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WineCountryCruiser

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  • Location
    Napa Valley, California
  • Interests
    Cruising, Photography, Piano
  • Favorite Cruise Line(s)
    Princess
  • Favorite Cruise Destination Or Port of Call
    Norway

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  1. Very happy to hear that Princess stepped up and resolved your issue in your favor. You might want to confirm the status (refundable or non-refundable) of the OBCs that were provided for your next cruise. We ended up emailing our documentation to senior staff in Customer Relations. Our primary reason for doing so is to understand why the post-disembarkation changes to our stateroom account were made. Our upcoming Island Princess cruise in October involves extremely similar circumstances and we do not want to go through this again. Craig
  2. Thanks for the contact information. I do not blame any individual for what happened though I do find fault with the mechanism by which the final statement is derived. Until you leave the ship, you can review your statement and speak with Guest Services about erroneous entries. After that, you can review the final statement produced by post-disembarkation processing but have very limited ability to speak with anyone about seemingly erroneous entries. Should you be fortunate enough to speak with someone at Customer Relations, they can, as happened to me, simply stand by their numbers without explaining why their numbers are right and yours are wrong. And that's not right!
  3. I agree that the "$$COMPUTER" charges are not likely to be true charges but the reclassifying of charges from non-refundable to refundable or vice versa. The problem is that the final non-refundable and refundable credit balances shown on the MedallionClass app were exactly as I expected. As has occurred on previous cruises, Princess applied charges to non-refundable credits prior to applying them to refundable credits. Given the specific credit amounts, the only way that they could have come up with the refund amount was to apply some charges to refundable credits and then some charges to non-refundable credits - leaving a lot of non-refundable credits to be discarded and a smaller amount of refundable credits to be returned to me. This just doesn't make sense to me. I understand about the dispute issues. But it seems that if post-disembarkation processing alters my final totals, Princess will always win. If it results in refunding less money to me than I am due, they win. If it results in producing or increasing a balance owed, they win again. Unfortunately, we can't know the impact of post-disembarkation processing until we've left the ship and we have to live with whatever they claim to be the final amount owed or to be refunded.
  4. I know that Princess does read some of the threads on Cruise Critic. If they happen to read this one, perhaps it will prompt someone to at least consider that there is a problem and initiate a review.
  5. Ours was also a B2B and we did almost exactly what you did. All seemed OK until it wasn't. We've done 64 Princess cruises and also never experienced anything like this. As a retired software engineer, it makes me wonder if there is a glitch in the software being used at Princess HQ for post-disembarkation processing. That's one of the reasons that decided to start this topic - to see who else might have had the same thing happen to them.
  6. Glad that you got some something back. I agree - make sure that you always owe something. That way if "$$COMPUTER" charges are applied post-disembarkation, you can dispute those charges via your credit card issuer.
  7. Yes they should know. Based on post-cruise conversations with someone in the onboard financial department of the cruise in question (we became friends while onboard), the onboard purser's office is effectively out of the loop once the accounting data for the cruise is transferred to Princess HQ. They can be very helpful while you're onboard but there's little they can do once you've disembarked.
  8. Unfortunately, the connection between onboard and Headquarters staff doesn't seem very solid when it comes to the accounting side of things. About the only way to reach Customer Relations is through email. From my experience, other paths to reach them don't seem to work.
  9. I do work with a TA but she was unable to do any better than I did. Given Princess' ability to make changes to your account without your knowledge after you've left the ship, the extremely difficult path to contacting someone in Customer Relations who might be able to help is especially troubling. I wonder how many other cruisers have had this happen to them and just didn't know it.
  10. Sadly, there is no way to reach Customer Relations by phone and I've tried, without success, to reach them through the standard Princess telephone tree. It's actually quite difficult, if not impossible, to even have a Princess agent let you speak with a supervisor. One big goal of my post is to remind people that it is essential to get a printout of your statement just prior to disembarking and compare it to the final statement that you receive from Princess via email after disembarking. I suspect that this may not be common practice.
  11. Given what happened, that's what we're likely to do. After so many years of cruising with Princess without this sort of post-disembarkation alteration to our account, we were just blind-sided. Now we know,.
  12. I had previously spoken with Guest Services to confirm the distribution of my OBCs between refundable and non-refundable and they did. I did have, and use, MedallionNet on my own laptop. The issue did not appear until after we left the ship.
  13. Having cruised with Princess for almost 20 years, I have learned that errors in our stateroom account, though uncommon, do occur. As a result, I check my stateroom account balance on the MedallionClass app each day to ensure that the day’s charges are correct, and that the refundable and non-refundable onboard credit balances are also correct. On a recent cruise, I had onboard credits classified by Princess as non-refundable and others classified by Princess as refundable. While sitting in the disembarkation lounge waiting to leave the ship at the conclusion of the cruise, I did a final check of my stateroom account using the MedallionClass app to verify that everything was what I expected. As expected, the information in the app showed that I had a substantial credit balance – of which the vast majority was refundable. After arriving home that day, I received the final statement of our stateroom account via email from Princess. To my surprise, the amount to be refunded to me was well under half of the refundable credit balance shown on the app. This was caused by the application of a series of unknown charges identified as having been applied on disembarkation day. I emailed Princess Customer Relations the following day requesting resolution of the matter. Two weeks later, having received no acknowledgment of receipt or response to my email, I re-sent the original email after updating it to include my detailed analysis showing what I believed was the correct amount to be refunded to me. I did get an acknowledgement that the re-sent message had been received but there was still no reply. The updated message was then re-sent two additional times, but Princess did not provide a response until almost seven weeks after we disembarked the ship. Their response included an attachment containing a detailed list of all charges and credits to my stateroom account that I was asked to review. My review of the details provided by Princess showed that every charge and credit was as expected up to the time that we disembarked the ship. At the end of the list of charges and credits was a series of charges labeled as “$$COMPUTER” that were applied over two hours after we disembarked. An exchange of emails resulted in Princess stating that all charges in the final statement of our stateroom account that I received on disembarkation day were correct – though no explanation was provided regarding the charges identified as “$$COMPUTER”. I then emailed Princess Customer Relations requesting an explanation of those charges. To date, I have yet to receive a response to that request. I have another Princess cruise scheduled that includes a similar set of non-refundable and refundable credits. Without an explanation of the post-disembarkation “$$COMPUTER” charges, I am concerned that I will be unable to avoid a recurrence of what happened on my recent cruise. Has anyone else had a similar experience or is this unique to me?
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