Leaked Emails: Norwegian Pressures Sales Team to Lie About Coronavirus
miaminewtimes.com
miaminewtimes.com
But couldn't we have a standard where literally anything anyone says to a customer must be true, or was not false to the knowledge of the person saying it? Scammy warranties, timeshares, and other "gotcha" products would be a thing of the past. To make money, providing honest value with a product that matches the expectation of the customer would be required.
In these situations, cruise lines will of course lose money in the short term. But the alternative is that we accept the risk to human life to people taking these cruises, all in the name of short-term capital gain. What if instead we had to either "eat the loss", or invest in true safety (we can take 50% of normal passenger load, add these safety measures, these cleaning routines, etc).
You can google for "advertising fraud precedent" "advertising fraud case law" and "advertising fraud case studies" for more information.
Yeah, OK. But here's what happens if a company gets publicly caught. "At ConCo we take ethics seriously. The statements by the employees in question are not in line with ConCo's policies and practices. Those employees will be burned alive, then put on a personal improvement plan, and then their heads will be displayed on pikes at their respective places of employment."
I suppose you think that current norms for these punishments are too lax. It's not easy to tell what you actually believe though. If you want to tease out your own actual beliefs on this, look up some advertising fraud cases and find one that was punished too loosely, and find one that was punished too severely.
There is no such thing as truth in advertising. There is only a Make Lawyers Rich lawsuit..
To argue against your theoretical case: If there is a data plan that advertises unlimited data without giving any fine print describing the throttling behavior, or other strange details after high data usage, then yes, they should be able to have false advertising claims pressed against them successfully.
The USDA's minimum for "free range" labeling for example for non-certified organic foods can be met with a standard chicken coop with a door and a few feet of screened in porch the chickens may or may not ever actually use. "No Hormones" on the other hand has the technical definition and the layman definition aligned, but is federally mandated anyway making it a meaningless feature.
https://www.thebalancesmb.com/what-does-free-range-really-me...
It's this kind of of nonsense that led me to consider all marketing messages and claims to be lies by default.
I guess I would clarify what you mean by deception. One of the key parts of sales, at least when it comes to technical sales, is that an answer to a question or a presentation of capabilities needs to be made in a context. You have to know your audience. When you're talking about how your software does authentication it's absolutely appropriate to describe it as "integrating into your existing investments in authentication" when speaking to the business side of the audience. This is compared to going into detail (e.g. NTLM, Basic, SAML, Kerberos, OIDC, JWT, whatever) when speaking to the technical side of the audience. Is the generic answer to the business side deceptive? I don't see how it is. It's not their role to analyze the technical merits. They just want to know how much extra work will it require, in general, to deploy the software.
Is outright lying necessary? No. I've only been on the sales (technical sales, but nonetheless sales) side of the world for 1.5 years, but no, you don't. I am fortunate that my manager has carved out a team where the _expectation_ is that we are technical stewards of our customers. Obviously our end goal is selling software, but the immediate goal is to make the software work. It's a norm on our team that it's entirely acceptable to join a call and tell the customer that a competitor would be better suited for the use case.
While it's not necessary, it is hard. The incentives for sales aren't aligned with telling the truth. But this is where culture matters quite a bit.
I'm not okay with saying these situations are unavoidable, but I think they arise pretty naturally out of situations where people are paid to make a sale, and people hear what they want to hear.
This would be hard to prove beyond existing rules, and what would you do about opinionated statements?
I want to prevent consumer pain due to bad sales practices, but I also appreciate that the burden of proof required means that it would be harder for someone to sue me into bankruptcy for speaking my mind at some point.
"Anything anyone says to a customer must be true" is difficult. "Anything the consumer signs must be true" is a much better, and easier to enforce method in my opinion. There's a long way to go on plain language there (and people can and have already tested enforceability) but it's a much clearer standard. (Not a lawyer, just a citizen)
I assumed it was a weirdly worded title about the country... but then I wondered why they had a 'Sales Team'.
Also any front facing sort of government services type folks who provide direction / help in some ways are sales... ish.
But this is a Miami based news source, so I can forgive the lack of clarity as my impression is that cruise ships are very significant there, so for their audience the cruise line might be what they associate first.
It is not their fault it gets linked to a worldwide audience on HN...
Outside of port towns where they visit, we've got no clue.
Sorry just don’t want to get us associated with such extremely unethical behavior.
Frankly it ought to be punishable in the justice system.
I can add that the name Norwegian is associated with the Airline company here in the nordics. So using just Norwegian in the headline is unfortunate.
I wonder if a country can force a multinational to stop using a country name because of misrepresentation. i.e Norway (tourism?) forces Norwegian Cruises to stop using its name.
Finland, on the other hand.. much respect :)
I was quite livid when they opened a new major oil field last year but it takes time to change things.
https://www.regjeringen.no/en/topics/energy/carbon-capture-a...
IIRC, fishing industry and oil industry were 2 major reasons why they did not want to join EU.
