The Cunard Single Habitation Fee: New Levels in Corporate Self-Entitlement

Riding the QM 2 is a pretty magnificent experience.. but if there is one thing I have noticed about upper class English companies, it's that they can have an absurd sense of entitlement which relies upon the uncomplaining nature of the English middle class, who are the people most likely to ride their boats, in a kind of thrill of a lifetime way.. they are all very pleasant enough, but they pay what they are told to pay.
I once tried to take the Cunard back to England, it's great.. you can go sit on the Queen Mary in Long Beach Harbor and go nowhere, or you can get on the Queen Mary 2, which really is a magnificent ship, and go someplace in a very exciting and relaxing manner, but something so took me by surprise that I canceled the trip, something so absurd that it makes me realize just how cowardly polite people can be.. I was going alone, and the Cunard Line, which is owned by Carnival Cruises (ah, if my friends could see me now!), decided, and this is how it was explained to me, that even though I was paying for my room, logically, the same that 2 people would pay, I was supposed to pay an extra supplement because there wasn't an extra person who might buy things on board... it was about 150$ usd. I was incensed and never showed.. of all the fees discussed in this link, this is perhaps the worst of them, the least justifiable:
http://www.cruisemates.com/articles/single/Single-Supp-072009.cfm#axzz2KvBN2PjN
To break it down, all right, I was paying for the space they had to haul from Brooklyn to Southampton, fair enough, no discount expected there. I didn't expect to pay less because I was alone, even though I was saving them about 250 pounds (weight, not money) in personnel and baggage to move around the ship and across the Atlantic.. the ship was likely too big to notice.. also it was a bit less food,but they load up on the food in the buffets anyhow, something tells me they have plenty left over at the end of the day and that one person doesn't figure in their calculations...but they wanted me to pay extra for the money they might have made had there been another person there, even though I don't gamble nor drink, and my one shipboard expense on my one cruise was to have a nice meal on the back of the boat, which likely cost 50 bucks. To Penalize on an expectation is just wrong, it's a very feminine form of business,it's a guarantee on consumption when they are supposed to be hosts in the traditional sense, responsive but not demanding of my actions once I pay for my room. For a corporation to instill a kind of corporate socialism seemed absurd to me.. the kind of thing they could spread across the 3000 people that do book each voyage instead of coming up with absurd notions like this that singles people out, which just make them seem not classy but arrogant, petty, and selfish, when they are attempting to portray themselves as the epitome of class.
I was actually coming from Indonesia to New York the first time I took the trip, via London, (it was months later that I attempted to return by the Queen Mary to England and demurred due to this), and I was so Jet Lagged that I would go to sleep at 8pm every night, wake up and play the drum kit at the back swimming pool at 4am (which no one seemed to mind), then watch the sun rise and ate the buffet at all the odd hours that my body craved.. I wasn't there to buy spa treatments or big meals, although I did buy one the last day when it was half price for kicks, since I was almost recovered, and I disciplined myself to not smoke a cigar in the cigar bar although it actually was quite pleasant, so I stayed well below the 150 not out of cheapness but just out of personal choice and circumstances, which in this case Cunard is disregarding. It was perhaps the best jet lag recovery I ever had, the cool air and the pretty nifty ship making it all the more pleasant, but somehow I can't get over this, the expected revenue being passed along.. since when did companies get a guarantee, and what does it say about what Cunard and Princess really think about people, their customers. Are we just prisoners to them in a floating shopping mall, a floating Singapore! The HMS Maidstone of Belfast Fame with industrial carpet and a dance show. What ever happened to risk and reward, exchange of good for fiat.. it's the same way Apple treats it's customers, and now Google is starting to clean their clock... Cunard, if you know what's good for you, you should drop this ridiculousness and place people before revenue just once. If you claim to represent class, the monarchy, and a British sense of fair play, what are you on about with this!?