Brenda and Gerald Moran are what you might call “regulars” on Royal Caribbean — or they were — until they were banned for life after they complained too loudly on a cruise website. For the past 3 years, they took two cruises a year with Royal Caribbean, but according to the cruise line, they complained about almost all of them. Finally, after stirring up too much controversy on a popular cruise site, the company banned the Morans for life.
Last September, Brenda and Gerald got stuck with a stinky, sewage soaked stateroom on their 14- night Alaskan cruise. The cruise line refused to move them into another room, but offered a 20% discount on their next cruise. They felt this was fair compensation and decided to book their next cruise on Royal Caribbean.
After the cruise, Brenda logged on to Cruise Critic and posted a review of her trip as well as a few comments on their forums, says MSNBC. A few weeks later she got a call from Royal Caribbean offering her an additional $500 credit for her trouble. Brenda was happy with this offer and again posted the details to Cruise Critic. This is apparently when everything went wrong.
Some board members felt the Morans had complained their way to an unfair discount and posted their displeasure. They felt that the Morans were teaching others how to “scam” Royal Caribbean. Some went so far as to contact Royal Caribbean’s president and chief executive, Adam Goldstein to complain about the Morans getting any compensation at all.
A few weeks later the Morans received a phone call from a man named Sebastian who identified himself as Bill Weeks’ boss. Sebastian was unhappy that Brenda had posted a negative review and had shared the compensation information on Cruise Critic’s boards. He asked Brenda to take down her review “at once.” Brenda refused and cited her right to free speech.
The following day the Morans received another phone call from Sebastian stating the couple was banned forever from the cruise line.
The Morans received a $500 check along with a letter explaining that they were, indeed, banned. Royal Carribbean’s spokesperson told MSNBC:
“On all but one of those sailing the Morans felt there were a variety of service failures they experienced,” he said. “In a small number of cases we agreed and compensated them appropriately. In most cases, however, we disagreed. Having concluded that we are unable to meet the expectations of the Morans, we have told them that they would be best served by sailing with another company.”
Harsh! Do you think Royal Caribbean should have listened to the people complaining that the Morans were scammers? Is the ban too harsh? Or just practical?
Complaining couple banned from cruise line [MSNBC](Thanks, Cherise!)
(Photo: physis3141 )
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@NameGoesHere: If you click on the MSNBC link, it has a link to the reviews in question.
[www.cruisecritic.com]
These are bad reviews worthy of getting them banned?
Sorry Royal, but I think you jumped the gun on this one.
Eh I don’t see the problem with this. If they feel as though they’re getting the shaft from RC maybe their time and money really is better spent on a different cruise line. Sucks that RC had to make that choice for them, though.
Whoever made up the phrase “the customer is always right” was smoking crack.
I am all for great customer service, but some people will always try to take advantage of it, which just ruins it for the rest of us.
I have no problem with RC severing the relationship with these Morans.
Is there a version of Internet Tough Guy magazine for women?
not harsh at all. First rule of being a customer. If you don’t like the service take your business elsewhere. If they complained about every cruise they took and Still continued to go on them, its their own fault. I’m siding with the business on this.
You know, I’ve never been on a cruise and have never had an urge, but I heard another story about RC recently that I think would keep me from choosing them. My uncle is a seasoned traveler and just took his sixth cruise. He opted for RC this time and went to the breakfast buffet to grab some fruit. He skipped one table and went to the table where the fruit was located A woman address herself as the captain’s wife and stated very rudely that everyone knows that when you are on a cruise, you must start from the end of the buffet table and work you way through everything whether you want it or not. She went on making a very public display of herself, even after he apologized and said he’d been on many cruises and no one ever did that. She responded by telling him he was a liar and obviously had never been on a cruise.
He complained on board and was told that the captain’s wife could do as she felt was necessary. He called RC after the cruise and they told him they’d call him back and never did. I don’t think they are all that great anymore.
if they think the service sucks but go back 6 times they should probably stop complaining or find a new place to complain about. first complaint was legitimate, but i mean why go back after two failed attempts?
i’m on rc’s side.
