One of the great things about taking a cruise vacation is that passengers have a variety of adventures tours to choose from and take a lot of fun memories back home with them. While a lot of passengers treasure their tour experiences, few guests who decided to go snorkeling on March 14th, during their seven-day cruise on the ship Thomson Celebration in the Red Sea off Egypt are suing the tour firm for leaving them stranded in the water.
Now we all know that booking a tour through an independent firm outside the ship tour desk is always a bad idea, but these guests booked their tour through the ship’s tour representative. This nightmare of experience for the 10 snorkelers occurred on a small island near Paradise Island.
According to Mr. Smedley, the 56-year-old guest who was among the 10 snorkelers, it was made clear to the rep on the boat that they “would be snorkeling close to the boat,” but it seemed that after a short amount of time the boats were not in the same spot where the guests were left.
Panic started to creep among the snorkelers who were waiting for the boat to pick them up, but did not. Mr. Smedley continued to explain the atmosphere and the experience, “The people in life jackets were panicking…they thought they were going to drown.” Mr. Smedley and his girlfriend started to swim towards the boat when they noticed that the boat turned around and picked up the panicking guests with the life jackets, but left him and his girlfriend stranded in the water. “The boat then headed off back towards Paradise Island…but I was still stranded,” Mr. Smedley continued, “I felt my life was in danger…my girlfriend was in a state of shock.”
Another guest who find himself in the same situations, the 49-year-old Mr. Harry Gilling, says that he “was panicking – we were in the middle of nowhere and it was choppy… I tried to swim towards our boat but it was too far away.”
The damaged guests are now seeking improvement of the health and safety standards, but say that they have been ignored so far, so now they are seeking compensation. According to Mr. Smedley, the company offered each member of the stranded party a £ 200 at first and when it was turned down, they offered them £ 300. All 10 of the passengers who went through this experience have employed a solicitor and are seeking damages of £5,000 each in the small claims court for negligence.
A Thomson Cruises spokeswoman made a statement about the incident that “our shore excursion team carried out a full investigation and immediately took the necessary precautions to ensure this type of incident did not happen again…we would like to reassure customers their safety is of paramount importance to us and this type of incident is a very rare occurrence. We operate the strictest of standards.”
