lstone19

We are on Sun Princess in late April, paid in full of course. I went to book our two included specialty dinings and was charged for them. Even less confidence inspiring is that there is absolutely nothing to show we paid for them except it being in my credit card's transaction history. No receipt from Princess nor does anything in the Personalizer or Medallion App show that we made these payments. I'm not going to be surprised if when we get on board and we try to get it fixed (do I see the host at one of the specialty restaurants? Or Passenger Services?) that they tell us those are our two included meals and they have no record of us paying.

So with Premier, $5 for the soft ice cream but unlimited premium desserts. I guess I’ll order a premium dessert, eat one cone’s worth of the soft ice cream, and throw the rest away.

So do we and the same thing. But in the Dine My Way thread, someone said last year (but before the new app came out) that it goes so far as to authorize the charge but never finalizes it. I booked out two specialty dining reservations and it did do the charge authorization. I'll keep an eye on it and if it does actually charge us, deal with it on the ship.

Dining reservations have opened for more cruises. We're on Sun Princess starting Apr 27 and I was just able to reserve.

No disagreement about the difference post-cancellation. But my point is that a cancellation can occur at the last minute when five minutes earlier, all looked good. And it doesn’t mean the carrier, be it a cruise line or an airline, was being dishonest in saying all was well up until that moment.

Of course, some times things really do happen at the last minute even resulting in day of departure cancellations (e.g. Norway boiler explosion). Having worked for an airline, I’ve seen flights cancelled when I was already in the gate area waiting to board. Or in one case, we were on a plane that diverted with a problem (and for the someone who made a comment earlier, yes it was a Boeing airplane and it was the plane’s first revenue flight but the problem was not a Boeing area of responsibility. And FWIW, I’ve also what should have been an Airbus first revenue flight but that one never made it away from the gate due to a problem. So my best luck has twice been with non-revenue flights before the plane’s first revenue flight). We were then given a replacement plane that had been close to starting to board for another flight. You could almost feel the dagger stares as we walked off our original plane over to the adjacent gate and on to that plane with the board at the gate still showing that plane’s original flight with Cancelled underneath and all its passengers still there.

As far as I know, that's true for all but what the first two or three cruises. We board Apr 27 and cannot make dining reservations yet.

Probably a little less. I make it a little under 1,000 nautical miles from Monfalcone to Civitavecchia. At 20 knots (I expect the ship can do a little better - most cruise ships seem to have a top speed of 21 to 22 knots), that's a little under 50 hours (2 days, 2 hours). Add a little time for undocking and docking. So long as it sails by 4:00a on the 26th, it can be in Rome by 6:00am on the 28th.

Story time: Not cruise ships but transportation none the less. Let's turn the clock back to March 1989. Earlier I mentioned I was retired from an airline but my airline employment was still over a year away. I was arriving SFO on an international flight and we pulled into a gate next to a Singapore Airlines plane. It looked like a 747-300 except it had winglets. What is that? Well, it was a 747-400 but I hadn't seen one before as the first had gone into service a little over a month earlier. Some digging turned up it had just arrived from Seattle (delivery from Boeing) and was going into service that night at SFO. Compare that to my carrier. I went to a delivery once to see the figurative handing over of the keys. We then flew on the plane back to one of our hub airports where the plane went into maintenance for a week or so so that things could be fully checked out as well as some additional interior upgrades done. In other words, some slack in the schedule between planned delivery and putting it in the schedule. So Princess is like Singapore Airlines was - put it in service as soon as you can while my carrier was like Royal Caribbean with some slack in the schedule despite how expensive an asset it is.

My thought had been all these Feb/Mar/early April cruises are pre-season cruises. But starting April 27, Sun Princess goes into what I consider to be the core Med schedule Princess has had for years the three seven-night cruises Rome to Athens, Athens to Barcelona, and Barcelona to Rome that can be booked B2B for 14 nights or B2B2B for 21 nights. And even early on, I had been wondering what Princess would do if Sun Princess was not ready. Do they jettison a core schedule or do they cancel something else and put a Royal-class ship in its place (not as much capacity but better than zero)? While nothing credible suggests a lengthy delay, the lack of open communications does make you wonder. Enchanted Princess is scheduled for the Caribbean this summer. Princess used to completely pull out of the Caribbean in the summer so if I were the decision-maker, I'd protect the core Med schedule over the non-core summer Caribbean schedule. But hopefully this is just idle speculation on my part.

Well, I'm retired from an airline. WN (that's the code for Southwest) had their big problem in 2022 but other carriers (including mine) have had meltdowns as well over the years. And I agree, the lack of communications is frustrating and it happens because things don't scale well when hundreds of flights are impacted. A single disrupted flight can be handled manually. But when it's hundred of flights, that manual process just doesn't work. My carrier had a lot of decision support tools (25 years ago, I was part of the team that developed them but even they don't scale well). Crews need rest, planes need to get to maintenance stations for their periodic checks (some of which are as frequent as every other day), you basically end up needing to build a firewall and restart from a known state. Others have commented about people arranging vacation time only to have the cruise cancelled. Above I mentioned being retired from an airline. I was always in a management position in a small group. I could take vacation when I wanted. But if you're in a large group (pilots, flight attendants, mechanics, airport service), you bid vacation time, usually before the start of the year. Their staffing plans are based on a certain percentage of that work group being on vacation every week of the year and some people get junior-manned into undesirable times. Not every pilot or flight attendant can have Christmas off. Some people move heaven and earth, make trades with other people, take an otherwise undesirable schedule, in order to get the time off. They may not have a chance to do that again for a few years.

