Aussies booked for an eight night cruise New Caledonia won’t leave Australian waters

Cruise passengers are furious after learning their South Pacific holiday destination will no longer leave Australian waters.

Six disappointed travellers spoke out about Choose Your Cruise, a family-owned business based in South Australia, ahead of their upcoming trip.

The ‘Flashback’ cruise was originally billed as an eight-day vacation with three stops in scenic New Caledonia and onboard entertainment, headlined by Human Nature, The Sweet, Boney M and Marcia Hines singing hits from the ’80s and ’90s.

Instead, the cruise will depart Sydney on October 30 and sail up the east coast to Willis Island, an external territory of Australia off the coast of Far North Queensland, with another port call in Brisbane.

The company cites ongoing unrest in New Caledonia as the reason for the sudden change to the cruise itinerary.

Brisbane retirees David and Terry and their wives paid $4,000 each, in addition to return flights to Sydney, for their long-awaited cruise.

But instead of white sand and coral reefs, the couples have spent thousands of dollars to stay in Australian waters.

“I booked a cruise to go to three islands in the South Seas, but we’re not going to any islands in the South Seas,” David said. A current case.

And to make matters worse, passengers cannot disembark at Willis Island.

Mother and daughter Kylie and Georgia call the new route a ‘panoramic cruise around a weather station’.

The couple, along with Kylie’s mother, paid $6,000 to travel from their Gold Coast home to the South Pacific for a girls’ getaway.

Because the itinerary change was announced after the date you could cancel the trip and receive a refund, Choose Your Cruise will not offer a refund.

Instead, passengers will receive a $50 voucher to spend on board and attend additional ‘The Elvis Era’ performances.

“We didn’t pay for that,” Georgia said.

Although Choose Your Cruise is known as a music festival cruise, passengers who spoke to A Current Affair said they booked the voyage for the promise of the island destinations rather than the onboard entertainment.

“We all wanted to go somewhere we hadn’t been before,” Terry said.

‘I like entertainment, but many of the bands on the boat are not my genre.

‘The destination was the most important reason for me to book.’

Georgia, 21, adds that she is not familiar with most of the musical acts, including Human Nature.

Of the addition of Elvis impersonators on board, she joked, “You can only listen to so much Hound Dog.”

Her mother Kylie added: ‘We definitely wouldn’t have chosen this cruise if we knew it was going to Brisbane harbour.’

Neighbors David and Terry certainly wouldn’t have booked the cruise if they had known the only stop would be in their hometown.

They joked that they would drop off at home during the layover, before heading back to the port in the afternoon.

“We fly to Sydney to fly down the Queensland coast, back to Brisbane and then back to Sydney,” Terry said.

‘Nobody would book a trip from Brisbane for that.’

The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade recently updated its travel advice for New Caledonia, urging Australians to avoid unnecessary travel to the French archipelago as arson and carjackings continue and civil unrest continues.

Violence broke out in New Caledonia, a French colony, in mid-May after Paris made plans to reform voting rights, allowing French citizens who have lived on the island for more than a decade to vote in local elections.

The move angered the indigenous Kanak people, who make up about 40 percent of the country’s population, who feared it would turn them into a permanent minority and destroy any hope of future independence.

Although rioting between independentists and French loyalists subsided from mid-July, it flared up again on Monday, the day France declared sovereignty over the island.

Choose Your Cruise indicated that due to the participation of the important musical guests, the ship had to dock at a port with a nearby airport.

‘Due to the limited number of ports in the South Pacific and because we have a packed entertainment program with 40 artists, some of whom require airport access, Brisbane was the only feasible port for this voyage to ensure the integrity of the entertainment program,’ the report said.

Daily Mail Australia has contacted Choose Your Cruise for further comment.