Open the travel section of any weekend newspaper in Australia and you might be forgiven for thinking that Alaska is the only travel destination on earth. Page after page, story after story, advertisement after advertisement - it is all about Alaskan tours and cruises. I appreciate that travel is our 'national hobby' but it seems you can't call yourself a true Australian until you have been on a cruise to America's 49th state. After Americans and Canadians, Australians make up the largest tourism group by nationality in Alaska - quite an impressive statistic for a country with only 24 million people.
There is no doubt that Alaska is fascinating and beautiful, and when you live on the driest continent on earth all those glaciers are a serious drawcard, but is Alaska worth the cost and do Australians (and Europeans) pay more than North Americans for the privilege of being such loyal fans?
Do Australians (and other non-North Americans) Pay More to Cruise to Alaska?
About a year ago, while David and I were in the U.S, we decided to book a cruise to Alaska. David was in a generous mood and we picked out an expensive stateroom on a ship operated by one of the world's largest cruise lines. The cruise was scheduled to depart in mid-2015. According to the cruise line's U.S website, the cost for two of us would be US$7,971.
We couldn't get our reservation to go through on-line so David rang the cruise line and tried to book by telephone. He was told that because we were Australians we had to book through an Australian agent, notwithstanding that we were physically in the U.S at the time, and wanted to pay in U.S dollars. We think the cruise line realised we were Australians because of David's e-mail address which has an 'au' suffix. Nothing David said would budge them. We either booked through Australia or we didn't go on the cruise.
We had heard previously, that Australians paid more than North Americans for the same cruises to Alaska and our inability to book the cruise in the U.S seemed to confirm this, so we took a screen shot of the cruise line's website with the details and price of the cruise. Two weeks later, back in Sydney, the same cabin on the same ship with the same date and place of departure was now A$10,650, an increase of 25%. Using the exchange rate at the time, which was a lot closer to parity than it is now, the cruise line wanted to charge us almost US$2,000 extra just because we were Australians.
I don't know how you would feel, but for us the discovery of this price discrimination well and truly took the gloss off our Alaskan travel plans. We travel a lot and don't mind paying a reasonable price for the privilege. However, we were pretty sure we wouldn't be happy once we were on board and discovered that other passengers were paying US$2,000 less for exactly the same cabin on exactly the same ship just because they happened to be North Americans.
Regional Price Discrimination Happens Worldwide.
We did some research, as you do, trying to find a way around paying the extra cost. We discovered that:-
- almost all the large Alaskan cruise lines engage in the same discriminatory regional pricing,
- most of the world's major cruise lines are owned by two huge multi-national parent corporations,
- regional price discrimination based on a passenger's nationality is not exclusive to Alaskan cruises but extends to the other major destinations around the world.
Short of using a
VPN or
TOR there was no way around the problem and even if we knew how to use a VPN and pretend to be Americans during the reservation process, there was the problem of what would happen when we turned up to board with our Australian passports. There are entire threads devoted to the issue of regional price discrimination on TripAdvisor and the consensus seems to be that while you could get around the price discrimination a few years ago by booking through certain travel agents the cruise lines have now moved, quite effectively, to shut that down.
That was the end of our flash cabin on a flash cruise to Alaska.
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| Life on a floating behemoth! |
Luckily, we found a Plan B: drive to Alaska using the Alaska Marine Highway. The
Alaska Marine Highway is a series of car and passenger ferries which run from as far south as Bellingham, near Seattle, to Dutch Harbor in the Aleutian Islands on the far south-western tip of Alaska. The ferries call in at the same towns and ports as the cruise ships, many of which, including the capital
Juneau, cannot be reached by road. The cabins are far from flash and you need to book early to avoid having to sleep on the deck but the overall experience is far more authentic than seeing Alaska aboard a floating behemoth.
In the end, we were glad not to have been able to go on a cruise. If would like to read about our experiences on board the Alaska Marine Highway click -
here - and for all our posts on our Alaskan/Canadian road and car ferry trip click -
here.
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| The MV Columbia - Alaska Marine Highway |
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| True adventurers camping on board the MV Columbia - Alaska Marine Highway. We had a cabin. |
Have you been to Alaska? What did you think? Was it worth the cost? Did you pay more than the other passengers for exactly the cruise?
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