I wonder if this pertains to Celebrity as well since they are part of the same company as RCCL.
I am with Royal Caribbean on this one. I worked for a pool contractor recently and they had to do the same thing with a customer. She had complained her way out paying service bills for over a year. It was obvious the service didn’t meet her standards so we severed the relationship.
It’s RCL’s prerogative. When a complaint is valid, most legitimate companies will work with the customer to satisfy them. Some people are just whiner babies and cannot be satisfied. That might be the case with the Morans.
I’ve worked with these kinds of abusive customers and they do us all an injustice.
Why does it seem, from reading online, that cruiseships are nothing but floating cesspools? Stories about sewage leaks, sewer gas, and fulminant diarrhea. I want to vacation someplace where universal precautions are taken. Where’s my bubble?!
Just read the reviews. There is no way they should have been banned. The reviews were mostly positive. The complaints were often only a tiny percentage of each review.
I wish I get a $500 check so I’d never have to go with Royal Carribean again.
I wish I get a $500 check so I’d never have to go to with Macy’s again.
I wish I get a $500 check so I’d never have to go with United Airlines again.
I wish I get a $500 check so I’d never have to go with comcast again.
What’s all the b!tching about?
Well I agree with Royal on this one. My sister tried Norwegian 3 times, 3 times they screwed up, she did some soft complaining, but figured out that even if it was free it is not for her. Now she is back to Carnival without a complaint in the world, and decided to through away the $400 credit that Norwegian threw her, since it was just not going to work out. This couple should have done the same.
Hrm. I think the critical issue is not that the Morans complained, but that RC banned them for writing negative reviews. That is astounding to me. I think it perfectly possible that the Morans enjoyed their trips and expected RC to improve their game (personally, I wouldn’t have stuck around after the bad toilet and I would have been far angrier in my write-up).
Imagine if another company did something like this? I’m a adult fan of LEGO; what if I purchased several sets and wrote negative reviews of them on a AFOL forum? There are certainly plenty of poorly done sets out there to choose from. Now, LEGO decides that I can no longer purchase from their website because they don’t want me writing about their product?
The consumer isn’t allowed to evaluate their trip for the benefit of other people interested in the same thing? Sorry, that’s crosses my line of what I consider appropriate corporate behavior.
Wow, if I were RC, I would’ve been like CHECK CANCELED, FUCK YOU VERY MUCH. All of the Morans negative reviews probably lost more business for them than the Morans could ever make up even if they renounced their RC hating/loving? ways and called RC the messiah. Fucking Morans…
Ban sounds fair to me. Who the hell continues to go on a cruise twice a year for three years if all they do is complain about each trip?
Then again I’m biased, I had two roommates who loved to go to the same restaurant and complain about how disgusting it was each time, and I was really hoping the restaurant would just hurry up and ban them already.
I think the cruise line may have just been worried that a bunch of other people would read it and try to take advantage or RL and claim something along the same lines to get a 20% credit and $500 next time they went on a cruise.
If they just posted the negative part and didn’t tell them what they got as far as compensation from RL, I don’t think they would have banned them. (speculation of course)
But its within their rights to post it and keep it up. Just as it is within RLs right to deny further service to them (as long as its not based on sex, race, yada yada).
Honestly though, I don’t see how anyone who was forced to stay in a stank ass stateroom would want to go back to the same cruise line.
their name reminds me of that classic A&W rootbeer commercial. the name is…
+ Watch video
I agree with RC. They had a customer they thought could not be pleased and it was just not to do further business. No different than blacklisting people who have an unusual level of returns from a store, etc.
The Morans sound like a couple of Morons. I’d ban them, too.
I just looked up the cost of a 14 day Alaskan cruise… they start at $1100 and go up to around $3000 so a 20% discount and $500 isn’t really anything to sneeze at.
