Cruise reviews, should they have boundaries?

As many of you are aware I like to call my clients on their return from their cruise for a chat, here what they have to say and quite often I pick up some great tips such as booking excursions, taxi companies, hotels to use, or not amongst other things.

Every now and then and very rarely a client will have some feedback about a negative experience on their cruise, this is fine as sometimes it can be genuine, a small matter or maybe expectations were not quite reached but a colleague of mine recently had feed back that made my chin hit the floor.

Now maybe I was shocked, as she was because we are the ‘experts’ and no what to expect so please read the below paragraph and let me know what you think. Is it shocking? Was the client right? Should travel agents ‘WARN’ clients about the nationality of staff on board the ships.

‘overall we enjoyed our first cruise but we won’t be booking another one. We find it completely unacceptable that the foreign staff onboard make so many grammatical errors when speaking English. We eventually gave up correcting our cabin girl. We chose P&O because we were told they were an English company. We feel we have been deceived. We did not feel we should tip these people.’

So What do you think?

Was that a step too far?

Racist?

Uneducated opinion?

Fair comment?

We are all entitled to voice our opinions and these comments for me have made me more aware that perhaps a 1st time cruiser does need to know this, or at least have the courtesy to be told before they book.

For the record I have only ever heard good comments about cabin staff and I for 1 admire how hard they work for a small wage, I bet I could look out of my office window now and see and perfect English speaking person not in work because they can’t be bothered! Is this ok though as they don’t need any grammatical corrections whilst collecting their benefits?