But when has a rule ever stopped me? Which is why I’m asking about Sally Radicali’s Holland America cruise to Tahiti.
From the beginning, things didn’t go as planned. Her home-based agent never sent her a receipt for the $3,500 deposit. And then, a few months ago, she tried to cancel her cruise because of a work-related issue.
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Frank and Lucy Pirri are unhappy with their cruise on the Carnival Destiny, and they’re even more unhappy with how the cruise line responded to their complaint.
Sound familiar? Given Carnival’s recent Triumph troubles, it probably does.
But this wasn’t a short island-hopper with a bad ending. We’re talking 18 days in Europe, which was “poorly planned and poorly executed” from start to finish, says Frank Pirri.
How so? Let’s count the ways. (Warning: laundry list ahead.)
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But you haven’t heard this story. Not the way Troy Bryan tells it, at least.
He recently received a phone call from someone representing a company called Premiere Discounts.
“A representative indicated that I had won a prize from a contest that I had earlier entered,” he says. “I don’t recall entering this contest.”
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But what would the cruise ship employees say when he showed them his birth certificate? So Purkey tried to find out. He contacted Holland America. He got its response in writing.
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The total price for a three-night Bahamas cruise package came to $2,058 on Travelocity. But that was before John Zimmerman applied a $1,000 rebate offered for a mid-level cabin through the online agency.
Then the rate was too good to be true – literally.
Shortly after booking the cruise, Travelocity unexpectedly reduced the $1,000 rebate offer to $100 and then eliminated it entirely. Appeals to the company were met with silence, so Zimmerman asked me to help.
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Question: We booked a cruise to Alaska on Norwegian Cruise Line last summer. NCL notified us that we would be sailing a day after our scheduled departure because they had to fix a propeller on the ship. This meant that the ship would not be stopping in Juneau for an originally scheduled excursion.
Then we had to cancel the cruise because of a hurricane that made it impossible to fly. All the airlines canceled their flights and we had no way of reaching Seattle. We had purchased a travel insurance policy through the cruise line.
Our airline gave us a full refund on our tickets, but NCL said we were only entitled to a 75 percent insurance credit that could be used for a future cruise. That isn’t in line with what other cruise lines did. For example, Princess offered a 75 percent credit through for passengers who had insurance and an additional 25 percent credit that could be used for a future cruise.
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The complaints started pouring in even before the storm had subsided.
Passengers were outraged — outraged! — that their ships had operated even with a hurricane approaching in late October.
One guest, who had just disembarked from a Disney cruise, was livid. “The pools on the upper decks were closed the entire time and the fine dining down below was canceled because of the excessive motion from the extremely rough seas,” she reported.
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