Stuck in the Seychelles: Travel Advisor Put Ashore by Oceania | Travel Research Online

When Debi King and her customer set sail on an Oceania World Cruise last month, it never even crossed her mind that the captain might put her off the ship in the Seychelles—with just $300 in her pocket and no recourse at all.

And just as King was crossing the globe to get home instead of sailing around Africa as she had planned, Virgin Voyages was sending out an email reminding travel advisors that soliciting travel business from fellow passengers while onboard their ships is strictly forbidden.

As more travel advisors than ever hit the seas this summer, King’s story and the Virgin email make up a cautionary tale highlighting the fact that “soliciting customers” onboard cruise ships is prohibited; some cruise lines are getting serious about enforcement; and once you are accused, you apparently have little recourse but to get off, bags in hand, and find your own way home.

Before we begin, I’ll note that both Oceania and Virgin Voyages declined to comment for this column, and so we will take King’s word about what exactly happened—and how, even though she tried her best to follow the rules, she nonetheless ended up on the dock waving goodbye to her $70,000 dream trip.

It all started in February, when King’s client invited her to share her stateroom on a world cruise, for leg sailing from Los Angeles to Tahiti. (It all went so well at first that her client invited her to stay on to Sydney, Australia.) During their first 40 days together, Oceania announced that troubles in the Middle East were causing them to bypass the Red Sea and instead sail around Africa. Thinking to cheer up her client, who was “bummed about missing the Mediterranean,” King suggested options for the new month-long leg of the itinerary, and suggested a five-night safari “and maybe a couple of nights at Victoria Falls” through a local tour company she knew.

“She was excited about the safari idea, and soon she started talking to other friends on the ship who also wanted to come,” King told TRO. “So I emailed the tour company and said, ‘Could you put something together for me?’ And that sentence was my big mistake.”

As King was sailing, the tour company created a website and a flyer for her, including the itinerary and lodge choices, and adding her agency name and contact information; she printed it out at the ship’s internet café and gave it “only to people who asked me. I made sure to say to every single person more than once I cannot be their travel advisor; they could go through their own travel advisor to book it or contact the safari company direct. And yet, it didn’t occur to me that I was giving them this piece of paper with my agency information on it, and how that might look if it got into the wrong hands.”

At this point, King says, the ship still was not offering any excursions, and people were anxious. So when she suggested the 10 people or so to whom she had spoken should meet in the ship’s bar to talk about the safari, they told other guests, who told other guests, and in the end 50 people showed up. Still sure that she was not doing anything wrong, King actually gave the flyer to the ship’s Reception desk and asked if it was okay.

Soon, though, she found herself called into the office, informed she had broken the cruise contract, and told to cease and desist soliciting customers onboard. “I said I realize how this looks, but I did not intentionally add my contact information to the flyer, and I have not made any bookings myself and was very clear that they should call their own travel advisor. But I understand and apologize. They said okay, just get your name off everything and stop distributing these flyers; I said sure, I did call the safari company to remove my agency from everything, but you realize there are many flyers out there. And she said ok, that happened, but you know now not to do it anymore.”

As the time of the safari neared, King emailed the ship’s purser to ask if there were any special requirements for getting off the ship in Mozambique. To be helpful, one customer printed up all the paperwork from the safari company—including the itinerary, helpful information about safaris, and the vouchers and invoices from the safari company, none of them including King’s name or agency name, but also her original copy of the flyer with King’s name on it—and gave it to the concierge to hand out to the other guests who had signed up.

Soon King got a knock on her door and someone delivered all the information neatly printed in a nice envelope. “And then the next thing you know I got a call on Saturday night saying the GM wants to meet with you at 6:30 and I’m thinking oh great, what now. And there was the GM, the captain and another officer, and not Millie the concierge. They said someone had all this information printed in our office and it has your information on it, and I reminded them I had said there would be stuff out there, but said I promise you I have not done any marketing, in fact the group is full and the safari company has said it can’t even accept any more people.

“But the captain didn’t want to hear a word I said. He said he had told corporate what I was doing and they said I need to disembark at the next port of call and be off the ship by tomorrow, and it is out of his hands. It being the weekend, there was no one in corporate that I could even call; they said I could call corporate when I got home.”

King says she went back down to the office again a third time to talk to the captain. She said she is on disability and so she is not even a practicing travel advisor at this point. The group going on the safari went down too and backed up King’s story. But there was no changing the captain’s mind; he insisted the decision was out of his hands.

She called her attorney, who told her to be sure to get something in writing explaining exactly why she was being put off the ship; they circled the paragraph in the cruise contract about soliciting being prohibited and handed it to her.

On Sunday morning the local police were waiting at the dock, and so was a representative from the US Embassy. “I told her the story and said I don’t know what I am going to do, I have $300 on me, I don’t have $2,500 for a one-way ticket to get home. They are kicking off a disabled 60-year-old woman to fend for myself.”

In the end, Oceania bought her a first-class ticket home. “I flew first class but I didn’t even get to enjoy it; I slept the whole way and cried in my little cubicle,” she says.

So what’s her takeaway from the experience?

“If the cruise lines really want to enforce the rules, they need to be more clear. You can’t solicit, but what about when someone asks you? Is no one allowed to say they are a travel advisor? Can a lawyer or a doctor hand out a business card or give people advice, or is that soliciting? Is that allowed?”

In the end, King says, it’s a rule that doesn’t mesh easily with the experience of travel advisors on luxury cruises.

“A luxury cruise—and especially a World Cruise—is about making lifelong friends. We’re eating dinner together and going on excursions together and talking about what everyone is doing on the next stop. You become a community. On this cruise, at the end of the night people would sometimes say, ‘I’m tired, I’m going home’—our cabins became our homes, our community.

“When I sail I make friends with everyone because that’s my personality. I’m not going to lie to everyone about what I do for a living. And selling travel is not like selling Tupperware, where you have to convince people they need it. If you say you sell travel, they already know they want it, they know they need it, and so they start asking you questions. I wasn’t there as a travel advisor; I wasn’t on a fam trip. I was just there to enjoy myself and relax and enjoy this amazing gift, going around Africa with my friend.”

What do you tell fellow passengers when you sail? Do you want to talk travel or just relax? Comment below or email me at crosentrave@gmail.com and maybe we’ll include your thoughts in next week’s Rosen Report—along with advice from travel attorney Tom Carpenter on what he thinks you need to do to not get put off the ship!

Cheryl’s 40-year career in journalism is bookended by roles in the travel industry, including Executive Editor of Business Travel News in the 1990s, and recently, Editor in Chief of Travel Market Report and admin of Cheryl Rosen’s Group for Travel Professionals, a news and support group on Facebook. As an independent contractor since retiring from the 9-to-5 to travel more, she has written regular articles about the life and business of travel agents for Luxury Travel Advisor, Travel Agent, and Insider Travel Report. She also writes and edits for professional publications in the financial services, business, and technology sectors.