Excellent Cruise, Outrageous Add On Prices - Letter to Oceana

Marina Cruise Review to South Pacific

Haggertp

Contributor Level: Purser

Cruises: 7+ cruises

Review: 1

Helpful Votes: 16

Overall rating:

4 out of 5

18 Night Pacific Serenade (Valparaiso To Tahiti)

Sail date: December 17, 2014

Ship: Marina

Cabin type: Balcony

Traveled as: Couple

Reviewed: 9 years ago

Review summary

We recently cruised on the Marina from Santiago to Tahiti. The cruise was nice, the food was very good, and the service excellent as we would expect from a 5.5 star cruise line. BUT

We were aware that Oceana’s wine and beverage prices were always higher than other cruise lines and—

Your wine package of “…a personally selected 7 bottle special selection of wines…” for $297.50 ($42.50 per bottle) looked OK. I did not recognize many of the wines so before purchasing I looked them up on e “Wine Searcher.com” - probably the standard for wine research, reviews pricing and availability. We wanted all red wines and looked up those we thought we might like.

OUCH – We looked up 12 wines and discovered retail prices ranging from $6 to $14. The average price of the wines was $9.94 (your cost about $6.40 per bottle). The wine ratings from multiple reviews ranged from 81 to 88 points with an average of 84.3 points. This is pretty poor for “specially selected wines”

It takes a large amount of courage, or a pre-planned decision to gouge your customers, to mark up the average wine from $6.50 cost to $42.50, that’s over 650%. How can you justify this ??

We took the Nautica Black Sea Cruise in Aug2013. We spent 2 weeks driving through Turkey including Selcuk (Ephesus) before embarking in Athens. Oceana’s small group full day tour of Ephesus (12 persons max) was over $250 pp. We took the same Ephesus tour in Turkey for $65 pp using the same tour supplier. On our Marina cruise, in Easter Island, we took a professionally led small group 2 day tour for the same price as the half day tour by Oceana.

So much for our warm and fuzzy feelings about Oceana’s pricing tactics.