A message to Kuki

[Cruiseguy]

Kuki, this post is not meant to attack, demean, or flame you, Cruisemates or any Cruisemates staff. Its just an honest question. Several of us west coasters feel that the Mercury cruise out of SF is not our cup of tea and as you said we don't have to go. And your right. Soooooo. Can we west coasters have an un-offcial Cruisemates cruise where we set up the cruise and elect our own host from the Cruisemates staff? Even though our Pride cruise was small, the good times and the friendships that we developed will last forever and I believe that is one of the major goals of a Cruisemates Cruise no matter how many people sail.

I am not trying to undermine or second guess your SF cruise but some of us would like to cruise sooner out of L.A. or Long Beach (no flight involved), we have some newer to new ships down here with some interesting itineraries that we would like to try. Granted we could do them ourselves but it would be great to have the blessings of you and Cruisemates.

Most of us have sailed many many times and have the knowledge to organise a group cruise and enjoy the group perks that go along with them.

I bet our next group will be larger and I would like to see it sail under the Cruisemates Banner.

Kuki, can we do this?

[Kuki]

CruiseGuy...

Absolutely! Anyone can put together their own group cruises, and chose a ship, and a date, a host, or everyone just shares the work involved.

If you are asking if you can put together a group and use the CruiseMates web site to promote, the answer is no!

Pretty simple reasons really as to why not. If we were to allow one group to promote their cruise, we'd have to allow everyone to promote any group they wanted to put together.
Agents would be flooding the message boards promoting group cruises, and group space they want to fill, and the boards would simply turn into a medium for free advertising for travel agents.

This is a commercial web site, supported by advertisers. And that advertising makes it possible for the wealth of information available here to be free to anyone who cares to search for it. To not protect our advertisers would plainly be foolish.

We are presently offering SIX different group cruises, from different ports of embarkation, different lengths, different itineraries, to try and appeal to a broad cross section of cruisemates readers. It is our goal to help CruiseMates folks together, and we send out CM staff to host them, to encourage socializing, and fun.

Even with that variety, we don't expect there to be one there which will suit everyone, for all a wide variey of reasons.

We do encourage people booking their own cruises to use our message boards for roll calls to find try and find other cruisemates on their sailings, and we offer the "Meet On Board" data base, for the same purpose.

However, posts used specifically to solicit people to book a particular cruise are deleted as they violate our User Agreement.

That said... If you are interested in a particular cruise, and would like to see it become an "official" CruiseMates group cruise, you certainly can research it, and see if you can find an agent who is willing to submit a bid to us.

That's the first step in ANY of our CruiseMates Group Cruises.

Once the bid is submitted, meeting our criteria, and we judge it to be a reasonable package, we put the exact same sailing out for bids to other travel agents.. to shop it, to assure ourselves we are getting the very best deal we can for our readers.

And.. once it's set as a CruiseMates group cruise, everyone would be free to promote it on the message boards. However... the host would still be chosen by CruiseMates.



Post Edited (03-21-04 14:25)

[Cruiseguy]

Kuki, thanks for the quick reply. Just wondering.