Real NHDOC

The only case I have heard of on this board was a guest who cancelled an excursion after the refund period had closed and asked for a refund anyway. When told they were not entitled to the refund they disputed the charge and were banned for abusing the dispute process. To say the cruise line has a policy of banning anyone who disputes a charge is simply not the case, as I pointed out, I personally have disputed charges that were upheld as being justifiable disputes by the CC company, and I received the refund from the CC company and it was not held against me. Lucky, perhaps, or more likely that those who complain about being banned as a result of abusing the dispute process then rewrite the facts and present a case saying they were banned unjustly. When you hear only one side of a story you are likely not to hear the whole truth.

Mine was a contact about my disappointment over the decision to discontinue the embarkation day lunch in the MDR. I didn't feel following up after not hearing a canned response which others reported receiving was worth the time. My point was, that my history of having guest relations follow up was less than satisfactory so don't believe them when they say they will follow up.

This is a misrepresentation of their policy. Their policy is to ban people who file disputes that aren't valid disputes. That's a lot different than banning people for using the dispute process to resolve a real dispute. I have had to resort to disputes a couple of times with HAL, mostly after Covid cancellations. My disputes were deemed to be justified and I continue to sail on HAL.

I hope you get the issue resolved to your satisfaction. I emailed guest relations only once and only received a robo-response saying I would hear back within 7 days. Never heard anything again. Unfortunately you have left yourself in a position where HAL has your money and now the burden is falling upon you to prove they owe it to you. I had posted elsewhere that the cruise lines will respond to complaints made to the BBB website pretty quickly so if you get no satisfaction with guest relations I would post a complaint there.

If you booked your cruise through a HAL PCC they also can handle overcharge situations for you. Probably not something your TA would be too eager to do since there's nothing in it for them. If you do put in a good faith effort to resolve it with guest relations and still cannot get satisfaction then as a last resort you can always calculate the overcharge and dispute that amount on your CC - you will certainly hear from them after that.

No horns, no funk. Plus the singers just didn't have the same spirit as the BBK singers. Just disappointing.

My impressions were similar. My thought was this was the old RS band that they just asked to play other types of music. I recognized several of the band members from past RS bands. When they stuck to the rock sets they were fine but when they tried to do the BBK sets they were pretty bad.

They have eliminated the BB King band from all of the smaller ships. All they offer now on anything smaller than the Pinnacle is the Rolling Stone Lounge which is supposed to play all kinds of music (they have different sets - rock, R&B, 80s, etc). We were on Eurodam this winter and found the band was OK for rock but for R&B were pretty bad. Nothing like BBK on the larger ships. That's my opinion, anyway.

They've also added more seating to both the RS and Billboard areas when they removed the staircase. I have found that the bands on the smaller ships that try to be the "jack of all trades" land up just not doing anything particularly well. You just can't get the BBK sound without brass instruments so saying they play R&B and Soul is fine but it's just not nearly the same experience. Plus that venue on the smaller ships is terrible. It's always either too cold or too hot and doesn't have enough seating for the size of the ship.

The cruise lines will push and push to get away with everything they can do to maximize revenue but unless people complain they will keep pushing the envelope further and further. I have no doubt that it was as a result of people complaining about the smell of smoke on deck 2 in the Pinnacle ships (from the casino above) that caused HAL to remove the spiral staircase that was between the casino and Rolling Stone/Billboard on Nieuw Statendam and that has fixed the problem. Of course we still can't walk across deck forward 3 but that's a lot better than smelling the smoke when sitting in those lower venues.

I'd follow up with the guest relations department in Seattle then. If not during the cruise, when you get home afterwards. You may not get OBC for this cruise but may receive a FCC for use on another one. Also, a complaint to the BBB gets the cruise lines attention, believe it or not, and it only takes a few minutes to lodge one. We had a problem with a cabin on a Celebrity cruise and until I left a complaint on the BBB website we got literally no response. But within 3 days after posting it I was offered $1500 in OBC as compensation. So that definitely did work for me.

So many people say things like "Princess, NCL and Celebrity do the same thing" as if it makes it OK for HAL to now follow their bad practices. Maybe loyal HAL customers feel HAL should be better than those others are. Like the whole favoring triples and quads things now and their willingness to cheat the general cruisers out of being able to use a venue because they double sell it (selling it once as an amenity and then again as a special events venue to a charter group like Park West). It's just bad business and saying "everyone else does it" doesn't make it right to do it, it just lowers HAL to the level of Princess, NCL and Celebrity.

I can say I would also be pretty upset if I were on this cruise. It's another one of those "conditions of the contract" that most people never read and some apologists here on CC think HAL will never abuse that allows this, but clearly this crosses a moral line of what's right and wrong. It's one thing to take a venue like the Rolling Stone lounge and close it during the day when it would not ordinarily be used for anything else and let the Park West people peddle their near worthless, objectively terrible art but it's quite another to take a space like the Crow's nest over every evening of a cruise. One of the bright spots of the post covid cruising was the absence of Park West on the ships - we had hoped it was permanent but apparently, like cockroaches, you just can't get rid of them!

Unfortunately, now, with the contract being the way it is even if you book a 2 person cabin for 2 they can move you for any reason so basically every booking is a guarantee cabin booking as you have no control over where they want to put you and no recourse if you are unhappy with it. Instead of calling a particular cabin your "chosen cabin" it should just be called your preferred choice of cabin.

It's blatantly obvious that section 4 of the contract wouldn't grant HAL the latitude to change your cabin at will or else they wouldn't have changed section 8 to explicitly give them that. Even they, in good conscience couldn't interpret it that way. Unfortunately, now that they have granted themselves such unilateral power over cabin assignments it's something they could easily exploit to maximize their profits any way they see fit. As I said before, they CAN do a lot of things, but SHOULD they? No, they shouldn't. If they choose to offer triple and quad rooms to singles or couples that's their choice, but they want it both ways. They want to be able to under-fill them with whomever wants to buy them but then reserve the right to put you anywhere on the ship to accommodate a larger party who happens to book after you do. It should be "first come first served" not "we don't care what YOU want it's all about stuffing as many people on the ship as we can legally stuff onto it". At some point they should be taking into account how it makes the guest feel about booking a cruise with them. I know it certainly makes me less likely to book a triple or quad room if it is being offered to me with the understanding that it's only "at will".