Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Cruising Pregnant... or Not

An article on USA Today's Cruise Log is about a 26 week pregnant woman not being allowed to board the ship. Rules when she booked her cruise had a cut off dated of 27 weeks but it was updated to 24 weeks after she had booked. To me this is a situation that is similar to the fuel charges when they were adapted over the winter. Carnival is this case has every right to change their rules regarding the cutoff date but should have lived up to their rules that were in place when the ticket was purchased. If the cruise line has a serious concern on this mater, a press release should have been made and every effort to notify anyone that may be in jeopardy of violating the new rule should have been notified. I am not sure if Carnival requires pregnancy to be disclosed when booking a cruise but would think that it is not. This is a case of a mistake made by the cruise line in how they handled the situation and the passenger has every right to be upset and the onus should be on Carnival to correct the problem. One of my biggest pet peeves on any contract is the statement "may be changed at any time". If any company/corporation needs to have that type of statement on their contacts, they need to be aware that they have to alert all those that may be affected by the "change" and if they don't know who, they would have to let everyone know.

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