Someone asked me the other day why I would continue to go on cruises after the MS Costa Concordia accident in January.
Safety at sea is something that I’m never really concerned about, as I feel my chances of meeting my demise are much greater in one of the 25+ year old 737-400’s I spend over 100,000 miles a year in than on a cruise ship.
I happened to be aboard the Seven Seas Navigator when the Concordia struck a rock and capsized off the coast of Giglio, Italy. I remember watching the news reports in amazement that such a thing could happen with all the modern technology onboard these floating cities.
As news of the ship’s accident began to dominate the news, there wasn’t much talk about it from fellow passengers on the Navigator or from the ship’s crew. Perhaps we just didn’t want to think about it as we floated around in the Atlantic.
Cruise ship accidents are rare and these cities-at-sea are among the safest forms of transportation available. But like any mode of transport, accidents happen.
I took my first cruise back in 1998 on Royal Caribbean’s MS Sovereign of the Seas, which at the time bore the title of “worlds largest cruise ship.” I was hosting a group of listeners from the radio station I was working for at the time and we were cruising the Caribbean. It was then that the sea bit me and I ended up with the cruise bug (not the throwing-up kind).
Since then I’ve traveled on some of the finest ships at sea including the RMS Queen Mary 2, Seven Seas Voyager, the aforementioned Navigator and several of the new Holland America Line ships. I’ve endured (aka suffered) 50-foot seas on the Atlantic during one of my journeys on QM2 and been on smooth-as-glass water in the Caribbean Sea. Even when the ship’s medical staff was going cabin-to-cabin administering “injections” to combat the 50 footers, I never feared for my life.
Well, maybe a little. But that was only because the dining rooms were closed for two days and I was hoping I wouldn’t starve to death.
Being someone who doesn’t like people all that much, I tend to stick with smaller ships; which is why Regent has become my favorite line and the 490 passenger Navigator my favorite ship. But I’ve been curiously following the two ships that lay claim to “world’s largest” – Royal Caribbean‘s MS Oasis of the Seas and MS Allure of the Seas.
These 5,400 passenger behemoths are more than cities-at-sea, they’re just… massive. Since their debut, I’ve wanted to find out first hand what it’s like to spend a week onboard. Since they’re home-port is Fort Lauderdale and I’m just a half-hour away, I bit the bullet and booked a week on Allure of the Seas.
I’m going into this knowing that booze and soft drinks aren’t included, I’m probably going to have to wait in plenty of lines and nickle-and-dimming will be the norm. But I’m looking forward to spending seven days on a wonder of maritime engineering in a two-level suite overlooking the (hopefully) calm waters of the western Caribbean while trying to avoid the “Gold by the Inch” sales.
My journey begins on August 26th and like any good blogger, I’ll have daily updates and plenty of photos to share.
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From the mailbag:
Via email: I’m almost ready to open my new store at (URL removed as store is not live) and was wondering how much money I can expect to spend on Google advertising. I don’t have much of a budget, but know I have to do something.
Pay-per-click advertising is a great way to get immediate traffic to your store while SEO takes time as those coveted organic (free) listings don’t pop up overnight. How much you’re going to spend on Google AdWords depends on the cost per click – you can be in an industry where clicks cost a $0.10 – $0.50 or you can be in an industry where those clicks cost a dollar or more. If you have a Google AdWords account, you can go into your control panel and use the “Get traffic estimates” tool to get an estimated cost for a specific keyword. After you have a handle on how much these clicks will cost you, you can set a daily budget.
I’m going to warn you, you can lose a lot of money on bad PPC campaigns. You need to keep an eye on your ads daily seeing which ones are bringing you in the maximum return, tweak the ones that are providing a moderate return and kill the ones that are just burning through cash. If you aren’t comfortable in managing your PPC accounts yourself, you can always outsource to a qualified agency.
Best of luck with your new store and welcome to the wonderful world of self-employment.
Via email: I’ve had my store for about four years and have been reading about the importance of blogging. I don’t have a blog for my store, but I signed up for a blogger account. How can I use my store’s domain with that? By the way, I enjoy your blog and you’re the one who inspired me to get one for my store.
Well, I’m thrilled that I inspired someone. Usually people tell me I give them gas. I’m rarely told I give them inspiration.
Looking at your email address I can see you have a Yahoo! Store (please email me if it’s not the domain in your email address you’re talking about). In order to use Blogger with a Yahoo! Store, you either have to give your blog it’s own domain name such as mystorenameblog.com or use it with a subdomain such as blog.mystorename.com. Unfortunately, you can’t use mystorename.com/blog with a Yahoo! Store.
Google has a help page that will walk you through setting up your Blogger account to either use a domain or subdomain. You can access it here: http://support.google.com/blogger/bin/static.py?hl=en&ts=1233381&page=ts.cs