That being said… I would have pushed for a partial refund of the current cruise rather than a discount on a future cruise.
@Ash78: Oh, absolutely. I knew a guy who practically made a hobby of it. Every time he went on an airline flight, he’d write a letter to the airline complaining about the service so he could get a freebie from them.
I’ve had plenty of customers that would have liked to tell to take a hike but didn’t. But there was one time, I was working as a Project Manager for a GC doing a renovation for a major hotel in Chicago. For the first couple of floors everything we did was wrong or sub-standard. We were getting killed during every punch. Quite frankly, the work was very good, I couldn’t see what they were complaining about. Finally after the hotel rejected a closet rack that THEY had purchased, I told them that I was going to recommend to my boss, the company owner, that we pull off the project “since they were obviously were not happy with our work, and I didn’t think we could please them”. They begged me not to make that call, and after that the job settled down.
RC made the right decision. Morans were troublemakers who deserved to get permanently booted. If I invited someone to my house but they complained every time they were there, the invitations would cease–hang out at someone else’s house if mine is so bad. RC shouldn’t have to put up with chronic bitch, moaning, and complaining either.
I don’t want people banned after their first or second cruise complaint because that would amount to a cover-up. But after six cruises, clearly nothing RC did was going to make this couple happy.
@darkryd:
“If the Morans complain about every cruise, then why do they keep taking cruises with this company?
Makes no sense.”
They kept cruising b/c they love they cruise line. They also love the compensation they get everytime they complain. I think they were scamming the company and taking advantage of the company’s willingness to compensate for every little thing.
What’s worse, if you read their review of the cruise with the sewage issuse on cruise critic, they gave it 4 out of 5 stars!
B
After reading the thread on this from CruiseCritic.com, I’ve got to side with RCL.
Apparently, this lady has been a thorn in several cruise lines’ sides. She takes a blacklight into every cabin and screams about anything that glows. And while her CruiseCritic reviews look like they’re mostly okay, she had been saying nice things publicly and then immediately turning to RCL and telling them that she’d humiliate them on the cruise boards if they didn’t do what she wanted, and NOW.
According to the other members of that forum who know her, she’s prone to taking a small event and embellishing it with each retelling.
Basically, she’s scamming this cruise line, and will tell anyone who listens that she’s gleefully doing it.
The review that got them banned.
It seems like it’s an overall positive review that mentions a few niggling problems (and one really big problem — the sewage thing — that they actually glossed over). If this is banworthy griping, then Royal Carribbean had better be prepared to ban every single customer with an internet connection.
I’m all for “firing” problem customers, but RC seems more like they can’t take any sort of criticism at all.
How are they banned for online reviews, when online reviews are the reason they got compensation? Maybe if the cruise line offered compensation over the phone from their own customer service operators, people wouldn’t have to post everything online. Royal Caribbean had ample opportunity to fix this off the record. But to me this is more than enough of a reason to ban them “sewage soaked stateroom”. If it really was soaked in sewage, a discount in price wouldn’t have allowed them to sleep in it. These honestly do sound like false complaints.
I agree with the general sentiment here. This isn’t just an arbitrary banning, and the cruise line has every right to refuse to service customers that have exhibited that they aren’t a match for RCCL’s service.
Looks like the cruise line tried to do right, and after enough attempts figures it’s best just to let this customer go in order to focus more on their other customers. Seems fair to me.
Ban the Morans – I hope someone didn’t use that line in an earlier post.
Let me get this straight, they went on six cruises with the same company and regularly received poor service and poor accommodations?
What is it called when someone does the same thing over and over again and expect a different result?
I dunno huh? I’m not sure it’s harsh… I mean, if they sucked that much why did they continue going with them? Because they knew they’d get discounts if they complained? I think RC were being good guys here and got rid of possible bloodsuckers.
I can see both sides of this.
