Updated on 23 July (see end of post)
So, I received a direct-marketing email from Royal Caribbean, the American cruise company.
Headed “We want to hear from you”, it invited me to take part in a survey. The email said: “This survey will only take about 10 minutes to complete. We hope you’ll make your opinion count as your feedback is very important to us.”
Fair enough, I thought. And even fairer when I followed the link and discovered that I would go into a sweepstake for the chance of a free cruise.
So I went through the survey, answering every question as honestly and accurately as I could — including one asking me where I came from, to which I answered “Australia”, and another asking me where I lived, to which I answered “UAE”.
It got a bit tedious and repetitive, as surveys tend to do, but I ploughed on because, hey, a chance at a free cruise is worth 10 minutes of my time. Again, I answered every question to the best of my ability, determined to give them good data.
Then, when I got to the end, it asked me for some details in case I won the draw for the free cruise. But the box marked “country of residence” wouldn’t accept UAE, United Arab Emirates or even Australia. Each time I got an error message asking for a US state. So, in frustration, I put NY, and it allowed me to complete the process.
I’d now like to know whether I’ve invalidated the entry or, indeed, whether I was never eligible in the first place because the sweepstake is only available to US residents.
Either way, I feel used.
P.S. One might be entitled to expect that a cruise company knows the difference between a country and a province.
PPS: After a few tweets I did get the following response from the cruise company:
It doesn’t explain why the data field said “country”,or why the “US only” condition wasn’t mentioned earlier, but it’s something.
