Why Am I Suprised?

:o We have had 9 terrific cruises on Regent and 3 more booked. At the same time, I have "battled" Regent about their web site that I regard as visually attractive but poor functionally. I have been following the recent "excursion" threads on this Board as I have a cruise in February whose excursions can be selected in a few days but some ports for that cruise were not showing potential "free" excursions (or so I thought).

To me, Cozumel and Casa Maya only showed the "Regent Choice - hire a car options". My daughter showed me the problem. For these two ports, if both the "Free" and the "Regent Choice" option buttons are selected, your are only shown the "Regent Choice" potential selections, Not Both! You get to see "free" for these two ports only if "Regent Choice" button is deselected.

Yes, I have offered several times to have the eighth- graders fix the faulty site links - like that for the Explorer Deck plan!

The horse you are beating died a long time ago.

No one at Regent every seem to concerned about their website's foibles. :D

J

594/41

The horse you are beating died a long time ago.

 

No one at Regent every seem to concerned about their website's foibles. :D

 

J

594/41

Greetings, JMARINER. It is true that Regent's website is often very difficult to use. Considering Regent's emphasis on luxury, it is strange that the website has an almost antique feel. Nice in museums, not so much for a cruise company. I notice that my password sometimes fails, and it takes some time to reset it. Oh well, nothing's perfect.

Mary

I've complained about Regent's website for years, but I really don't think the competition is any better. They might have an edge post-booking, but I don't like the interface for shopping cruises on any of the other lines.

I am sure Regent will review what Crystal have been doing with their website when/if they get around to updating their own (as they have been promising for some time)

Come to think of it, didn't Jason mention something in the town hall meeting in April about the new website being almost ready to roll out?

I guess it is the industry. I use Regent and Celebrity. Right now on the Celebrity boards there is a firestorm thread about the poor quality of Celebrity (and RCI) internet sites. This is a market that still relies a lot on direct selling, through their mail (we all complain about being bombarded there too), travel agents and on ship. I think the emphasis on getting the sell, is overwhelming the need to deal with the post sell. The audience on Cruise Critic (all lines) are heavy internet users, used to quality vendors driving their "internet" model. The cruise lines with their focus on getting the cabin sold, just have not addressed the need make the rest of the experience better by improving the quality of their online services. Those of us that like to click, buy,manage and schedule on the internet will continue to suffer I'm afraid.

Come to think of it, didn't Jason mention something in the town hall meeting in April about the new website being almost ready to roll out?

Bill,

You are correct

Looking back at the previous thread reporting on the April Town Hall Meeting on board Explorer, Jason Montague said that Regent were working on the website and planned to upgrade it by the end of June.

So it should be less than 3 weeks before we see the outcome :cool:

Having been through two major website revamps (ten years apart) at my job before retirement, I can say that it is much better to delay launch than to launch "on time" and wind up having your live site be a test site. My first experience was the latter, and it was a mess. In the second experience, we came in six months late, but the launch was close to flawless, due to multiple rounds of testing and fixing.

It rather sounds like Crystal is going the live-site-as-test-site route. People on CC may understand the dual sites, but CC represents a small percentage of the clientele.

I hope that Regent takes the time to get it right. And is getting real users to test it. That was the key for us.

Having used by Crystal and Regent sites, I have to say that the pre-redesigned Crystal site is much more functional, even if it isn't all that intuitive. Just having a search function on the site makes a world of difference.

But if you want a competition for worst cruise line website, I'd nominate Scenic River Cruises' U.S. website. What a mess! Interestingly, their Australian website is much, much better. I'm not sure why they didn't just adapt that for their plunge into the U.S. market.

Totally agree about Scenic River cruises US website--I was just trying to browse and compare, and it was totally impossible. I have learned to deal with rssc.com idiosyncrasies.

To me, Cozumel and Casa Maya only showed the "Regent Choice - hire a car options". My daughter showed me the problem. For these two ports, if both the "Free" and the "Regent Choice" option buttons are selected, your are only shown the "Regent Choice" potential selections, Not Both! You get to see "free" for these two ports only if "Regent Choice" button is deselected.

Hi DeepFreeze63 - you are absolutely correct that this is a bug that exists for only some ports - and this is something that I was not previously aware of, so thank you for bringing it to our attention. As others have pointed out, we are in the midst of a redesign for these pages, and while you won't see them this month, you will see them soon. Given our efforts are currently focused on the redesign, I'm afraid that it is unlikely that this bug will be fixed, but we'll do everything we can to make sure it doesn't carry over to the new site.