From the bottom of my heart, I have nothing to complain about the cruise. Everything was good and enjoyable from the point I stepped onto the gigantic ship.
Perhaps the nature’s way of conveying that nothing’s ever perfect, our almost perfect vacation was marred by the procedures of checking in, boarding in and immigration clearance.
To me, the whole process was chaotic and it seemed like the cruise centre was not designed to cater for the over 2000 passengers. Can you believe it took us about 3 hours to get into our cabin from the point we reach the cruise centre?
But strangely, when I spoke with friends about this, they seemed to be surprised with my encounter as their own experience were not so bad. Frankly, I couldn’t remember such bad scenario during my previous trips too.
Or was I so ‘suay’ (unlucky) to the core that day?
Here’s our experience:
About 7.50pm: Reach Singapore Cruise Centre at Level 2. There were already long, long and still long queues (apparently more than 1 queue). I did a brief survey and found the queue for World Cruiser (our booking category). We started queueing.
(It said Boarding Time was 8.30pm so we just stayed in our stationary queue)
About 8.30pm: I noticed some movement somewhere in from of the queue, so I went forward to check things out again. I got more confused as there seem to be more queues. Saw a staff who was on duty and asked (apparently lots of people was confused as everyone seemed to be asking the same question – WHICH QUEUE?). Finally I got it – first, queue for the checking in, then moved to another queue for the boarding in. (I almost freaked out)
Anyway, I went back to my father and hubby and told them we were in the wrong queue and ushered them to the correct one. So we waited……
Close to 9.30pm: I think it was around this time (or later) that I finally reached the counter for the checking in. I was starting to feel tired. After checking in, we went to the queue for boarding, and gosh, that queue snacked through one pillar after another. We decided to go for dinner at the food court first. We were dead hungry. ( We had earlier thought we could board the ship by 9pm, and have our dinner on board thereafter – how naïve!)
About 9.45pm: We went back to the queue for boarding. The queue was long but we could see we were among the last passengers in the queue.
I thought once we get pass the boarding in gate, we were saved! But wow, I was wrong!!! And how wrong!
After we passed through the board in gate, there was this usual luggage scanning which we need to go through. The crowd was already packed up to where the scanning equipment and sensors were.
Looking further in, we almost fainted. The queue was a queue no more. It was just crowd!! It was like a 3 lanes converging to 2 lanes and people started messing up the lines.
The worse was at the peak as we need to get clearance from the immigration counters. God knows how long we spent here because I had totally ‘switched off’. We couldn’t see the front anymore, and were just moving along whatever space was ahead of us.
Close to 11.30pm: The last I did a check on the time was when we finally got into our cabin and well, it was about 11.30pm!
How frustrating. But the time we spent on the cruise made up for it, until we return, again!
The checking out part was fine. Again, the bottleneck came from the customs. I really wonder what’s wrong!!!!
Perhaps the nature’s way of conveying that nothing’s ever perfect, our almost perfect vacation was marred by the procedures of checking in, boarding in and immigration clearance.
To me, the whole process was chaotic and it seemed like the cruise centre was not designed to cater for the over 2000 passengers. Can you believe it took us about 3 hours to get into our cabin from the point we reach the cruise centre?
But strangely, when I spoke with friends about this, they seemed to be surprised with my encounter as their own experience were not so bad. Frankly, I couldn’t remember such bad scenario during my previous trips too.
Or was I so ‘suay’ (unlucky) to the core that day?
Here’s our experience:
About 7.50pm: Reach Singapore Cruise Centre at Level 2. There were already long, long and still long queues (apparently more than 1 queue). I did a brief survey and found the queue for World Cruiser (our booking category). We started queueing.
(It said Boarding Time was 8.30pm so we just stayed in our stationary queue)
About 8.30pm: I noticed some movement somewhere in from of the queue, so I went forward to check things out again. I got more confused as there seem to be more queues. Saw a staff who was on duty and asked (apparently lots of people was confused as everyone seemed to be asking the same question – WHICH QUEUE?). Finally I got it – first, queue for the checking in, then moved to another queue for the boarding in. (I almost freaked out)
Anyway, I went back to my father and hubby and told them we were in the wrong queue and ushered them to the correct one. So we waited……
Close to 9.30pm: I think it was around this time (or later) that I finally reached the counter for the checking in. I was starting to feel tired. After checking in, we went to the queue for boarding, and gosh, that queue snacked through one pillar after another. We decided to go for dinner at the food court first. We were dead hungry. ( We had earlier thought we could board the ship by 9pm, and have our dinner on board thereafter – how naïve!)
About 9.45pm: We went back to the queue for boarding. The queue was long but we could see we were among the last passengers in the queue.
I thought once we get pass the boarding in gate, we were saved! But wow, I was wrong!!! And how wrong!
After we passed through the board in gate, there was this usual luggage scanning which we need to go through. The crowd was already packed up to where the scanning equipment and sensors were.
Looking further in, we almost fainted. The queue was a queue no more. It was just crowd!! It was like a 3 lanes converging to 2 lanes and people started messing up the lines.
The worse was at the peak as we need to get clearance from the immigration counters. God knows how long we spent here because I had totally ‘switched off’. We couldn’t see the front anymore, and were just moving along whatever space was ahead of us.
Close to 11.30pm: The last I did a check on the time was when we finally got into our cabin and well, it was about 11.30pm!
How frustrating. But the time we spent on the cruise made up for it, until we return, again!
The checking out part was fine. Again, the bottleneck came from the customs. I really wonder what’s wrong!!!!
28 Oct 2007 (12.20pm)
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