The Royal Caribbean Fan Blog has a new address:  Click Here to visit!

As I might have noted, on my 36th birthday, some four weeks ago, I feel on the ice at my place of work, breaking my right ankle.  This happened nearly three months into working out and improving my diet.  Naturally this new self-improvement regime had a cruise set as the reward for reaching my goals.

Thankfully after one month, I’ve actually lost a goodly amount of weight, the ankle is healing nicely, and my mind is turning towards rehabilitating and resuming life.   The cruise is now a prime motivator for me.  What ship, I haven’t decided, but I’ll figure that out later.

In any case, visions of boarding a big white ship, the sound of the PA tone, even that cruise ship smell give me a bit of a push when hobbling around on crutches gets old.

Ever since 9/11, it seems as if people are gun-shy about doing anything fun after a tragic event.  Where it is fine and appropriate to seek to respect people, or an area after something unfortunate happens, I can’t help but feel people are trying too hard to find fault in Royal Caribbean sending ships to their resort at Labadee.

There was little to no damage to the area where the resort is located.  The local people depend on the ships for their income.  Relief supplies are arriving from those ships, at one of the few entry points in the entire country.  If the ships didn’t stop there, they would simply go someplace else, or no-place at all.  Yet the ships would sail all the same.  People would revel in the joy of a cruise anyway.  The world would continues to move on.

Yet I read headlines over articles, such as “Is it ethical for cruise ships to return to Haiti yet?”  What kind of a flaming moron poses such a question?   Ethical?  I suppose letting people fall into unemployment, leaving the relief supplies in Miami, and stopping in the U.S. Virgin Islands, simply because weak minds can’t separate the issues in one part of Haiti from another, is the only “ethical” response to the disaster.  Yes, we must make everything worse, because we sop to some adolescent reaction to something fun being anyplace near a disaster.

Pathetic.

I do not know from where yet, but I fully expect to find articles like this grow as the same groups that attack the cruise industry hunt for ways to exploit what they think is a new entry point to make themselves heard.

Royal Caribbean’s response has been precisely what it should be.  Any person that can not assert the intelligence and maturity to see the situations in play for what they are, and acknowledge the appropriate nature of the response, has issues of their own to deal with.

I decided to shift the focus of my blog from mainly a hybrid of news and commentary, to what blogs are more generally about.  That is, light talk and banter about the topic, with news working into it as fits the situation.  In part, this is because I have changed how I use the front page of Royal Caribbean Fan.  I’ll be pouring news as it comes into me about the front page.  This will make the the main site more of an attraction.  I have already made some system upgrades to the picture galleries, added user blogs, and have other upgrades pending.

The streamlined process should let me get back to this blog more often with some luck.  If nothing else, you can also follow the news through Twitter! (RCIfan)

A whirl-wind tour of the news about Royal Caribbean International…..

• Steiner Leisure will continue to run the spas aboard Royal Caribbean International ships, including both of the Oasis class.

• Royal Caribbean International hopes to realize an 11% gain in fuel efficiency over the next five years.

• Royal Caribbean International is sending eight ships to Europe in 2010. They include three Voyager class including Voyager, Navigator, and Adventure of the Seas. Adventure, who has been sailing out of San Juan almost exclusively since her launch, will now pioneer cruising out of Malaga, Spain. Two Radiance class, the Jewel and Brilliance of the Seas are deploying, as are Splendor and Vision of their namesake Vision class. Independence of the Seas returns to represent the Freedom class.

• Royal Caribbean International is joining with Universal Orlando to offer the kind of Cruise-Land vacations previously best associated with Disney. They go a step further however, in providing options for more itinerary lengths. Where the Disney packages were for joint cruise-land trips of 3 to 5 days, Royal Caribbean International is moving forward with 7 night outings with Freedom of the Seas. It is described as being part of a “Way More than a Cruise” program. This I find curious, as I had thought we had seen the last of the older marketing tag-lines. All told however, it sounds like a wise enough move. Universal’s family or parks appeal to the post-Disney age range, yet retain some leverage in conjunction with using the existing Nickelodeon relationship.

• Employees of federal, state, or local law enforcement and fire departments across the U.S. will get a 20% discount on Royal Caribbean.

•  Booking for Allure of the Seas has begun!

That didn’t take long!