New Delhi: It looks like the misbehaviour of Indian tourists is not limited to airplanes as we heard so far. Last month, 1,300 employees of the pan masala company Kamla Pasand went on a conference cruise on Voyager of the Seas. Operated by Royal Caribbean International, the boat left from Sydney, only to turn into an unwitting host for ‘wild parties’ with women dressed as Playboy bunnies, courtesy the firm’s employees.
According to a report in Newsweek, these men took over pool decks, bars and buffets, while also bringing on board burlesque dancers. The men also reportedly harassed passengers and shot videos of young girls on their cell phones.
Cassandra Riini, a passenger was quoted by Australian Nine Network’s A Current Affair as saying, “It was almost like a huge bucks [bachelor] party, a bucks night for 1,200 people. Their doors would be open and you would walk past and be like what am I going to be looking at when I walk past this door? It is hard to forget after seeing all the flashbacks of these men around all the time, 24 hours a day, like we could not escape.”
The cruise turned out to be a nightmare for all the other passengers too. Bingo, which is generally a hit game with cruise passengers, had to be cancelled owing to lack of interest from the employees’s end (they were more interested in cabaret). The cruise gradually deteriorated to such an extent, that the Royal Caribbean International had to issue full refund to passengers.
As per to Christine Weyling, the Royal Caribbean should have informed passengers that such a large group would be on board with them: “It was crazy…little Playboy bunny outfits, you know this is a family boat. I think that they should have notified us that there was a big group that had been booked and had booked the pool deck out…everyone on that ship should have been notified.”
According to the Telegraph UK, cruises are one of the safest forms of travel as statistics have shown. However, laws at the sea are complex. In order to decide what legal system would kick in if a crime takes place at sea, the previous and subsequent port of call, nationalities of victims and perpetrators and the country with which the ship is registered, are taken into consideration.