Fuel surcharges for the cruise lines

Name: Budget Travel LLC
Price range: $

By Budget Travel

October 3, 2012

Carnival, Costa, Cunard, Holland America, Princess, and Seabourn are charging fuel surcharges of $5 a day to the first two passengers in each stateroom for sailings that depart on or after Feb. 1, 2008. The fee is being slapped on bookings that have already been made, and will be added to future bookings.

Other cruise lines will soon add fuel charges to bookings. Here's a bunch of them, courtesy of online booking agency Vacations to Go:

Cruise West, $12 a person, each day.

Crystal, $7 a person, each day.

Oceania Cruises, $7 a person, each day.

Regent Seven Seas, $7.50 a person, each day.

Majestic America, $8.50 a person, each day.

MSC Cruises, $6 each day, for each of the first two passengers in each cabin.

Norwegian and Orient Lines, $7 a person, each day, for the first and second passengers in a stateroom.

Royal Caribbean, Celebrity and Azamara: $5 a person, each day, for the first two passengers in each stateroom.

Silversea, $10 a person, each day.

Viking River Cruises, $7 a person, each day.

Voyages of Discovery, $10 a person, each day.

Windstar, $8.50 a person, each day.

EARLIER Adding fees after you've paid?

Plan Your Next Getaway

Keep reading

Movie Quest: Florida

It turns out that Florida's tourism office has created an online guide to movie-quest (and TV-quest) sightseeing in the Sunshine State: Movies in Florida. Moviegoers might argue over the most interesting film ever shot in Florida (Apollo 13? True Lies? All About the Benjamins? The Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan series?), but why bicker over one spot when you can visit a bunch of 'em. Okay, so some of the movies mentioned in the guide are kind of lame (Clambake, for instance), and a few of the films only had a few minutes of on-screen film actually filmed on location in Florida (such as Midnight Cowboy, with only the closing sequence shot there), and a couple of the movie locations are in the Charlotte Harbor area, a region that's pretty dull except for the Everglades. But who's bitching? Some films were obviously shot in Florida (Apollo 13, Goldfinger, Cocoon), but others are surprises, such as Day of the Dead and Meet the Fockers. See the full list here, and you may find your curiosity sparked. Info on maps, hotels, etc., can also be found on the site. SLIDE SHOW We rounded up the year's most travel-inspiring flicks into a slide show, in which Bud Travel pops into the films in a Zelig-like way. RELATED See our Web roundup of the places where celebs hang out in L.A. and N.Y.C.

Inspiration

Rare passport stamps

We loved the exotic passport stamps that readers of BudgetTravel.com recently shared. Here's a slide show of the most fascinating ones, from Laos, Turkey, Libya, Sri Lanka, Burma, Nepal, Brazil, Suriname, Mozambique, and Bangladesh. Since publishing the slide show, we've received a couple more rare ones: Back in the 1970s, I made many trips to Afghanistan, where I was involved in helping the Afghan government start a new medical school in the city of Jalalabad. On one of these trips, I was traveling from Karachi, Pakistan, where I had picked up a case of Skippy peanut butter at the American Embassy commissary to take to my son who was working in a youth camp in France, where I was headed the next day. When the Afghan customs officer at Kabul Airport asked what was in the box, I told him it was food and took the cap off one of the jars so he could see and smell it. He was totally bewildered, and filled up this entire page in my passport giving me permission to import the stuff, so that when I departed the next day I would be permitted to take it out through Customs.—Edwin W. Brown, M.D., Indianapolis When my husband and I traveled to Zimbabwe in 2005, we got this cool stamp. We were there on a hunting safari and I got to go to Victoria Falls too. The falls were so powerful and beautiful! At the time the country had it's share of troubles, and it's saddening to know that it has continued it's spiral downward. With the fastest growing inflation in the world and severe shortages of everything, the country is in great turmoil.—Wende Warren, Milwaukee [who has a blog]. Shown at left is a honorary stamp from Port Lockroy, British Antarctic Territory.You'll find the stories behind all of the stamps featured in the slide show here. Update 11/28: It’s not too late, you can still send us your coolest passport stamps

Adding fees after you've paid?!

It's unheard of, right? You agree to a price and pay, and that's it. Not in the cruise industry. Pretty much every North American cruise line has added a fuel surcharge (of $5 to $8.50 per passenger per day; some cap it $70 per person per voyage). While many cruise lines are applying the surcharge only to passengers who have yet to fully pay the fare, or for bookings made after the surcharge was announced, others are behaving less reasonably. Carnival, Costa, Holland America, Cunard, Princess, and Seabourn are all adding the $5 per passenger per day surcharge to the bill of anyone cruising after February 1—even those passengers who had paid in full months ago. It seems to me that this is borderline outrageous, and I can't think of any other industry that operates this way. (Even the airlines haven't tried such a thing!) Here at the magazine, the cost of paper and postage are always going up, but we don't start billing subscribers more in the middle of their subscription. UPDATE 11/28 See a list of the cruise lines and their fuel surcharges.

Spill your secrets about Denver

Travel is one of those things that you'd get really good at if you did them all the time. Unfortunately, few people get to do it all the time—including the staff of Budget Travel. So we're pooling our knowledge: We ask you a question, you share your advice, and then we spotlight the most helpful tips in a future magazine issue. This week's question is:"I'll be in Denver for three days in January. Where should I go for my morning coffee? Low-key lunches? Nice dinners? Which neighborhoods should I explore? Anything else I shouldn't miss?" —Beth Collins, Associate Editor EARLIER: Readers answer a question about which wineries to visit in the Finger Lakes, N.Y.

Real Deals