Cruising on the Cheap

This post is going to save you tons of hours.  I am going into my second "week" of research on getting the best price for a cruise to Alaska.  As an environmentally conscious mommy, cruises aren't normally my thing, but since this is for a family reunion at the suggestion of someone else, here I am entering the gluttonous world of all you can eat, and travel with your entire hotel room in tow.

Now, I am assuming that you are the kind of person who knows what they want and just wants the best price, and does not need to have her hand held.

Here's what NOT to do.  Don't bother with booking directly with the cruise line.  It's always at an outrageous price.  And here's the crazy thing.  Cruises to Alaska in particular book up nine months in advance, so they say.  This was certainly true in my case.  All Vancouver return sailings to Alaska have all their balconies fully sold in the lowest categories.  Except for one sailing.  At a whopping $5000 for a family of four, who are these well heeled folks?  I could have flown to Disney World and stayed at a nice hotel for a week for $4000.

Agents Bid on Your Business

The first step was figuring out the itinerary and choosing the right ship.  Only five ships had the embarkation port I wanted, and only two of those visited Glacier Bay.  Now this sounds simple enough, but I obsessed for days and days, researching on Cruise Critic and Cruise Reviews until my eyeballs bled.  I had the near impossible task of booking a mix of balcony and outside cabins on the same floor.  Well, I managed to do that.  THEN I found out that my balcony would be above noisy public areas.  I hate noise.  Then I found out that my category of balcony has steel railings instead of plexiglass, effectively blocking the view for half the window.  That was not readily apparent when you're booking a cabin on any of the travel agent sites.

Once you've narrowed it down, go directly to Cruise Compete.  At Cruise Compete, you will have 3-6 agencies bid on your business.  The problem with this is that there really are something like six agencies tops that bid on Cruise Compete, so don't kid yourself if you think you're getting quotes from across the world... there are only the same six agencies who bid on this site.  Or at least that's what a gathered from my snooping around.  Cruises'N'More, Crown Cruise, Dream Vacations, Cruise Vacation Outlet, and National Discount Cruise are some of the names.

The bids you get at Cruise Compete will come within 24-48 hours, and you're going to end up with quotes that are very close in price.  If you see a huge difference in quotes, it will be because the agent was too lazy to actually read what you specified when they did their quote, mistaking a double for a triple, or a F for a G category, or something like that.

So, why are the amounts so rock bottom on Cruise Compete?  You are getting a bottom line price and should not expect much in the way of service.  Agents are paid a commission, and they will chop it down to get your business.  Sometimes they offer on board credits (OBC) or free gratuities, but really this is a way of re-distributing where your money goes.  For me, I prefer a lower price since I usually spend next to nothing on board.  Yes, I'm the passenger that the cruise lines have nightmares about, the person who doesn't go to art auctions, drink alcohol, or darken the entrance of gift shops.  Or shore excursions!!!

After your quotes come in, compare incentives and prices.  Double check that you are not paying any hidden charges.  Make sure you will not get dinged cancellation fees or change fees.

Double Check

You will also want to check Cruise Quick to double check if you've really received the bottom line deal.  According to Cruise Quick, the Wall Street Journal calls them "The least expensive place for experienced travellers to purchase cruises."  I loved the ease of the cool pull down windows and search engine, which allowed me to input the ages of the passengers instead of breaking it up into adults/children THEN specifying the ages of the children.  Cruise Quick has very high incentives, but ultimately, I did not find they were offering a better price.

Here's a comparison on my balcony VD cabins for four.  I subtracted any incentives from the price to come up with a net price.

Cruise Compete: $5109 - $50 OBC = $5059
Cruise Quick: $5595 - $405 ("shipboard credit") - $50 (OBC) = $5140

Cruise Compete wins!

Price Drops

Update, February 20, 2013:  Ignore this section on Price Drops.  I subscribed to this service, and it has just been garbage so far.  Quite often (once every 2-3 weeks?) I receive an email from them regarding a Price Drop from $2,036 to $1,999, and within a few hours the price increases again back to exactly where it was, and I receive another email.  So the verdict for now after having subscribed for five months is don't bother with this.  I am including this "Price Drops" section for your reference only if you are doing research on Cruise Fish.

Update April 18, 2013:  I cancelled my original booking since I found a much better deal on Crucon.  Previously, my total price for 4 cabins was $18,046, which included three balcony cabins (and two quads) and an obstructed ocean view.  I found a special price through Travelzoo for balcony cabins.  Now I have six balcony cabins for $15,627.  So I saved $2,500 plus got TWO additional balcony cabins on higher floors, although two of those are category VE instead of VD which I originally booked, so a slight downgrade.  It was cheaper booking two doubles instead of one quad balcony cabin.  Hard to believe, isn't it?  The only thing I lost was the proximity of the cabins.  I was choosing from the last dregs in categories VB, VC, and VE in order to make up the six cabins.  One pair is positioned at the far aft and has only showers instead of a bathtub, another pair is positioned near the elevators (but a review I found online assured me it is quiet), and only one pair is in a relatively inoffensive location.  Each pair is located away from the other cabins.  If I pay an extra $100 per cabin, I can move them all to the same location by putting them all in the same category.

