Passengers Revolt After Cruise Ship Fails to Make Any Promised Stops

Are there any pleasant cruise ship stories outside Rose and Jack boning in that car parked below deck? Because it seems like every day brings some news item about naive land-dwellers paying thousands of dollars to be mistreated at sea by companies that do not seem to care at all what happens to guests once the boat hits open water. Today in cruise nightmares, passengers aboard a Norwegian Cruise Line ship have banded together in protest after a cruise that promised a magical journey to the Netherlands and Iceland instead trapped guests for weeks aboard ship without functioning toilets.

As passengers set sail for their two-week vacation, they were told that a planned stop to Amsterdam had been replaced with Normandy, France. But bad weather forced the ship to skip the France stop as well. Then all their planned stops to Iceland were replaced with stops in Norway, where many towns had already shut down for the season. One passenger told People the only place that was open in one town was a grocery store where a probably very confused employee tried to feed the influx of passengers:

“There was a restaurant that opened and all it was able to serve was frozen hamburgers,” the passenger said. “That’s all he had. There was nowhere to get a cup of coffee. The main feature that was open was the grocery store. To say that that’s equivalent to Iceland is a pretty far stretch”

To make matters worse, onboard the ship, food began to go stale and toilets stopped working. Passengers were told they would finally dock in Scotland and began to pump themselves for solid land, only to be told at the last minute they would not be allowed off the ship even as they could see Scotland from the deck.

Passengers then crowded the main atrium of the ship, chanting “Refund,” and demanding to be taken back to London so they could finally just be free of the literal floating tourist trap.

Instead of giving passengers refunds for what sounds like a horrible experience of being set adrift at sea for a fortnight, Norwegian Cruise Lines offered 25 percent off on passengers’ next cruises. As if any of the probably very constipated passengers gnawing on hunks of stale hardtack would care to board the Flying Dutchman again.