Then again, I'm from NL. Same with our fishing industry, and Shell has done some naughty things in the past, too.
https://www.nve.no/energiforsyning/varedeklarasjon/nasjonal-...
Their politicians love touting that 98% green energy production but it’s incredibly misleading.
Sorry by the way I really don’t mean to take this conversation so off topic. It was meant half tongue in cheek :) every country has blind spots and this was about coronavirus and cruises, not global warming! And this is only their politicians; Norwegians are the most lovely people. Nothing against the country.
I’ll leave it here. Sorry again.
I don't really think there's a way around this for Norwegians. If you're upset about climate change (and you should be) then you should also be honest that continuing to extract and sell oil is contributing to the problem.
It's nice that Norway has a small, homogenous population in a country with low population density, great education, and opportunities for easy (relatively speaking) renewable energy. Many countries don't have those luxuries.
With that being said, I applaud Norway in general as a country. I think they do a lot of great stuff. But I think it's fair to point out what I perceive as a shortcoming that they currently have in the context of this discussion.
> It's nice that Norway has a small, homogenous population in a country with low population density, great education
This all seems off-topic to me.
> But I think it's fair to point out what I perceive as a shortcoming that they currently have in the context of this discussion.
Considering this post is about an US based cruise ship lying about a virus, nothing in your comment is really appropriate for "the context of this discussion".
Salespeople lying, within certain limits, does not seem to be treated as fraud by most governments, caveat emptor and all.
If they tell you the alcohol on the cruise will be free and you sign a contract saying so, and then it actually isn’t and you have to pay more, that’s one thing. If they tell you it’s going to be sunny and warm when you’re taking a cruise to Alaska in winter, that’s a different thing.
Lying or deceiving during sales about things other than the product is a large part of a salesperson’s job, I believe (including but not limited to making the customer think the salesperson likes and respects them).
And even more serious sources basically say: "we don't know at this time", which is not enough to make these actions criminal (as per current laws, per my limited unprofessional understanding).
I guess it was owned by Norwegians at one point.
That wasn't a "scientist", that was the President of the US of A.
His lies are going to get people killed.
Hell, just writing that out actually makes me think twice about calling and booking something. But I have young children and my wife would be unnecessarily worried the whole time and she doesn't even like cruises.
Assuming that immunity from the virus lasts longer than a few days/weeks.
Haven’t taken up on it yet but likely will. Cancelling the test of the trip is going to be tough, financially, so I’m looking on how this progresses.
Surely it would be insanity to drum into people’s heads “profits before species!”
I’m sure this is an isolated incident.
"Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is an infectious disease caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2),"
and it is backed up by a WHO factsheet https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2...
However, it does not explain why we haven't heard of flu outbreaks in cruises before this coronavirus. It seems cruises are perfect for the proliferation of any airborne virus.
We already knew that about cruises.
> However, it does not explain why we haven't heard of flu outbreaks in cruises before this coronavirus
We have, actually, but we don't hear about it much, because, except with the scrutiny occurring during this COVID-19 outbreak, which led to media exposure for a cruise ship flu outbreak [0], cruise ships are only required track and report when gastrointestinal disease hits a certain threshold, not respiratory ailments. [1]
[0] https://www.baltimoresun.com/health/bs-hs-royal-carribean-fl...
Anecdotally I hear about it almost every time the topic of cruises come up on Reddit or other social media. I just don't think its particularly newsworthy so it isn't making headlines. Cruise ships and Conventions are pretty similar in the sense that people just get notoriously sick after attending is my understanding.
> Kentaro Iwata, an infectious diseases expert at Kobe University who visited the ship, strongly criticised the management of the situation in two widely circulated YouTube videos published on 18 February.[36][37][38][39] He called Diamond Princess a "COVID-19 mill".[40] He said that the areas possibly contaminated by the virus were not in any way separated from virus-free areas, there were numerous lapses in infection control measures, and that there was no professional in charge of infection prevention—the bureaucrats were in charge of everything.
As I understand it, the message from CDC etc is, roughly: It's transmitted through droplets coughed or sneezed from one person that then end up through common touching of not-cleaned surfaces and thence into the body through face-touching.
My gut feel is that if that's how transmission occurs, we shouldn't see infection spread between large numbers of people who were simply present in the same room as each other for a few days.
Which makes me wonder if all the hand washing is just "Epidemiology Theater".
People cough and sneeze all the time, even healthy people, and the droplets of saliva from that land on surfaces that other people touch and then they touch their faces, rub their eyes and pick their noses. So the virus will spread in the air and also by transmission onto mucus membranes from your hands. It’s not airborne but there is droplet transmission. The danger is relatively small if people don’t touch, like shaking hands, hugging or kissing, and if surfaces are wiped down with disinfectants regularly and everyone washes their hands but that does not describe most people’s experience of being in a room with other people for a few days.
I don't think the hand-washing is epidemiology theater, in part based on this thread: https://twitter.com/PalliThordarson/status/12365493051895971...