george@cruisemaster.com (George=A0Leppla) wrote:
>Read the part again that said that people were
>"bumped" off VOLUNTARILY. Princess
>basically offered them a better deal on another
>sailing and sweetened the pot enough that
>they were willing to accept that voluntarily.
>Some of these deals can be VERY attractive
>to people whose schedules are flexible.
>FWIW, I have been selling cruises for 13
>years and have never had a single customer
>"bumped" off a sailing. I have had a lot of them
>take advantage of upgrade/cash back offers to
>change sailings...... and even more of them
>refuse these offers for the same reasons you
>would.
>There was an instance last summer where
>Carnival had over-booked a couple of sailings
>out of Baltimore and they did bump some
>passengers, but on major cruise lines, that is
>the only time I can ever recall that happening.
I find it hard to believe that in your years of experience as a travel
agent you never had passengers bumped. We have only been on 2 cruises
with another booked for this summer and one more for next summer, and we
have been bumped. and it was not VOLUNTARY.
A few years back we had booked a river cruise in the Netherlands and
Belgium with uniworld over the Christmas New Year's vacation. We paid
our deposit, picked a cabin, and then paid the balance when it came due.
And then, we received an e-mail from our travel agent that the ship was
chartered and we were being offered an upgrade on another uniworld ship
with a different itinerary. Being unfamiliar with cruising at the time,
we did not understand what chartered meant. We turned down the upgrade,
and said we would rather stay on the ship and itinerary we had chosen. I
then got a sinking (pun intended) feeling as to what chartered meant and
called the travel agent. (At the time we were using Lori Cunnigham's
agency.) She said yes she realized that as a travel agent she understood
the term, but then realized that I had not when I replied that we would
rather stay on that ship. She got an even better offer from them that we
briefly considered, but we decided that we really wanted to go to
Amsterdam and opted to get a refund instead.
uniworld, unlike the ocean cruise lines would have charged us penalty
for cancelling from the moment we paid our deposit. But, they had no
qualms as to bumping us and all other passengers. And believe me,
getting the refund back was not as easy as paying.
We may still take a river cruise some day in
Europe, but it will not be on uniworld.
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