We now resume our regular programming:

The last thing you should do is set up a price drop alert.  You see, if the price of the cruise drops before you make your final payment (in my case, in April), then you can ask for a price adjustment to the lower rate.  This can only be done once, and the travel agent will not (usually) do this for you.  I signed up for Cruise Fish for the price of $5 for tracking 5 cruise prices.  Now, that is impressive: usually my hands have to be cold and dead before you can pry any money out of them to pay for services on the Net... I would never pay for extra photo storage space, pro upgrades, classmates.com, but I *will* pay for this service, otherwise I would have to check the prices regularly myself.

 The cruise I bought for Category VD (nice initials!) shows this:

Current Price $2099 (price per person for first and second passengers):

 

So, it seems that the lowest price was in March, 15 months before the cruise, with prices changing quarterly--yet no price change in June.  We'll have to see how many times the price changes before the sail date.

When To Book

If you require a quad cabin, you need to book early as there are a very very limited number of cabins that can accommodate four people.  For example, on my deck, of the more than 100 cabins, only nine can take four passengers.  If you are part of a couple, prices may be lower closer to the sailing date.  You can also save money by booking a "guarantee" cabin which assures you of a certain type of cabin but not the location.  The only problem is that you may sometimes be given a cabin in an undesirable location.

Happy cruising!

Post-Cruise Update, August 15, 2013:

We've returned from our Alaska cruise.  It was wonderful.  Relaxing.  While I have some criticisms of Holland America's Zuiderdam (toilet not flushing, mediocre food), for the most part I recommend the ship for the incredible value I received.  For $5226 inclusive we had four people total in two balcony VB cabins, plus $500 in on board credits, which we applied toward the gratuities of $11.50/day per person.  So in effect we paid $1181.50 per person for a balcony cabin with double occupancy!  Fantastic!  So much room to stretch out in, two toilets, two bathtubs... and a double width balcony.

We were able to open up the partition between the balconies so it was convenient to travel between the two rooms side by side (there were no cabins available with an adjoining door).  My husband spent one entire day with food poisoning, the Glacier Bay day, but he was able to see the glaciers and the island of seals from his bed.  I highly recommend a balcony cabin if you can afford it.

Also, it turns out my worries about noise in our location close to the elevators was unfounded.  The passengers on the Zuiderdam were predominantly white haired and mellow.  We heard next to nothing.  Dead silence, after 9 pm!  Only once did we hear noise, from a herd of kids that was racing around the hallways around 11 pm.  They did three rounds then they stopped.  The rooms were well insulated for sound.

Old People Smell

I was given an interesting mission. Find out how to eliminate old people smell to make life tolerable for a friend.

The phenomenon of old man smell is called "kareishu." Steve Levenstein writes:

"Kareishu is caused by a certain type of fatty acid created in the bodies of older people. This substance, called "nonenal", has a distinct scent that is difficult to hide or mask since it is emitted from the skin when humans sweat.

Mind you, a common trend in Japanese advertising is to state some pseudo-scientific information in your spiel so buyers feel justified in buying the product. It should be noted that the term kareishu itself was coined by the Shiseido Research Centre, an affiliate of Japanese cosmetics giant Shiseido."

My research turned up interesting information. In 2000, a chemist at the Shiseido company (yes, the cosmetics giant!) researched the problem of old people smell. He discovered that:

"2-Nonenal, an unsaturated aldehyde with an unpleasant greasy and grassy odor, was detected only in older subjects (40 y or older)."

He concluded that 2-nonenal may be involved in the age related change of body odour.

The product they came up with?

Ag+ Deodorant Stick

For the life of me, I could not find what resulted from Shiseido's research.  The best I could come up with is this link, a writeup of a commercial on Japanese TV:

CM of the week: Shiseido Ag+

While snuggling up to a pretty young woman, a handsome man sticks his nose in her underarm area and emerges with a clothespin on his nose. The letters Ag are written on it, the chemical designation for silver.

>Odorologist Betsy Lyons, dressed in a lab coat, appears and says "donkan" in her flat American accent. "Donkan" means "insensitive," meaning that people aren't always aware of the smells emanating from their own bodies, though others are. Lyons has been the "CM character" for Shiseido's deodorants for years, conveying a mixture of technical expertise and Yankee practicality, the implication being that non-Japanese know more about body odor since, as everyone knows, foreigners give off more of a reek. The beautiful young couple in the ad are not Japanese.

