TENS of thousands of British marks have been tricked into spending their life savings on a fortnight on a luxury prison ship.
All the facilities of a municipal leisure centre and four times as many peopleThe cruises, which satisfy every desire except the increasingly desperate need for freedom, visit exotic locations for very brief periods before long stretches on the featureless, disquieting ocean.
Cruise CEO Joseph Turner said: Imagine an enormous shopping mall, like Bluewater or the Trafford Centre, at sea. Now imagine you arent allowed to leave.
Within a day you know it intimately. Within a week you have eaten in every restaurant, seen every show, and hate every one of your fellow passengers.
And dont think you get to escape. Our Dubrovnik stop is twice as far from the city as the EasyJet airport.
By the time the coach has got there all you can do is buy jewellery and get back on.
On-board entertainment includes the fourth runner-up in 2002s Pop Idol, the bloke who came ninth in 2007s Any Dream Will Do, and the winner of last years The Voice.
Bill McKay of Worcester said: We were hoodwinked by marble floors, open-air bars, images of sophistication and class.
Instead there are 92-year-olds attending classes on how to use the internet in between coronaries and Silk Cut sessions in the casino.
I long for the days when I used to have a drink or a sandwich without first having to attract the attention of a Filipino waiter.
We were begging to hit an iceberg, and that was before the norovirus.
