MV Voyager - V.O.Ds new ship

I wrote a post yesterday about Voyages of Discovery, (V.O.D), which you can read by clicking here.
In it I gave you a bit of information about V.O.D; what the cruises were like; what the MV Discovery was like and a few pros and cons of the cruise line. I also promised to give you a bit more info about V.O.Ds new ship the MV Voyager, being launched later this year. The really nice thing about this ship is that it answers a lot of the problems that some people may have about V.O.D as a cruise line.

Cruise industry set for a massive shake up

I've said it before and I'll say it again, I'm not a big fan of sea days. Cruising for me is all about seeing the different ports of call on my itinerary, not relaxing onboard staring out at the ocean.
Don't get me wrong, the occasional day at sea in between ports is nice to break things up but four or five days in a row? No thanks!
The problem is that some new fuel regulations that will come into play in 2015 may well mean a massive increase in sea days.

My Top Ten List of things you didn't know you could do on a cruise.

We all know cruising is becoming a more and more attractive option, especially cruises from the UK without the worry of flights. Many more people are looking at cruising as a viable option for their family holiday but there are still loads of activities and entertainment that a cruise ship offers that most people don't even know about.
Here's my top ten list of things you didn't know a cruise ship offered.

Are cruise ships a good thing for a city?

Cruise ships bring a lot of money to a city in the form of tourism and port taxes etc but is a large number of cruise ships always a good thing?
I'm thinking about this after having just read a report about Barcelona which so far this year has been visited by 355 cruise ships, bringing in a total number of cruise passenger tourists of over 1,000,000!
Now Barcelona is a big city and can cope with that number of tourists, (the pickpockets and thieves preying on the tourists of Barcelona being a separate issue), but I'm thinking of the small Caribbean islands, or the small Fjord village ports that play host to the likes of Allure of the Seas or P&Os Ventura and Azura.
When these ships come into port the population of these places can sometimes double and that's assuming only one ship is docked; most experienced cruisers will be able to tell you nightmare stories about two or three big ships being docked at a small port at once. Whilst there's no doubt that these ports benefit from the revenue that level of tourism brings I can't help thinking what happens the day after when there aren't any ships in and the residents need to clean up after 2,000 to 3,000 cruise passengers, or what happens when in the off season if the ports don't get any cruise ships visiting them at all. What happens to all the jobs created by the ships visiting and the people that depend on them?
What do you think?

Happy cruising?