Cruise ship passengers unwittingly rack up gambling debt

Thousands of cruise passengers, including some New Zealanders, could be included in a class action against cruise line companies over their lax onboard gambling rules.

The Australian law firm leading the action, Carter Capner Law, says some passengers who could not afford to settle their bills had been "unlawfully detained".

One regular cruise passenger, who has joined the class action, told Nine to Noon that on his first cruise about 10 years ago, he had no idea he was borrowing money to gamble.

"It just spun really badly out of control," said the man, who admitted he probably had "a bit of an underlying gambling problem".

"At 21, I didn't have too much money, and my final bill was about $4600. Because I wasn't aware of the situation, I wasn't aware you could actually rack up all this money... And this had to be paid by my mum who was on board at the time.

"I was told (whilst this didn't happen because the debt was paid) that I wouldn't have been allowed to disembark if the debt was still owing.

"They wanted it settled straight away."

The man said passengers were able to transfer funds to their casino accounts from their "cruise cards" - but those cards were not debited right away, so it was effectively an uncontrolled credit line with which to gamble.

Over the years since, he has been offered free drinks, free meals and even "free cruises" by the companies, most recently in October.

He went onboard intending to spend a maximum of $2000 in the casino, but ended up spending $28,000, coming out with a loss of $8000 in total.

"At no point does anyone tap you on the shoulder and say Hey, maybe this is a little bit too much.

"Twenty eight thousand is a lot of money. I was a bit shocked. I'm notoriously a little bit of a big spender when I get on board, but $28,000 blew me away a bit...

"The only contact I had was when a casino host walked over to give me my free drinks card for that cruise, and that happened pretty quickly, in the first day, because they want to make sure you're spending money."

He estimated he had lost between $30,000 and $40,000 in cruise ship casinos.

He said he had joined the class action in order to "raise awareness of the issue", because there families who were being unwittingly caught up in debt as a result.

"It's a little known thing that these ships are just picking up people and taking them offshore to gamble."

The class action is being taken by Australian law firm Carter Capner Law against Carnival, which owns P&O, and Royal Caribbean cruise lines.

One of its directors, Peter Carter told the programme they launched the investigation after the death in May of a passenger, who fell or jumped overboard after losing money in the casino.

"It appeared that the cruise ships had the impression that once they were on the high seas 'anything goes' - but that's not my view, that's not our view.

"Our view is there are still some restraints that the provider of the cruise needs to observe."

Under New Zealand and Australian regulations, gambling operators are not allowed to offer lines of credit, if they have reason to believe the money was going to be used for gambling, he said.

There were also controls on "incentives".

Carter said their argument was that cruise line companies were obliged to abide by consumer protection laws, including in their "flagged" countries.

In some cases, passengers had been unlawfully detained over their gambling debts, he said.

"They've been detained by being interrogated about how they're going to pay the debt - told 'You'll have to settle this before you go, call someone so they can settle the debt for you'.

"And some of the periods of detention range up to several hours. That's not lawful anywhere in Australia. I presume it's not lawful in New Zealand either."

Carter said it was possible 10,000 people could be included in the claim.

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