I just wanted to add a little bit briefly. I LOVE cruises and have only been on Carnival. [Except when I was on Semester at Sea, totally different though]. Anyway, many moons ago, on my first cruise we ended up with an amazing waiter... who turned into my amazing boyfriend of 2 years. It was a very difficult relationship to keep up but we did our best. Anyway, I'll just put if out there-- Carnival has very little respect for their employees and put them at risk often. The stories I heard were chilling.
Did you know the waitstaff are not paid anything by Carnival [or most cruise lines]? The staff work twice as much as a regular waitstaff job and have to hope they are lucky enough to get a decent tip that last day. Sometimes, my ex would get lucky and make a few hundred bucks, but some weeks he would work 80+ hours for $50.
And, Carnival as a company isn't known for being great with customer service [though, the many wonderful employees who work so hard make up for that]. My last cruise with Carnival, was aboard the Triumph which would, a few weeks later, catch fire and drift around the Gulf of Mexico for a while.
Well, I could have told them there was something "not quite right" with the ship on our voyage. First, our toilet exploded all over the bathroom and the drains started gurgling up water. They came down and "fixed" it yet the next day it happened again. Then, our air conditioner stopped working while we were in Honduras. We were also unable to dock there due to the conditions. Of course, some of this was totally out of the control of anyone. The infuriating moment was when they sent one of the administrative staff to see if our air conditioner was really broken. Well, it was well above 90 degrees in our cabin and she apologized profusely. I guess they assumed we were just trying to get something out of them, which we weren't.
They had us go to our cabin and pack all of our things and moved us to an emergency "extra" cabin. My husband went back for something in the original cabin and they had torn out the ceilings and everything we hadn't brought to the second cabin was full of dust, insulation, ceiling particles. It was nasty.
I have been on 7 or 8 Carnival cruises and that experience makes me quite leery of embarking on another. I hate to say that because it is a fun cruise line to take and my prior experiences were great.
In "restitution" for missing our docking in Honduras, everyone on the ship was given $20 credit. lol. We spent hours packing and unpacking, airing out our cabin and even cleaning the cabin and they refunded us a total of $40 on a cruise we'd spent well over $2500 for and had some serious issues happen at that time.
I guess my point is, sometimes pax complaints are valid however it seems like they're milking the situation to try to profit from a man's death. That's awful. I would be much more concerned about the man's family and circumstances than worry about getting some kind of reward for seeing blood and hearing noises-- as horrific and graphic as they were-- seems pretty selfish to me.
