But we all want that special memory, and one taken by a professional of you and your partner, is just a bit nicer. And you are offered various ways to have them with different sizes. So far so good. There are about five or six pros on board and they will come around at ships evenings such as a 'black tie' evening, or will take photos as you disembark to go on tours.
What I have issues with is the prices. We bought for ourselves a photo memory book. Just three photos of 8"x10" and a couple of standard stock photos. The quality was pretty good, but that cost was just under £45. Quite pricey for what we got.
A standard 7x5 photo was around £6 and a 8x10 was just under £12. You of course are paying extra because of the ones that do not buy them. Have they not thought that by reducing the price by half about three times more passengers would buy them?
One of the biggest stings I noticed was on a canvas print offer. A 16" x 20" canvas print was on a 'special offer' of 5p short of £70! You can get this anywhere at £40. Below is a copy of the professional photo taken on board. It is only a 'photo of a photo' so not quite as good as the real thing.
Enough about the photos. Also on offer was a 'behind the scenes tour of the ship. Down to the engine room and up the bridge, that sort of thing. Don't forget this costs the ship nothing, just an officer to walk around and point out the places etc. I was interested so asked about it. Yes I could go but the cost was £75 each! No thanks was the quick answer!
The tours were also quite pricey, although I cannot give the prices here as I had organized my own with another company.
And of course there was the Wi-fi. That was a little gem. As you are on the high sea the internet is the ships own and not what you could expect back home. But it was OK for the odd email etc or surfing Facebook. They wanted £62.50 for 250 minutes! That works out to around £15 an hour. Needless to say I did not bother. I stayed out of touch for a couple of days until I could get to port and find a free Wi-Fi spot.
So that is today's moan about the cost. Of course you did not have to pay it, and I did not for most of it. But it just seems they want to get that little bit more out of the customer, even though you have already paid a great deal to be there in the first place.
What I did like however was the cashless on board payment system. When you board you are asked to present a credit or debit card. They will take the details and then give you a card used to open the cabin door. This is also used to pay for all items on board from a large item to a packet of sweets. This does mean that you do not have to carry around cash or credit cards etc. At the end of the trip your on board spend is calculated and taken from your card. You can ask for a print out at anytime of the spend so you can keep an eye on it.
And then just to finish this off nicely, a photo that I took with my own camera, just of a flower we noticed while on a trip.
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