USA Today ran an article this week about Norwegian Cruise Lines, which just announced plans to institute cover charges for entry into five nightclubs onboard one of its forthcoming new cruise ships.

The article calls the nightclubs “exclusive adult-only, Vegas-style venues” (one is an Ice Bar, where visitors will be given fur coats to stay warm). The nightclubs will allow free access for passengers who book top-dollar cabins and suites, and will charge everybody else onboard to come inside. According to the company’s press release, passengers will be offered a “Beyond the Velvet Rope” package deal.

This type of “up-selling” appears to be an extension of what I told you about here on the CharterWave Editor’s Blog back in November, when The New York Times ran an article highlighting how cruise ship companies (including Norwegian) had begun offering separate pool areas, services, and more to passengers willing to pay a premium to escape the crowds onboard. That “up-selling” followed the practice instituted by several cruise lines of offering passengers access to exclusive, crowd-free restaurants for an additional charge.

So, putting all of this together now, you can book a cruise ship vacation for the advertised lowest rate, but you’re going to have to pay extra if you want to enjoy a moment’s worth of privacy while sunbathing, dining, or, now, having a cocktail.

I’ll tell you, the more the cruise ship companies institute these kinds of programs, the more they show themselves to be trying to offer you the essence of a private yacht charter experience. These multinational conglomerates have figured out that people don’t like being herded, fed, and treated like cattle during vacations at sea. So they’re trying to change the experiences onboard these mammoth ships without changing the heart of the problem, which is the size of the ships themselves. They’re trying to offer you the experience of a 12-person yacht onboard a ship with 3,000 passengers.

Why in the world would fall for that when you can often pay the same amount and have an entire yacht all to yourself? You won’t have to go to a “velvet rope” section of your yacht to enjoy personalized comfort and service. You’ll have it 24 hours a day, every day of your charter. At zero extra fee.

And remember, the more these cruise ships tack on additional fees, the more their overall prices align with larger and larger charter yachts. You may think you’re buying your way into something special onboard these ships, but in reality, you’ll be paying the same amount of money as you could have spent on the real deal, your own private yacht, in the first place.

There’s a heck of a lot of buzz on the Internet right now about the new 951-foot-long cruise ship Ventura, which P&O Cruise Lines launched this weekend in England–proudly hailing her as “the largest superliner ever built for the British market.” This is a whopper of a cruise ship, taking more than 3,000 passengers at a time. She’s currently on her maiden voyage in the Mediterranean.

A review of the new ship in London’s Sunday Times caught my attention, not because of all the activities and food it describes as being available onboard, but because at the end of the story, the writer quotes the price for a family of four to take a two-week cruise: 8,060 pounds, or the equivalent of $16,000 at today’s conversion rate.

I immediately hopped over to the website of CharterWave sponsor Virgin Island Sailing, which I know to have a regularly updated list of crewed yacht prices in the Virgin Islands–and where, just as I expected, I found several private charter yachts that would cost a family of four the exact same amount of money for a two-week vacation. If two families wanted to get together and double the overall budget to $32,000 for two weeks, there are a good number of well-kept charter yachts they could enjoy a vacation onboard.

It never ceases to amaze me that people would choose to cram their family onto a floating city at sea when they could relax onboard their own private yacht (with a captain and a chef!) for nary an extra cent.

I continually chalk such decisions up to ignorance–that people simply don’t know they have another,similarly priced option in yacht charter. I plan to keep pounding that message home here on CharterWave, like a person throwing a defiant pebble into the ocean of cruise ship media coverage.

“Once people see there is an alternative to big-ship, mass-market cruising, people will become hooked on luxury vessels.”

Sadly, this quote is not from anyone within the yacht charter industry. It is from the marketing director at Silversea, an upscale cruise line that is one of several mentioned in this article posted yesterday by MSNBC. The article’s headline? “Luxury Cruising is the Next Big Thing.” The number of times private yacht charter is mentioned? Zero.

I’ll tell you, I’m no longer surprised by stories like this coming out of the mainstream press, which takes many, many advertising dollars from the cruise ship industry. Most of these reporters simply fail to look past cruise ships for cruising articles, at any price point.

I used to get angry about articles like this, but nowadays I make it my personal business to expose them for the half-baked reporting that they really are. Anyone writing a story about luxury cruising, who fails to even acknowledge yacht charter as an option, simply isn’t doing her homework. Reporters used to be able to say the information simply wasn’t out there to find. Today, thanks to CharterWave in particular, the information is readily available and accessible to anyone who cares to seek it out.

Luckily for those of us who understand that charter yachts are safer, more environmentally friendly, often in the same per-person price range as cruise ships, and, well, just plain better, readers are turning out to be smarter than reporters like this one at MSNBC. They’re moving past mainstream media features about cruise ships and coming to sites like CharterWave directly, in our case to the tune of about 50,000 readers each year (and still steadily growing).

As that MSNBC article’s headline said, luxury cruising is, indeed, the next big thing. If you’re reading this blog post, then you are one of the smarter travelers who has actually come to the right place to find it.