Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. It's Tuesday the 27th of June and all this week. I'm talking about really key consumer issues that will affect your holiday and of course we're coming up to the main travel months of July and August.

Delighted to welcome back Charlotte Hindle for today's entertainment,

which is your rights and indeed obligations on a cruise.

Hello, Charlotte.

Yes, hello, hi.

So there are lots of people taking cruises,

including myself this year, so excited about that.

But there's quite a lot of things that – there's lots of things that can go right with the

cruise, but there's also lots of things that can go wrong.

So I thought that we just have a look at some of the common questions that are coming in.

I think really the first one is that you tend to choose your cruise based on the ports of call. So, you know, my question is,

when you're booking a cruise, are you sort of buying the itinerary? Because often ports of call

change for many reasons, but just, you know, what are you buying when you buy a cruise?

Ah, you're buying the right to be on board a ship, basically.

If you look at the terms and conditions, and maybe I should get out more, but I do,

then effectively they say the captain's decision is final.

He or she will decide on the itinerary taking into

account a number of factors, and that's that, basically. Now, of course, cruise lines exist

to make people happy like the rest of the travel industry and they really don't want to mess

you around, but you can find that there are some

really serious changes to cruises and if you have booked specifically because of a port of call

and you find that you're not going there then that's very upsetting and of course many people say

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