What's the point of Liverpool?

You may, (or may not), have been reading recently about the growing dispute between Southampton cruise terminal and it's Liverpool rival. If you haven't it's quite simple.
 In a nut shell Liverpool docks want a much larger share of the ex-UK cruising market and to that effect have invested nearly £20,000,000 in improving the Liverpool cruise terminal. The problem is they have largely done this out of public funds. Southampton obviously don't want to give up their share of the cruising market and whats more the Southampton cruise terminals have been mostly if not solely built from money raised by private investors.

Top nude cruise destinations

Ok so todays post is a bit tongue in cheek, but considering the response I got to my post about topless sunbathing on Royal Caribbean cruise ships there's clearly an interest out there for nude cruising. It's not going to be about naturist cruises per se, more about some naked beaches you could visit on some of the more popular cruise itineraries as a shore excursion. Feel free to recommend some more if you know of them, (and you're brave enough to admit to it!).

Wheelchairs on a cruise ship

Someone called me up looking to book a first time cruise for their 50th birthday and wanted to know if I could offer them some advice. They had never cruised before and were a little worried as they were in a wheelchair and were wondering if a cruise would be a suitable holiday.
I gave him all the advice and help he wanted and he ended up booking a cruise but it occurred to me that if he had questions about taking a wheelchair on a cruise ship then other people might have the same questions.
It's with that in mind that I've written todays post.

Confused by Harry Potter

Hi all. Today's post doesn't have anything to do with cruising, instead it's a question that's been bugging me for the last few days and I was hoping one of my readers might be able to help me.
Being the decent gent that I am I took my wife out to see the last Harry Potter movie recently. She's a massive fan and has been looking forward to seeing it since she saw the previous film.
I haven't really seen many of the movies, and this one was part two and I'd only seen half of the first one so perhaps my confusion is understandable.
Here's my question........

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?

Would you book this airport?

I was speaking to a client the other day who was looking for a Christmas cruise. He wanted to cruise the Caribbean and he wanted to cruise for at least a month. Beyond this all he was really looking for was a cheap deal as he was going to be cruising as a single passenger so he wanted to avoid any massive single person supplements.
We finally settled on a P&O back to back cruise of 28 days. The only problem was although P&O still had plenty of flights to get him out there, because it was a Christmas cruise they didn't have any flights coming back. It was then that P&O offered us a really strange solution........

Who are the Blue Man Group

I was talking to a customer today about a cruise he wanted to book on the NCL Epic when I happened to mention offhand that one of the shows onboard was the Blue Man Group.
"Ooh, that sounds interesting", he said. "What do they do?"

I cannot tell you how much this question irritated me. Not because he'd asked it and not because I didn't know. I just couldn't find a way to put it into words. And I've seen them live!

Well, they're a sort of comedy act; with paint and music and stuff, and they're sort of alternate and different and........

I must of sounded like a blathering idiot to this poor passenger!
My best advice to him was to look up some videos on YouTube of them as they're one of those things that need to be seen to be understood.
If anyone's ever seen the Blue Man Group and can come up with a better explanation for them than I could please let me know. In the meantime for anyone who's looking to book a cruise on the NCL Epic or for anyone who's just interested in seeing them I've put a couple of videos below for you to have a look at.

Happy cruising