Carnival’s discounts caused ‘social unrest’?

There’s an argument being made in the travel pages of the British newspapers that heavy discounting in cruise prices has lead to ‘social unrest’ which is really just a polite way of saying ‘the wrong people are taking cruises’ – this comes after six Carnival Cruise Line passengers were arrested in Antigua as a result of a dockside brawl with a cab driver, a punch-up on P&O’s Ventura during a Christmas cruise and scenes of passengers on Cunard and Princess ships that have changed their itineraries staging sit-ins or mass protests.

However, the cruise industry argues that it’s not down to people’s income or social class, but the amount of alcohol you’ve drunk and, according Carnival Corporation’s CEO Micky Arison ‘the circumstances you're in’. Quite what that means is anybody’s guess, but it’s probably true that if you’ve invested all your disposable income in a cruise, regardless of how discounted it is, you will find it hard to remain even-tempered when something goes wrong, which means that for the next couple of years at least, we can expect to see more irate passengers complaining at cold food, missed ports or poor service. However, cruise prices are likely to start rising in the next eighteen to twenty-four months, but once cruise passengers have learned to make a fuss, will they go back to their more reticent complaints when the recession is over?