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Carnival Cruise Boat Will Serve as Home for Olympics Security Personnel

Carnival Cruises just booked a huge number of passengers, and it won't even have to take them anywhere: The cruise company has been hired by Canadian police to house security personnel during the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.

The three ships will serve as floating hotels to ease the city's housing shortage by allowing some 4,000 private guards to cabin up. The police had earlier contracted with a rival company called Cruise Connections, who is now suing them for allegedly backing out to try and get a better deal -- recessionomics at work!

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Cruises / Princess Cruises / Joe Sharkey / New York Times / → All Tags

Cruise Travel: Mutinies Are In for 2008

Speaking of cruises, sounds like starting a mutiny is the new calling customer service. New York Times writer Joe Sharkey is tracking the "trend" of organized passenger resistance after a recent Sapphire Princess cruise that had to skip many of its scheduled stops when typhoons whipped up seas.

Passengers angry with the unplanned diversions started cooking up schemes, says passenger Carolyn Spencer Brown, who also happens to run the influential site Cruise Critic:

First there was a group of what I'd call rabble-rousers, led by a lawyer. We were missing all of these ports, and they felt they weren't getting the truth...[at one point, assembled in the ship's theater] the attorney jumped up and grabbed the microphone away from the assistant cruise director and said: `We're taking over the stage! We have a petition!'

List of names notwithstanding, officers on-board were able to retain control, and Princess Cruises gave everyone some free spending money and a discount on another cruise. Let that be a lesson for you instigators: Just because you organize a mutiny doesn't mean you won't be invited back to sail again!

Related Stories:
· Growing Rebellion on the High Seas [NYT]
· Cruises coverage [Jaunted]

[Photo of the Sapphire Princess: SqueakyMarmot]