Yes there can be scammers but
There can be problems with bad service on each cruise, people can point it out to try to get a company to live up to the contract or the promises they made in advertising. If a ship isn’t performing to expectations and no one complains then levels will steadily sink till someone does indeed complain. I’ve seen it happen, as the staff get complacent, usually occurs in the public sector where no matter how bad someone is they aren’t sacked.
Now as to posting compensation levels given, that’s tricky. Whilst posting a bad review and then RC have given us satisfactory compensation (no amounts) is OK; posting amounts is problematic in that RC don’t want the world +dog to know what they’re prepared to offer as, if they screw up again (certain) then people know what to expect! Not good business.
However banning for life, is just bad PR. As is telling them you can’t meet their expectations, as they are based on RC promises. advising them to move up to one of RC’s premier brands would be better, and make it worth their while with a 50% initial discount.
Most of the people in this thread didn’t actually read the reviews. The reviews weren’t harsh at all, and the last one was glowing. Royal Caribbean has the right to do what they did, but the Morans are not some evil or stupid couple. They kept taking the cruises because they LIKE the company, and their reviews are mostly positive.
If you actually read the review that got them banned, you’ll see that it was a fairly positive review. So this couple got banned because the woman isn’t a Pollyanna who will say, “Everything was perfect! We especially enjoyed the earthy aroma of sewage in our room. It really reminded me of my carefree childhood summers at camp where my tent was next to the latrine!”
This reviewer writes a balanced account of both good and bad points. Clearly the couple believes that over the years the good has outweighed the bad, because they keep going back. By including both in a review, she can help her readers make up their own minds about whether they would accept the same trade-offs.
Apparantly Royal Carribean considers anything less than undiluted highest praise to be intolerable.
It’s kind of like “constructive eviction,” where you offer a tenant a rebate on a couple month’s worth of rent if he/she agrees to be gone by a certain date and not trash the place.
That being said, screw RC’s management for asking the Morans to remove their online comment.
@NameGoesHere: It definitely doesn’t seem to be that bad of a review. I regularly read cruisecritic.com, and in reviews like that (and even in the forums), people complain about the bad things (which tend to be food, sewage smell, chair hoggers, bad service, and bad customer service on the boat), which can and do occur on any cruiseline, as well as applaud the good things. This review is fairly long, and the complaint about the sewage smell only takes up a paragraph of it. I didn’t click through to find the poster in the forums, but that review by itself isn’t bad at all, much less bad enough to fire these passengers (they still gave that cruise 4 waves or whatever it is).
While I am all for severing relationships for customers who abuse the system (worked in hotels, and had to do that in the past), from the information given, I certainly can’t side with RCCL here.
As for people who think they were gaming the system (maybe they were, maybe they weren’t, but we don’t know), everyone (well, most everyone, and people reading this site) understand that when you complain to a company about something ligitimate, you expect the company to rectify the situation to the best of their ability, and this may be in the form of discounts/refunds/etc, or just changes in their service. Every cruise, every plane flight, every hotel that I have been on I always mean to fill out a survey card/write a letter (doesn’t always happen, but that’s another story). This isn’t because I expect something, this is because the best way for these companies to know how things are going or to fix things is to hear from customers who have experienced it, since typically the higher-ups that receive this letter or the card don’t know what is happening at the customer level.
Not harsh, just the facts of life. You can’t bitch about a company, get deals and incentives as part of a company’s good-faith effort at customer service, then bitch about what they gave you. I mean, yes, sewage in the room isn’t right, but to accept a compensation package, as shitty as it was, and then bitch about said package? Go find another cruise line; this one clearly isn’t up to your standards and never will be.
Guess they won’t be riding the Genesis.
Skimmed over a couple of their reviews. It’s all pretty typical. Reviews like theirs are actually the ones I appreciate the most when I am researching cruises. They are nice and detailed. Anyway, it seems like if there is anyone to blame it is the jealous posters who had to complain to Royal Caribbean because they felt the Morans were getting preferential treatment. This story is just exposing the underbelly of the secret societies that exist in the cruise world. Some people are just waaaaayyyy too obsessed with the companies in particular – to the point where they would call the company and complain about a total stranger getting compensation.
