2) to take a photo of all damages to the car with the rental representative in all the photos.

We traveled to Europe from the US wanting to see Malta and Tuscany. Being the travel savvy chicks that we are we decided to try and do this as economically as possible. We flew to London from Houston, flew to Tuscany and then on to Malta, back to London, and finally to Houston using cheap European puddle jumpers to get to our destinations. You don’t even want to know how many hours we put into fine tuning the flights so we had enough time in each place, enough time to get to the airports, etc

We saved a CONSIDERABLE amount of money doing it this way. Before you try this at home there are some things you need to be aware of.  With both RyanAir and Easyjet… you are allowed 1 suitcase and 1 carry on (which is obviously a purse for a woman). It will be WEIGHED. And the limit is NOT 50 pounds, it is closer to 20. And your empty suitcase weighs something you know, even before you put something IN IT. EVERY pound over that you will PAY FOR and it is expensive.

Ryanair who we now call CRYIN AIR – allowing 15kg Checked Luggage + 10kg Hand Luggage and you may not share weight with your travel companions!!! When Ryanair states a limit of 15kg this doesn’t mean that when travelling as a couple one can carry 20kg and the other 10kg. “All baggage allowances are personal and cannot be combined”. This nonsense is being enforced to the extent that people are having to repack at the check in desk so that each individual bag conforms to the weight limit.

And here is the kicker – if you go OVER you are charged 15 EUROS per KG that you are over. So if you take two pairs of shoes instead of one you are totally fucked. TO MAKE THINGS WORSE, THEY INCREASED THEIR PER KILO OVERAGE CHARGE WHILE WE WERE TRAVELING!!!! WHAT A BUNCH OF STUPID BULLSHIT – WHEN WE LEFT IT WAS 10 EUROS PER KILO – WE HAD THAT ON OUR DOCUMENTS, BUT THE BITCH AT THE AIRPORT IN MALTA INFORMED US IT WAS RAISED TWO DAYS AGO, FUCK YOU VERY MUCH.

Then we have the assholios over at SLEAZY Jet – well really it is EasyJet, but having flown with them several times now, I am so done, although they are WAY MORE REASONABLE than Ryan Air. You can check up to 8 pieces of checked-in hold baggage to a maximum combined weight of 20kg. A fee per kilo for excess weight is charged at the airport prior to departure of only 12 EUROS per KG over.

So do you really save money on the ticket? PROBABLY NOT! Other airlines charged 300 dollars as opposed to Ryanair and Easyjet less than $150, but when you add on the extra pounds for your luggage, it may come out pretty close to even. At least you can BUY some stuff on your vacation, other than what you brought with you. And some clean underwear. We are NOT heavy packers but being gone for two weeks with no opportunity to wash clothes, we obviously exceeded the weight limit.

If you live in America you may opt instead to use one of the more expensive airlines instead of doing what we did. We were constantly trying to fit our purses in our carry-ons, packing, re-packing, weighing, and worrying. If you are traveling light for a short stay, not the two weeks we were gone or if you have the opportunity to do laundry while away, go for it and try the cheaper options of Ryanair and Easyjet – god damn though, where is British Airways when you need them.

Please think about what your needs really are before you chose an option like Ryanair or Easyjet. It just may wind up costing you more money, and more frustration than you bargained for!

What the hell is happening to television programming? AMC used to stand for American Movie Classics. Then they started showing shit like Steven Segal movies and I demanded their heads. Bravo TV used to show weird cool stuff like Cirque de Soleil (before everyone knew what it was) and now they have Real Housewives of the (insert name) and their rotten kids. They need to change their name to MTV.You can read our rant Why Network Programming Really Sucks, but now we are focusing our attention on The Travel Channel. They are really working my last nerve. I want them to start calling themselves “THE CLOGGED ARTERY CHANNEL” or perhaps The Glutton Network.

23. Diner Paradise : followed by alka seltzer paradise

24. Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern: Gross. Just gross. I don’t want to see someone eating spiders, rats on a stick, bats on a stake, grasshoppers, sheep heads, fish eyes or anything else that is creepy crawly. GAG. Why isn’t this who on Chill or SyFy?

Its no wonder there is so much obesity in this country… The Travel Channel clearly promotes it with their line of programming. But what about travel? What about shows that highlight Paris, Ireland, Thailand, Yellowstone… anywhere but a greasy-spoon truckstop in the middle of Podunk, Nowhere who serve up 64 oz chicken fried steak smothered with cream gravy.