Arthur Frommer lambasts cruise gimmicks

Cruise commentator and veteran traveller Arthur Frommer thinks cruise lines are dumbing down – and he blames it on the USA. His comments follow an interview with a guest expert on his Travel Show during which she described the new circus training lessons, bungy jumping, live comedy classes, spa cabins, boxing rings and bowling alleys.

Frommer says these are developments deeply disturbing and reflecting a lower level of culture, education and maturity in America. He goes on to add, ‘A cruise should be sufficient in itself. It is an opportunity to venture out onto a new and unfamiliar area of the world — the vast oceans. It is sufficiently different and sufficiently provocative of eternal questions, that it need not be "aided" by bungee jumping, amateur boxing, glass-blowing exhibitions, rock-climbing and wave-surfing.

A cruise should be an occasion for conversation and reading, for long afternoons in a chaise lounge gazing at the sea and enjoying it. Those were the classic pleasures of cruising that once satisfied a large number of people, who emerged from the cruise with their equilibrium restored and with memories and new friendships’. In fact, he claims, cruise ships are becoming amusement parks geared to a child's mentality. They are, he says, raucous and hyperactive and he cannot understand why people go to sea to become part of a crowd when the activities on offer: bungy jumping, rock-climbing, wave-surfing and glass-blowing, could easily be undertaken ashore. And his final damning comment? ‘It was hoped the people who ascended to the top ranks of the cruise-ship industry would be well-educated, well-read, thoughtful people. Turns out, they are commonplace, dime-a-dozen, mindless oafs’.