Roatan's Mahogany Bay, Latest Private Beach/Fake Village Built by a Cruise Line

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To Labadee in Haiti, Costa Maya in Mexico, and Coco Cay and Great Stirrup Cay in the Bahamas, you can now add "Mahogany Bay" on the island of Roatan in Honduras. It opened in January (after two years of construction) and is the latest in a growing number of commercial centers and private beaches in the Caribbean maintained by the cruise lines in an effort to channel your spending into their (the cruise lines') pockets. Heaven forbid that you should ever purchase an item from a local merchant!

Photo credit: Catherine Meadows/Frommers.com Community

The owner of Mahogany Bay is Carnival Cruises, just as the owner of Labadee and Costa Maya is Royal Caribbean, just like the owner of Great Stirrup Cay is Norwegian Cruise Line. The restaurants, cafes, and shops in these places are all owned or essentially managed by those giant shiplines and have about as much to do with the authentic local life of the islands as a U.S. military base would have, if there were one.

Mahogany Bay's biggest feature is Mahogany Beach, an 825-foot-long private beach (fenced off from the life of Roatan just as Labadee is fenced off from the life of Haiti). You get to Mahogany Beach on a "chair lift" costing $5 for the ride that takes six minutes to deposit you from the dock to the private beach. Every person relaxing on that beach is a cruise passenger, never a resident, and you will never deal with a Honduran citizen other than the ones hired by the cruise line.

Mahogany Beach is the latest effort by the cruise lines to eliminate the foreign travel experience from the world of cruising. On a private island, private village, or private beach of the Caribbean, you do not once encounter an overseas country.

You stay surrounded by surveillance cameras and watchful supervisors of the cruise lines. You have no easy access to public transportation, and a great many recent reports tell of taxi dispatchers informing you that it will cost $80 to hire a cab to take you to a resort hotel outside the area of Mahogany Bay.

Obviously, the cruise lines hope to entice you to book one of their escorted motorcoach tours. They also seek to control your movements, just as they attempt to persuade you to take your meals, hire your beach chairs, buy your souvenirs, solely from the establishments which they have licensed to do business within the private village or private beach.

The use of these private villages, private islands, and private beaches to provide the "port experience" on a cruise is growing rapidly. If you will turn to one of the cruise discounters who prints the itineraries of the cruise ships (like VacationstoGo.com), you will find a great many cruise ships devoting two days out of your six days aboard the ship (after it has left a Florida port and sailed overnight to commence a six-day cruise) to visiting these totally-contrived, so-called ports. As I recently pointed out, the big Oasis of the Seas starting in June will devote every other departure to an itinerary that spends three whole days at sea and two days at private beaches or fake villages. Only on one single, solitary day will it stop at an actual Mexican port.

Starting now, it behooves every smart traveler to favor the few remaining ships that go to actual foreign ports. You must carefully study the itineraries and refuse to commit until you discover a cruise that goes to actual places inhabited by authentic local people, reflecting their own cultures and lifestyles. A cruise going to Labadee, Coco Cay, Costa Maya, or Mahogany Bay doesn't.

Source: Heard of Roatan's Mahogany Bay? It's the Latest Private Beach/Fake Village Built by a Cruise Line

[Aramide olawale]

toomuch money in d pocket.