The Ultimate Vampire Resource and Directory

Carnival Corporation announced late last week that they are instituting a mandatory fuel surcharge of 5.00 per person per day for all of its brands on all sailings across the board. (Carnival Corporation also owns Holland, Princess, Cunard, Costa and Yachts of Seabourn).

This is for the 1st and 2nd passengers in each cabin ONLY. For the goth cruise, thats 35.00 per person.

(Royal Caribbean, Celebrity, and Crystal also announced a fuel surcharge this morning. Norwegian is expected to follow)

Unless the price of oil lowers back down, the fuel surcharge will remain in place. I have seen fuel surcharges taken off of sailings as prices go down, or lower. So I will let you know if it does.

Because there is the possibility of seeing the fuel surcharge decrease or disappear, I have decided to break out the cost on future itineraries. So it will be on the left side of your future invoices.

Before anyone asks.. I already called Carnival to try and fight it.. and its not possible.

You know, at first I see this and think..."That sucks". But then I looked up some stuff and realized it actually makes alot of sense and is probably not even meeting the extra costs that Carnival is facing.

I checked out the price of bunker fuel, which is the low grade fuel oil that ships use. I found the price trend over the past few weeks at the website BunkerWorld, which tracks marine fuel prices. From the beginning of November bunker fuel cost has increased $35.00 per Metric Ton from $472.00 to $507.00.

To put this in perspective for the cruise ships. The last cruise I was on, at the end they published a "ship's log" with details of the voyage. This was on a HAL Vista class ship,, somewhat smaller than the Glory. The cuise burned about 17,000 Metric Tons of fuel. So, let's do the math, 17,000 Metic Tons x $35.00/MT increase = $595,000.00 additional cost per cruise!

Assuming that EVERY passenger paid the $35.00 surchage, and the ship was at full capacity. 2,974 PAX capacity X $35.00pp = $104,090 additional revenue.

While it's true that the cruise lines have long term fuel contracts, so they are not paying full market price...They still are likely losing money on fuel costs even with the $35.00 pp surcharge.

Thank you KCRC for your reply!
I agree that it is hard to understand a surcharge for fuel for many people. I work in the hotel industry and when CA and the West Coast were having huge energy issues a few years back, we had to institute energy surchages. Clients hated it but when it was explained to them like you did here, they were far more willing to pay it.

Same crap here in Florida with our power company.

They raised our power rates through the use fuel surcharges. Since the price of fuel went up, they had to add the fuel cost in.

Airlines are doing the same thing.

$70 for fuel, hell, that barely buys two tanks of gas for my car...sounds like a deal to me.

I saw it on the news the other day actually, and figured we'd pay it.

I don't see oil prices coming down in the short term :(.

two words: Nuclear power!