Passengers who had booked a cruise from New York City to the Bahamas were told the night before departure that they had a choice: Cancel their vacation, or go to Canada. MSC Cruises said the itinerary was changed at the last minute due to "unseasonable and rapidly worsening weather," NBC News reports. The MSC Meraviglia, one of the world's biggest cruise ships, had been scheduled to travel to Florida and the Bahamas in a seven-day cruise that started Saturday. Instead, it went to Boston, with stops planned in Portland, Maine, and Saint John, New Brunswick, before its return to New York.
Passengers were told that they could receive a refund in the form of future cruise credit if they decided not to travel to destinations much colder than they had in mind. Some people, however, missed the email and didn't find out about the change until they were boarding. "The guy helping us with our luggage said, 'You're going to Canada' and we all laughed it off," Girish Keswani told the Boston Globe. "We thought it was a joke." Keswani traveled to the US from India with his family for the cruise. The Globe spoke to other disappointed passengers from around the US—and some from Canada.
"I did not want to pay $5,000 to come to Boston," a passenger who lives in Pennsylvania and regularly travels to Boston for work said, referring to the cost of her family's tickets. "This was supposed to be our Christmas vacation." In a statement to ABC News, MSC Cruises said the rough weather "would have made it impossible to safely reach the southern Atlantic Ocean from New York City." The cruise line said the only last-minute berths available were in New England and Canada. "The only alternative would have been to take the more extreme step of canceling the cruise—and thousands of people's vacations—outright," it said. (More cruise ships stories.)
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