pierpressure

I couldn’t agree more. We were sick with the same respiratory illness that hundreds on the ship were experiencing and searching for our bags in and around the covered area was very taxing. We’re late 70’s and very small so being shoved, walked on, hit and run over by luggage while searching wasn’t pleasant! We found 2 bags but couldn’t find the third after 3 rounds of checking in the chaos. A port attendant said she’d look but never came back. Thankfully, my husband found a contracted cruise line rep who was in the baggage area (completely unidentified except for a name badge that said Connie) and she said she’d search for us. About 15 minutes later she arrived with our bag which was about 300 ft away from the others in another colour category. We will not consider San Diego again for a embarkation or disembarkation point. San Diego City, you should be very ashamed of your cruise port facilities, if you can call them that.

This may be the reported number of ill passengers but there were hundreds who didn’t report to the medical clinic when very ill. Many wouldn’t pay the prices requested so just stayed away, I heard in conversations. We’ve just returned from this cruise and there were easily more than 1,000 ill passengers. I had Norovirus on Day 4 (perhaps already on the ship from previous cruise?) and a significant respiratory illness with a nasty nonending cough which those approx. 1,000 passengers, including my husband, had from about the midway point of the cruise. There were even cases of pneumonia diagnosed by the medical clinic according to a man with it who had been diagnosed that day. By then the extra safety protocols had been removed as the norovirus was controlled, I suppose. The respiratory illnesses then flourished rapidly with passengers again using shared serving utensils in the Lido buffet, many electing to forgo the handwashing machines or hand sanitizer machines and few sick passengers covering their mouths while hacking away. The entire ship sounded like a hospital ward inside and out. As an example, there were many of the cruise passengers on our flight home last evening and most were in fits of coughing throughout the flight. As the average age on this 35 day cruise was 78 years, I believe HAL should have kept the extra safety protocols in place for the duration of the cruise to try to minimize the illnesses on board. My husband and I feel fortunate we just lost 1.5 weeks of the cruise to illness as it could have been much worse.