Just got back from a 3.5 week cruise with elderly mother and my brother up the Amazon River -- had spent quite a bit of time in upper Amazon tributary systems in Ecuador many years ago, but this was my first visit up the main stem -- very interesting!!! The itinerary also stopped through Devil's Island (Papillon!) and a few Caribbean ports on the way up and down, and had a ton of relaxing days at sea to boot, so all in all a great trip.
The real bonus for us from a financial standpoint was that the ship (ms/Prinsendam) was just coming out of drydock and they didn't finish all repairs,etc. before this trip left, so there were a bunch of maintenance issues they had to deal with during the cruise. This caused a
lot of whining on the part of some passengers, believe me. While we had some (in my mind) relatively minor issues in our cabins, this did not materially diminish our enjoyment of the trip at
all. But I have to admit the collective complaining did yield us all a nice financial benefit from Holland America to compensate for the hassles! In total we got: two free bottles of wine, $750 in
cash the last day of the cruise (to use towards our tips/shipboard accounts, and the balance paid to us with a check), some free photos,
and a credit towards a future cruise equivalent to 15% of what we paid for this one (worth about $3000, which we will apply to another world cruise portion cruise with HAL we're doing in early 2014)!
So now I'm hoping that
every future cruise we ever go on has similar maintenance or service 'issues' so we get a similar windfall! (Maybe I'll start tracking drydock schedules or something!
).
(Reminds me of the way I and many other young folks used to game the system with that old discount air carrier People's Express back in the 80s, where it was 100% certain that they would overbook like 50% of the flight, so all you had to do is arrive sort of late in the check-in process and you would be guaranteed not only a replacement flight for the one you 'missed', but also an additional ticket to compensate for your trouble! Not a bad ROI, even if a bit ethically questionable!!
).