Love Month – Day 18

I love people who tell their stories.

I was in a Facebook group today and someone had posted a video of a YouTube couple who are travel vloggers.

Coincidently they had been on a cruise in Antarctica in December around the same time I was. Their experience was not great as mine was.

Now let me first point out that Antarctica can be a challenging trip for the cruise companies. The weather can change on a dime, there are rules about how many people can get off the ship at a time, the bird flu is a major problem in the area, and there are limited places to go ashore.

Still, there appeared to be fewer ships than normal out there over the holidays, at least from what I saw when out there. I only recall seeing another ship two or three times.

There were a few weather changes that caused a few itinerary changes for our ship. I watched those weather maps every day, though. Slight adjustments meant we had landings on the continent, as well as amazing zodiac trips. We had a couple of landings cancelled during our 18-day trip, but those were earlier in the Falkland Islands and South Georgia.

This ship, however, did not have that experience. I won’t go into too many details, but the woman had three goals when she booked her trip – setting foot on the Antarctica continent, kayaking in the area, and camping on Antarctica. All was cancelled.

The reasons were all poor weather. The captain told them they were going back to Ushuaia a day early because the Drake passage was expected to be very bad the second day. (The Drake was shaking when we went through, but you know that going in. It wasn’t impassable). The captain finally turned the boat away from Ushuaia and headed back towards Antarctica. They said there was little wind. While they only got a zodiac cruise (which was supposed to be 45 minutes, but was cut short), they saw a tiny bit of what they were supposed to see.

Keep in mind these cruises are very expensive and some people have saved for their whole life to get there.

I go through all this to get to my point. One of the comments was “These are YouTubers. Each time you share their video and watch it, you are putting money in their pockets.”

Wait, what? What’s the problem with that? They took a situation that was trauma for some of the people they were with on the ship and took the bit of power they had to share the experience. If I had been planning now, that would have been important information for me. Especially the response of the cruise line, which was so poorly crafted. That response even included the insensitive response of the CEO to the PR’s letter to passengers, who evidently hit “reply all” in error. Whoops.

I travel a lot and use reviews – and horror stories – to help me make good choices. I love people like this couple who invest in getting data out there. I’m happy they may get a few pennies from me watching it. They gave me even more data I can share with others about their trip. Had I not been in the same area when they were, I wouldn’t have understood the extent of their truth.

Be fair, but tell your truth. I love that this couple ended this video saying “We research before our trips and have looked back on this situation to decide what we could have done differently when we planned. We haven’t been able to come up with anything.”

Now others will benefit from their mistakes and if nothing else ask how companies handle bad weather and bird flu and issues like that. I know even though my trip turned out great, I wish I had known to ask those questions.

Invest in those things you love. I’m investing in people who tell their story.

“There’s nothing better than people talking to each other, sharing best practices, and opening up communications.” – Dan Gilbert