WHO CARES! These are the same people that turn up their nose or scowl at people that do anything on the cruise ship that doesn’t meet their approval. Total Cruise Nazi’s.
@Alger: I’m not saying that particular complaint is unwarranted. What I am saying is that some customers (which you sound like you fall into this group) can never be made happy. If they go on that many cruises with the same liner and have a complaint every time, than I have ZERO sympathy for them. There are other cruise liners on the ocean, you know.
It’s kind of like complaining about every Gizmodo article in the comment section but refusing to ever read Engadget. Get over yourself and go find some other boat to ride.
I bet these people paid for the trip with frequent flyer miles and coupons of some sort – cheap bastards is what they are.
@BigElectricCat:
That is not constructive eviction. Constructive eviction is when something is substantially preventing one from using the property for its intended purpose.
Like the doors to your apartment building being locked to keep you out.
Or the court case in which a slum lord had the sewage from the house go into the basement and would come by every month to pump it out. (happened in Utah) The family lasted 3 months before moving. The slumlord sued since the contract was for a year. The tenants argued they were constructively evicted and won.
@quagmire0: People are turning their noses up over something else.
Suggested alternatives to cruises: Kayaking at the sewage-treatment plant. Converting a port-a-john into a pontoon party boat.
I once worked for a fairly well-known copy chain, and we’d have customers who complained that the copy/print job we’d done was somehow inadequate, therefore we should get a discount. Our policy is that if you didn’t like the job, we’d do it over again and do it right (at no additional cost), but we had high standards and refused to give our customers substandard work.
This was hilarious because it completely flustered scammers. People would come in griping about a job and then say we shouldn’t charge them full price. When we told them no, we wouldn’t sell them the crappy work, we’d do it over and do it right, they had absolutely NO IDEA how to respond. They had it in their minds that if they bitched about the “bad job” we did, they’d get a freebie. It was hilarous to see them try to explain that they didn’t actually want the job done right at all….
RC should have given them more than just $500 since they were stuck with a sewage smell for 14 days. i dont care what people think…you try and enjoy a long-awaited vacation with the smell of sewage. Go ahead, hang out in a public bathroom for 14 days and see if $500 can make up for it.
Sewage smell a legitimate complaint, but there are some people who believe that complaining about everything on messageboards makes them sophisticated connoisseurs; these two were champion nitpickers. However I am surprised that they provoked such a negative reaction at Cruise Critic, where the average poster seems to be perpetually angry and/or poo-flinging crazy.
I know one thing, I’ll never cruise with RC. Then again, I’ve never taken a cruise.
All of the cruise line are pretty much owned by the same company.
A sewage-smelling room is not a vacation. It is probably not even healthy. A 20% discount – to be used against a FUTURE cruise, is shamefully inadequate compensation. That said, I’m not sure why the Morans are upset by the ban. Why risk being unhappy with RC again, when there are other cruise lines?
I once had a nightmare situation with some airline flights. I wrote the airline and told them their vouchers were wholly inadequate compensation for what they had put me through. They sent a polite apology, with larger vouchers (a rare occurance). I never used the vouchers. In fact, to this day, I have never flown that airline again. It just isn’t worth it to me. I tell this story to illustrate the difficulty I have in identifying with the Morans.
Take the $500 check, go out to dinner and a show, stay away from sewage-smelling cruises, be happy.
Ah, further investigation on Cruise Critic revealed this thread. No, her review wasn’t that bad but apparently she has something of a reputation for being coarse and confrontational on the messageboards. Also, it seems that her tale of the sewage got a bit of literary embellishment between her review and the MSNBC article. This couple — or at least the woman — is an entitlement monster and she’s angry because her game stopped working, she went to the press because she was finally told NO.