Carnival Triumph problems not deterring

some NJ vacationers from cruise ships

Repeat passengers don't fear troubles
Feb 18, 2013

If there was even a small possibility that Carmen Cancel-Seaman would consider going
on a cruise, the Carnival Triumph washed it away.
For years, her late husband, Joseph, urged her to go on a cruise. Her friends told her
that if she would just try it once she would like it. Last Christmas her daughter told her
that she wanted to buy her a ticket for a cruise, and Cancel-Seaman told her absolutely
not because she had seen or heard about incident after incident at sea.
Then all of a sudden this happened, the 60-year-old Neptune resident said, referring to
the ill-fated Triumph, whose engine room caught fire on Feb. 10 and left it lifeless in the
Gulf of Mexico, leaving thousands of passengers in hot, unsanitary misery. I now know
that I never will be going on one.
The cruise industry expects many others to make such declarations against cruising,
but such decisions will likely be short-lived, industry experts say. While a very public
mishap like that of the Triumph may permanently turn off first-time and would-be
cruisers, veterans arent ready to turn their back on what they find as efficient,
affordable and relaxing travel.
These are staunch defenders of cruises who have seen the downsides one
Manchester woman saw a man jump overboard and not come back up and say, in
reference to the Triumph incident, they are risks worth taking. And then there are those
who have had one bad sea experience too many and now choose strictly terra firma
vacations.
Still, these are halcyon times on the high seas. The worldwide cruise industry has had 7
percent compound growth since 1990 and is expected to continue to grow through
2017, according to Cruise Market Watch. Last years deadly Costa Concordia
crash caused a sizable stock market hit for Carnival, which owns the company that

operates the cruise ship, but the stock bounced back. Carnival shares fell 43 cents on
Friday, to $36.92 (the stock market was closed Monday).
As soon as it gets off the media for about two or three weeks, (the industry) pretty
much goes back to normal, said Ken Heit, owner of Florida-based Adventure Travels.
His company has seen about a 25 percent decline in sales since the Triumph incident.
It doesnt really have that much of a long-lasting effect. Its a remarkably resilient
industry.
An old maxim said two narrow demographics filled the bunks of cruise ships the
newly wed and the nearly dead. The old steel-hulled liners were smaller, highly
regimented and featured few amenities aside from gambling, said Carolyn Spencer
Brown, the editor of Pennington-based Cruise Critic.
A shift came around the mid-1990s, and the liners plying the waters now are capacious
floating cities with boutique dining, day care centers, ice skating rinks and, on one ship,
a park, Spencer Brown said.
There is little that will deter Theresa Papa of Manchester from cruises. She has four
booked for this year and another two for 2014. Once, on a Carnival cruise, she saw a
man and a woman arguing on the ship, and then he left and jumped overboard. And it
is a given that there will be a run-in with a group of people drinking heavily. But shes
willing to take on those risks.
Its the same thing as going on a plane; thats the risk, Papa said. You could go up in
the air and come right back down, and thats the end of you.
It took just two cruises to sour Jennifer Bookstavers idea of ocean vacations. The first
cruise was fine, she said, but the second was a nightmare. It was a Carnival cruise in
1998 during Hurricane Georges, and Bookstaver, 49, was pregnant. Rocking in 20-foot
waves intensified her prenatal sickness. The crew had placed vomit bags between the
walls and the railings, and they were quickly filling, she said.
All the hallways smelled of vomit, Bookstaver, of Neptune, wrote in an email.
She told her husband, You will never trap me on a seven-day cruise again ever, and
from then on, the family has vacationed domestically.

Dennis McManus, a former Navy sailor who lives in Toms River, said he was one of
nearly 100 people on a cruise ship tender that ran aground off Bar Harbor, Maine, last
year. That was the last straw for McManus, who had gone on more than a dozen
cruises since the 1990s but said the level of service and quality of cruises had been
diminishing in recent years and its just not cruising anymore.
Toni Sergi, 55, has sailed on the Carnival Glory before and said last weeks incident
wont deter her from future vacations. As photos from the ship showing leaking sewage
and tents set up on the decks went public, Sergi, of the West Keansburg section of
Hazlet, thought that it could have been her. And if it was, she said she would deal with it.
The way I see it is, you didnt hit an iceberg, did you? Sergi said.