Would you expect compensation from a live-aboard operator if

[vladimir]

My wife worked in a doctors office. All office personnel were trained on how to give themselves an edge during cold and flu season.

As I said above (post 117) in reference to somebody else's mask suggestion:

Outside hospitals, it certainly is not a common precaution against the spread of virus. So what steps should EV have taken? Who else routinely takes these steps?

Primary defense was lots of hand washing and wiping areas down with disinfectant solutions (not windex) and minimizing any hand to mouth actions.. I would think it reasonable for the boat operator to have included such precautions in the initial briefing, especially give the history of illness on the boat over the previous 2 weeks.

The original post told us that the passengers were informed in the opening briefing that there was a virus aboard. They have a further responsibility to remind the passengers to wash their hands? I am not saying it is un-reasonable, but again, who else does that?

I also believe we may be misinterpreting the medical post concerning the spread thru inanimate objects. While these pathogens may have a very short lifespan outside the body, they can survive long enough for an infected individual to contaminate a piece of paper or a pen and then pass that device to another exposing them to the contamination (the kind of things you would do during the inprocessing on a live-a-board).

I am not qualified to judge Lynne's post, but I don't see that much room for misinterpretation:

Okay. Throw out all the stuff about hygiene, crew members cooking, and bedding. Most respiratory viruses are spread by hand-to-hand or droplet contagion. Staying in the same room almost certainly didn't affect things, because most of these viruses are short-lived and killed by a minimum of light, dryness, or cleaning agents. They are passed by hand-to-hand or respiratory droplet transmission.

I suppose she left room for a hypothetical transmission as you have described (the pass-the-pen vector), but she seems fairly clear that that is not a common method of transmission. Does EV have to guard their passengers against every hypothetical risk of contagion?

 

[redacted]

When EV admits to having had a problem for 2 weeks, I think they have an obligation to take reasonable actions to protect their paying guests from recognised (not hypothetical) health problems.

 

[utdivermatt]

The fact is we paid for an activity that we were not able to participate in. Speculate all you want but the only fact, and I stress, only fact we know is that there were sick people on the boat for 2 weeks prior to our arrival and upon our arrival and one of those sick people served dinner that night and breakfast the next morning.

Just out of curiosity, what is the price on the liveaboard for a non-diver? If you really think you paid for an activity you will have to explain what happens to the fees from those people. Most liveaboards offer a small discount, if any, but the truth is you pay them for use of the boat and the transportation... a small percentage of the price goes solely to diving.

 

[djanni]

Just out of curiosity, what is the price on the liveaboard for a non-diver? If you really think you paid for an activity you will have to explain what happens to the fees from those people. Most liveaboards offer a small discount, if any, but the truth is you pay them for use of the boat and the transportation... a small percentage of the price goes solely to diving.

Well, like all liveaboards, they advertize diving trips. Check out their website. They don't say "use us for transportation and while we're out motoring around the ocean maybe you can get in some dives."

I don't know what their rate is for a non diving guest. Maybe you can find it at their website. While there read the itinerary's.

BTW: Go Hogs!!!

 

[vladimir]

Just out of curiosity, what is the price on the liveaboard for a non-diver? If you really think you paid for an activity you will have to explain what happens to the fees from those people. Most liveaboards offer a small discount, if any, but the truth is you pay them for use of the boat and the transportation... a small percentage of the price goes solely to diving.

The discount for a non-diver is minimal, but I don't think that's a fair way to gauge the value of the diving. They don't discount much because of the opportunity cost--if your non-diving girlfriend wasn't there, they'd sell the berth to another diver. On the other hand, if they didn't offer diving, I doubt they'd fill many berths with their offer of transportation.

 

[offthewall1]

If the crew of the boat was this sick I would never have gotten aboard. It seems they gave you fair warning an illness was on the boat and you got on anyway. Had your group objected to boarding and asked for a refund prior to departure then you may have a case.

It sounds to me like you all went on the trip... meaning the boat used its fuel, had to pay its crew and all of the other usual expenses associated with running a group of divers out for the week.

