Recently there has been a lot of discussion on the subject of Royal Caribbean having created a group called the Royal Champs. They just expanded the group from the original "charter" members to include some newer members.

Follow up:

For me on a personal note this has left me with a lot to ponder. Is it acceptable for a cruise line to reward people. Sure. Is it acceptable for them to continue to reward them and to monitor them? Well, not according to the FTC or WOMMA (Word of Mouth Marketing Association).

I want to assure people who read my blog that I can't and won't be bought. If a travel agent brings me a good deal, I'll post it. But the point of my blog is to offer the best deals. If another agent offers a better deal, so be it. I don't have any preference for one company over another other than my personal preferences. We all have preferences. But I'm also open to anything new.

The whole fiasco with trying to influence message boards has left me with a lot of questions. The first being that if this was a focus group... it's far too homogeneous. The second being that TripAdvisor the parent to Cruise Critic, the largest site and the site affected by this has a clear policy on shills and to ensure content integrity.

There are more questions to be answered. Certainly we haven't heard much from Royal Caribbean about this. Cruise Critic claims that they knew nothing, like Mr. Schultz on Hogan's Heroes. The most obvious losers in all of this are the people called "Royal Champions" because they knew nothing at all about any intents. Some of them are really nice and helpful people. Most of them had nothing but the best of intents when accepting to be members of the group. And others are treating them horribly when they did nothing wrong.

If you want to hear more of the controversy, I suggest popping over to ExpertCruiseer, USA Today and some of the rival board like CruiseMates and CruisingTalk, both well run message boards.