We’ve always promoted Princess Cruises when people have asked us about our experiences with the cruise line. Great service, we’ve said. They really have gone above and beyond, we’ve mentioned in the past.
It’s said that you can tell the true nature of something when it’s at its worst, not its best, and sadly, Princess Cruises haven’t done themselves any favours in the current, admittedly troublesome time for the travel industry. While we’ve taken refunds from other cruise lines where bookings have had to be cancelled, with Princess we’ve been taking the future credit offer instead, our reasoning being that of course we’d be cruising with Princess again so why wouldn’t we? Well, that reckoning is having a bit of a rethink right now.
We have just had to cancel a cruise with Princess Cruises, and let’s start with that process itself before explaining the reasoning. It took thirty seconds, more or less, to ask the person on the phone to cancel the booking and for it to get done. That’s great. It’s the failure for there to be that option on the website (failure or deliberate design decision) when you can book and amend all manner of things, and it’s the fact that I finally got through to someone on the phone after four days of trying and listening to hold music (when the line wasn’t busy) for well over an hour in total. That’s not good.
The cruise we cancelled was one we’d booked on Grand Princess for next August, up to see the midnight sun in the Arctic Circle. We picked a big balcony for the sights. It was a ship we wanted to cruise on. It was a region we wanted to see and an experience we wanted to have.
But then Princess modified the cruise. Grand Princess became Regal Princess. Urgh. I’m sure she’s lovely to certain people but she wasn’t what we booked and that balcony we wanted no longer existed. We could have coped with this change, though, because the ship is secondary most of the time for us.
Princess moved us from the place we’d specifically picked (and for which we’d selected the “No Upgrades” option for) to what they categorise as a better class and in a different part of the ship. That mid-height, mid-forward view and sound of the waves being sliced open by the bow that we adore… now a high-up, mid-aft view of the Seawalk bump in the middle of the ship. Dreadful. We could even have coped with this change, though, because we thought we’d be able to phone up and get ourselves moved without too much trouble.
Princess tweeted me and said not to worry when I voiced concerns about these changes as everything would be sorted soon and prices would be adjusted for those seeing odd values, and we’d simply need to wait for the proper confirmation email. Fair enough. I waited. That arrived. Nothing had changed. The apparently random allocation of our cabin was still the same and hadn’t been checked by anyone, and the tweet had been nothing more than a “Stop moaning on social media” message. We could have coped with needing to sort things out ourselves, though, but now we were feeling a little shitty about the whole thing.
And then I spotted a couple of things. Firstly, the itinerary which Princess had said was the same was missing a port. Quietly, it had been removed. Secondly, the pricing for bookings on Regal were lower than on Grand. That made sense because she can carry more passengers and, of course, there was that one less port to worry about. We could have coped with everything at this point had our booking price reflected the new cost of taking this cruise. That doesn’t seem unreasonable to me. A view not shared by Princess, however.
So, there we have it. Princess were honouring the price I had agreed to pay for our cruise because it was higher than the price the cruise I hadn’t booked now was; Princess were honouring nothing else. Different ship. Different itinerary. Different cabin location and features, and priced above what anyone else could book it at.
And there’s nothing I can do about any of this except either suck it up, committing ourselves to parting with a lot of money next year for something not quite what we’d wanted, or take a financial hit. Since we’d booked with a Future Cruise Deposit this hit was tiny, fortunately, and since we’ve been so disappointed with the level of service from Princess Cruises about all this we’ve decided to take it.
Princess now have £100 of our money. Had they aligned the cruise price following their complete butchery of our original booking or even if they’d decided not to take the FCDs as cancellation fees then we’d have stuck with the cruise (or, more likely, re-booked to take advantage of the lower price). So, sure, we’re down £100, but Princess have missed out on over £5000 for the cruise before the excursions and dining we always take. Their loss. They’ll get someone else in the room we would have had but will they be as big a spender onboard? I certainly hope not but that’s because I’m feeling petty today.
So, so disappointed with Princess Cruises. We don’t seem to have any luck where their Royal class ships are concerned; our one experience on Royal Princess was immensely unsatisfactory too and our booking for Enchanted was cancelled before it sailed. We’re now down to just one cruise with Princess to look forward to and it’s one we’re still expecting to get cancelled at any point as the ship’s old. Our backup plan for if that happens was to take the future cruise credit again and book with a rival line doing something similar; only the latter part of that plan has survived this recent experience, but we’d still really like to cruise with Princess again, ideally. They’re just going to have to work a bit to restore our faith in them.
I do sympathise Mark. We are gradually learning not to book in advance on a Princess cruise because the prices are initially a lot higher and, as a UK guest, you are locked into that price. And even if we wanted to move to another cabin in a different class it has to be at the price of that class when we booked it. Thus we were quite happy to be able to move back from the midship balcony assigned on the Regal change to the aft-facing balcony that we picked on the Grand at no extra cost. Why that didn’t happen automatically in the re-allocation god knows! That was until we checked the current cost on the Regal for the cabin next door – massively cheaper! So we cancelled and re-booked at the lower price having only lost the £1 deposit.
It is incredibly frustrating. I know there are people out there who don’t care so long as they’re on Ship X. And I know there are people out there who don’t care so long as they’re on any ship. For us, the ship isn’t important but it and its features will factor into our reckoning and the reason we like to book early is because we’re fussy about the sort of cabin we want and the preferred location; not always, but typically. And that was the case for this cruise. It’s one thing for Princess to change one ship for another but if they’re changing one class of ship for another then there really ought to be more flexibility to say “Well, actually, you’re not fulfilling the terms of the contract I agreed with you here so how about a full, no-fee cancellation?” They have an extraordinary circumstances clause in their contract but it’s vague enough that a ship change won’t warrant it in this case. It’s really irritating because we’ve spent a lot of time telling people what a good holiday a cruise can be but then something like this happens and you think, ah, right, you’ve got far more protection to cancel if you book another type of vacation and they can’t match what you booked like-for-like, so maybe avoid booking cruises if this is a worry after all.