FEMA's $236 million agreement..

[erynthered]

This is unbelivable....

 

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/9507503/

 

 

 

To critics, the price is exorbitant. If the ships were at capacity, with 7,116 evacuees, for six months, the price per evacuee would total $1,275 a week, according to calculations by aides to Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.). A seven-day western Caribbean cruise out of Galveston can be had for $599 a person — and that would include entertainment and the cost of actually making the ship move.

[Taro T]

This is unbelivable....

 

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/9507503/

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Now, don't get me wrong, because I am not necessarily defending FEMA and Carnival, but isn't FEMA now getting criticized for doing what its critics asked it to do; i.e., do something NOW?

 

It sounds like this contract was worked out in less than a day. Within that time, Carnival had to estimate how much money it would lose from cancelling / rebooking (I thought I read in the article) 100,000 vacations. When doing the back of the envelope calcs, if I'm Carnival, I am going to go conservatively high on how much lost future business this will cost me, as I am certain a lot of those passengers will no longer want to do business with Carnival. The cost to Carnival to do this contract is much higher than a normal cruise because of the potential lost business of repeat customers.

 

Also, how exactly is FEMA supposed to get multiple bids on something like this IN LESS THAN ONE DAY? This isn't like deciding you need 3 air conditioners and check at Home Depot, Lowe's, and Sears for the prices. This is hiring out 3 full cruise ships for several months. Due to the logistics and the timing, there probably wouldn't have been a lot of Cruise line companies that even would be willing to bid on such a project much less that had the resources to pull it off.

 

As an aside, I also would be interested in how the fares on Cruise ships are effected as you have now reduced the supply of available rooms by (I would imagine) a fairly significant amount. I've never taken a cruise, so I don't have any idea if there are 100 or 10,000 cruise ships in the particular region that these sailed, but 3 full cruise ships sounds like a significant number.

 

Dave.

[Crap Throwing Monkey]

To critics, the price is exorbitant. If the ships were at capacity, with 7,116 evacuees, for six months, the price per evacuee would total $1,275 a week, according to calculations by aides to Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.). A seven-day western Caribbean cruise out of Galveston can be had for $599 a person — and that would include entertainment and the cost of actually making the ship move.

 

Implicit in that is the assumption that all expenses are paid for on a cruise ship, somthing I don't personally know but rather doubt (at the very least...they have gift shops, right? They must have SOME way of separating passengers from their money via discretionary spending above and beyond the price of the cruise itself.)

 

And also implicit is a single incorrect fact: not all cruise packages are $599 a person. Some of them are much, much more. I just did a quick search on cruise prices, and they range from $399 all the way up to $2000, depending on the package - or between $100 and $200 per day per person, which is a more accurate count. $1275/person/week is about $170-180 a day - well within the range, albiet at the high end...but of course it looks exorbitant when you only compare it to a $599 bargain package.