But the CM itself is aimed at Japanese women, a demographic that may be paranoid about being sniffed but isn't as likely to stink as the average salaryman, who wouldn't wear deodorant if you paid him.

The company website for the Ag+ product line at Shiseido is really strange, with pictures of models in their early 20s in funky clothes over links to each of the products in the line.  The only nod to old people is the little circular picture here:



Isn't she cute?  But smelly.  This product is found on eBay and at online retailers like Rakuten at $12.59 for 20 g.  I have NO IDEA what is in the stuff.

Ecoteam

A company in Korea called "Ecoteam" was formed by Edward Chang, who studied polymer chemistry in university. I enjoyed reading Edward's origin story, how he noticed his neighbours were fighting about cigarette smells and created a spray to eliminate the odour. Other products included: a spray for courage (!!) and a mosquito repellent. Wow.

Ecoteam's blog suggests that 2-nonenal is one of the aromas that "the human nose perceives in old books, beer, buckwheat, cucumbers, lard, and orris (iris rot), orris being used in some cosmetics."

Ecoteam purports to create solutions which break down the odor causing chemicals, rather than masking them. Of interest to me was "Deodorant Silver Spray" which is "the world’s first deodorant for eliminating the smells that appear as one gets older. Spray two or three squirts of Silver Spray in the room, on clothes and on bed linens and these smells miraculously fade away." Sounds promising, at $32.80 for 500 ml and free worldwide delivery by Express Mail Service (EMS).

So... what is in Silver Spray? It is a complete mystery. There is no ingredient listing on the website, but whatever the heck it is, it has a "mild and elegant wood scent."

Mirai

Another company is called "Mirai", "the only product in the U.S. that eliminates Nonenal, the source of aging body odor." The secret ingredients to control nonenol are: persimmons (!) and astaxanthin, an anti-oxidant, the "world's most powerful anti-oxidant." The solution is offered in the form of a liquid "purifying body wash", 150 ml for $19, a pencil sized body spritzer (for the non-pencil sized price of $14!), and a clear amber (similar to Pears soap colour) bar of soap for $19. In the ingredient list, the anti-oxidant appears 5th last, and persimmon is the 3rd highest component.

What is in that stuff?

Most of the proprietary products I've already mentioned do not list their active ingredients.  My research found that a chemical that helps decrease aldehydes like nonenal, and thus deodorize, is cyclodextrin.  This according to the article, Effects of Cyclodextrins on Deodoration of "Aging Odor", co-authored by Koji Hara, Katsuhiko Mikuni, Kozo Hara and HItoshi Hashimoto in the Journal of Inclusion Phenomena and Macrocyclic Chemistry, 2002, Vol. 44, Num. 1-4, Pages 241-246.

Now please excuse me if I don't remember how to cite journal articles properly as it has been many years since I nabbed my degree in Pharmacology from university!

An example of a product containing cyclodextrins as the chief active ingredient is Proctor and Gamble's Febreze!  The New York Times article "How Companies Learn Your Secrets" describes how Febreze was initially a failure and this resulted in visits to people's homes to discover why:

The panicked marketing team canvassed consumers and conducted in-depth interviews to figure out what was going wrong, Stimson recalled. Their first inkling came when they visited a woman’s home outside Phoenix. The house was clean and organized. She was something of a neat freak, the woman explained. But when P.& G.’s scientists walked into her living room, where her nine cats spent most of their time, the scent was so overpowering that one of them gagged.

According to Stimson, who led the Febreze team, a researcher asked the woman, “What do you do about the cat smell?”

“It’s usually not a problem,” she said.

“Do you smell it now?”

“No,” she said. “Isn’t it wonderful? They hardly smell at all!”

So, if you stink, you have no idea you stink because you are habituated to the smell.

Unfortunately, I could not find an inexpensive or readily available natural source of cyclodextrins for odor neutralizing other than Febreze.  Cyclodextrins are produced by the enzymatic conversion of starch.

Not everyone stinks the same

For your further reading pleasure on the subject of smells, I include this writeup from 1999 in the LA Times by Mark Magnier: 

"Nationalities Vary in Their Odors

...Since when does body odor respect national boundaries? For Americans, it would seem the ultimate aging-boomer product.

Shiseido executives say they're open to that. But when it comes to bodily aromas, marketing across international borders isn't that simple. Chief perfumer Nakamura says body odor is determined by several factors, including species, genes, age, sex, physical condition, diet, drugs and level of stress, along with national and possibly racial components. Among North Asians, Koreans exude the least body odor, he believes, followed by the Chinese and then the Japanese.

"The Japanese have a fishy odor," he adds."