Had you objected to getting on a "sick" boat, you could have made the argument that if the boat stayed docked there were no expenses - therefore your entire boat fee should be refundable. You most likely could have rescheduled your trip at a later date... and instead of being out all the money and getting sick... you would have simply been out airfare.

Depending upon where you were, you could have arranged another itinerary.

While I think the situation sucks - illness is beyond anyone's control... and once that boat leaves dock, the rations are bought, prepared and served, the boat is crewed etc... what money exactly do you think they should refund?

While I agree I would like a refund in a situation like this - I certainly don't feel I'm entitled to it. You shared in the decision to go out on a sick boat.... and you should share the burden for what happened... a sucky as that sounds.

 

[UnderwaterBumbleBee]

If only someone had a petri dish and a microscope so the exact origin could have been pinpointed. More gear to pack on the next trip...

The morning I woke up to leave for our last trip to Belize I had a cold. I loaded up on cold medicine, Airborne,etc.. for the next 4 days while on Ambergris Caye. I was nearly over the cold once we boarded the Nekton. I just drank a lot of hot chocolate that week and took stuff when I could. It didn't impact my diving at all and fortunately no one else was sick during the trip though one crew member probably got my cold the day we left. Sorry but I wasn't going to cancel my trip for a minor cold the day I was leaving, sick happens.

 

[DivingPrincessE]

If the crew of the boat was this sick I would never have gotten aboard. It seems they gave you fair warning an illness was on the boat and you got on anyway. Had your group objected to boarding and asked for a refund prior to departure then you may have a case.

You most likely could have rescheduled your trip at a later date... and instead of being out all the money and getting sick... you would have simply been out airfare.

These days airfare is a considerable amount of money. I checked how much it would be to fly from Dulles to Freeport and it's in the $400-500 range...not to mention time off of work that you have already taken to fly down. Since the outbreak occured two weeks prior, EV should have contacted the guests a week earlier. At that time they could have let them know about the situation, the liklihood for transmission, and at that point the guests might have been able to pay a small fee to the airline and get a one-year voucher.

However this would have all been a moot point if EV had simply taken steps to have the illness not spread, steps that have been repeated over and over again in this thread. More hand cleaning, bleach, NOT having a sick crew member (or any crew member for that matter) sleep in the guest rooms, quarantining the sick crew member, etc.

If I paid all that money for airfare, flew down there, and had them tell me, "hey someone is sick" I would think it's a fair assumption that since they obviously recognize the problem they would take steps to counter the spread. I would not, however say, "well I've got sooo much money to spare that the $500 it took me to get down here is nothing, so I'll just throw that away and fly home...then with my infinate wealth I'll just pay $500 to come back in a few weeks, hopefully they will have their act together then, thanks, tra la la off I go."

You're also assuming that a full refund from the liveaboard was an option...I don't remember the OP saying, the perser informed us she was sick and that we could get a full refund if we wanted to leave. I might be forgetting it...but I doubt that EV made that statement.

 

[robint]

These days airfare is a considerable amount of money. I checked how much it would be to fly from Dulles to Freeport and it's in the $400-500 range...not to mention time off of work that you have already taken to fly down. Since the outbreak occured two weeks prior, EV should have contacted the guests a week earlier. At that time they could have let them know about the situation, the liklihood for transmission, and at that point the guests might have been able to pay a small fee to the airline and get a one-year voucher.

Freeport? The OP was on the Explorer Turks & Caicos. None of the Explorer boats leave from Freeport.

 

[DivingPrincessE]

I had forgotten that, I just know that most of the liveaboards I have looked at leave from Freeport. Turks and Caicos is even worse. One flight available for $431 and the other is $681. So yeah, it would "just" be the airfare, because everyone has an extra $681 laying around...

Obviously this is just an example as I don't know where the OP was flying from, but to say that someone "would have simply been out the airfare" is a foolish comment seeing as how expensive airfare really is.