Many of us have enjoyed a great piece of fish and ended up biting into a bone on the last bite. It diminishes the amazing bites that led up to it. We learned this lesson on our last day of the Mayercraft Carrier and we won’t have a chance to redeem ourselve until November.
In short, the ship was scheduled to arrive back to Long Beach at 10:00am and the day before, we were told by the ship’s captain that we would be docking around 8:30am. The ship had asked us to encourage guests to carry their luggage off to acknowledge the shortage of luggage cages displaced by music equipment.
Normally, ships arrive around 7am and guests begin exiting the ship around 8am (once Customs and Border Patrol clear the ship) allowing some guests to get up early while others sleep in and get off around 10am. Guests also are normally encouraged to take advantage of the ships service of collecting luggage the evening before and loading off the ship for them the next morning. When guests check their luggage with the cruise line, it reduces the load on the elevators as guests are able to use the stairs.
What happened was that most guests ended up trying to get to the lobby at 8:30am carrying their luggage. The Captain did not make it clear that even though we docked at 8:30am, we would likely not be getting off until 9:30am (due to the normal process of Customs and Boarder Patrol clearing the ship for arrival). In addition, we escorted John Mayer and his band off first and it appeared that everyone was waiting for him. When in fact, he was just waiting like everyone else around the corner.
We should have known that arriving at this time with a large east coast contingency needing to catch flights back home would be a potential mess. I take full responsibility for not catching this because it was a bad last bite to what was an amazing vacation.
In hindsight, we would have done the following:
1-Plan our needs for storage cages more efficiently so it does not impact the guests experience.
2-Set a real expectation of the estimated time the first guest would be able to exit the ship with an explanation of how the “Clearing” process worked.
3-Educate the guests on the challenges of carrying luggage off the ship and encouraged some guests to allow luggage to be taken off by Carnival.
4-Communicate frequently during the “morning of” as to how it is moving along and advising guests on where to go while they wait.
I have always joked that cruises are missing an opportunity to offer a better “Last Bite”. You have this great vacation and then they drop you at the docks at sunrise like a “one night stand”.
What did I leave out about how we can make “getting off the ship” better for you?
Andy