My guess is they've decided that the relatively small number of us affected by what is going on with Sun Princess is worth ignoring so they can continue to market to the rest of the potential passenger pool. Outside of those of us directly affected or left wondering, nobody cares and it's getting very little play in the media (which is not at all surprising). Compare that to an airline which has melted down due to an inability to recover from weather. It quickly becomes big news in the affected area which is sometimes systemwide. To continue rah-rah marketing in the face of being page 1 news for the wrong reasons would just turn up the heat. So they've decided they don't care about those of us booked on Sun Princess. We're expendable compared to what they believe they can attract in new or repeat business by continuing the marketing effort. So after our cruise happens (or not), why should I care about Princess. As I said in an earlier post, just another reason to try another cruise line.

We already had our upcoming Sun Princess cruise for late April booked when we were on another Princess cruise last August. There were enough things wrong with that cruise to make me comment on the survey "thank you for giving me a reason to give other cruise lines a try." Nothing about the Sun Princess roll out is giving me a reason to reconsider that statement.

While the other stuff is "more than saying sorry," the refund is not. The refund is a basic part of what is required when you fail to provide the contracted service. Why anyone would think refunding the fare for a cancelled cruise would not be required? (I know, some people think the passage contract gives Princess god-like powers but not refunding when they cancelled is not one of them, at least not under the laws of most countries. Some airlines tried that - cancelled flights and then said no refund, just a future credit. The U.S. government stepped in quickly and said WRONG! If a flight is cancelled for any reason, all fare restrictions are cancelled as well and a refund must be offered).

True except in this case, every minute they delayed meant more people were boarding flights for Rome that they’ll then reimburse. If I had been boarding a flight to Rome, I’d rather know just before boarding rather than while the plane is taxiing out (and with onboard Internet, it’s entirely possible someone heading to the ship learned of it while the plane was taxiing).

I find the timing of the announcement very curious. About 6pm in Santa Clarita but 3am in Italy. They discovered in the middle of the night they had a problem with the ship? Not during business hours in either place. We’re supposed to board Apr 27 and at this point, have still not made any non-refundable commitments and won’t until it actually enters service (air and pre/post cruise hotels are all cancellable at no cost). Even holding off on insurance beyond what the credit card I used will provide until sailing is more or less assured.

We are on the 4/27 cruise as well although we're doing the 21-night version so we are watching for them to open as well.

No, dining reservations are not open for it yet.

Saw your ship cruising along the south side of Kauai while out on my morning walk. I knew it was due in today (I keep track of ship schedules when we're visiting Kauai since the buses for one of the major tours go right past where we stay) so when I saw it out there, I knew you had to cancel the port. It's been pretty windy here the last three days so I'm not surprised you had to miss.

Having been burned by the Coral Princess delays in 2002, I would not go out of my way to be on an inaugural. I have twice been on the first revenue flights of airplanes. The first one had us divert 2/3 through the flight with an engine shut down. The second one never even pushed back (it was the first time the plane had been rained upon and oops, a water leak where something was attached to the top of the fuselage - and before someone says it, it was not a Boeing aircraft. Also, despite what most people think, airplanes are not sealed the same way a submarine is. Aircraft pressurization works by pumping air in faster than it can leak out - some air leakage is by design).

Except that Princess became so enamored of "Medallion" that at the same time they moved from keycards to medallions, they renamed the onboard Internet access MedallionNet and created a lot of confusion as it implied that the medallion had something to do with Internet access. And regarding what Steelers36 said about Internet vs. Intranet, another source of confusion everywhere is people who use "WiFi" as a synonym for Internet access. WiFi is just the technology that allows a device to connect wirelessly to a network. It is the equivalent of plugging in an Ethernet cable to a wired device. What you can then access depends on what that network is connected to. So on the ship (and on planes), as Steelers36 said, anyone can connect their device via WiFi to the onboard network and then access things locally on the ship. But to go outside the ship requires purchasing Internet access (including having it included in a package) - but note that even without purchasing the plan, you can get to outside sites like princess.com (the same as on a plane where you can usually get to the airline's website and the airline's app works without purchasing Internet access).

We were supposed to be on one of the Coral Princess early cruises. It was worse than that. We were booked for 12/24/02-1/3/03. That was supposed to be the sixth(!) cruise. Then it was the second cruise as the first four were cancelled. Than the inaugural. Then cancelled. The cancellation was announced 15 days in advance, on 12/9, a day I well remember as my employer filed for bankruptcy the same day (not exactly a good day for me although the employer successfully reorganized and I worked another almost 15 years there. And rebooked Coral Princess for the same thing a year later). Coral Princess did go into service 1/3/03 but all those cancelled cruises were ten-night cruises (Panama Canal partial transits out of FLL) so in the end, it was two months late.

Whose fault it is is irrelevant. But it is Princess's responsibility. My cruise contract is with Princess, not with Fincantieri or any of the other sub-contractors. Princess is responsible for the performance of of its contractors, not me. For those who were booked on the cancelled cruise, it is Princess that failed to deliver their side of the cruise contract.

One of things we lost with the end of traditional dining is showtimes and other evening activities that were timed to fit with the traditional dining times. Now it's lots of evening activities and hope that your chosen dining time fits with what you want to do and hope you can change dining times if needed. For us, the loss of that is taken away some of the enjoyment of cruising since it makes planning your time more stressful.

The OP did not say how many nights. The summer Med itinerary could be 7, 14, or 21 nights. If that’s CAD for 21 nights, that’s a very good price!