Jonnoh

Hey everyone! Firstly, I want to reiterate how blown away we are by the response and attention this community has shown to our situation. I want to go out and say while we appreciate all the responses, a special / huge shout out / thank you to wrk2cruise! We emailed the CEO and director of customer engagement (Jennifer is on mat leave btw) this morning and got a call back within 2 hours from a member from their ‘Engagement Center Senior Leadership.’ They were super helpful and finally started to be proactive about jumping in to help. It took about a day, but I’m pleased to share that Celebrity will be refunding us the entire amount that was owed for the flights we paid out of pocket. They’ve also been great about giving us updates throughout the day so I think we’re really glad to put this chapter behind us. Just need to see the amount credited back to our account. In terms of extra compensation for the inconvenience, they provided me with $150 FCC which isn’t the greatest but not worth trying to push / prolong this any longer. We’re ready to put this behind us and honestly, i can’t understate this enough - it’s all thanks to this forum or else I would probably be still talking on the phone with Celebrity contact center. In terms of the recent questions regarding my TA, I’ll be thinking twice on whether I will use them again. I certainly believe that they should have been the ones dealing with this on our behalves since they were the ones coordinating our travel and definitely shouldn’t be let off the hook. Also, since the airfare wasn’t paid for by Celebrity, we basically ‘paid’ for the entire reservation which included the return flight home. In closing, just want to put out some Lessons Learned for those who may be experiencing similar issues like we have: 1. First point of contact in the event of travel emergency should be to contact the Celebrity emergency travel team 2. For those who want to be cautious, best to call the airline in the event you can’t check-in to make sure you have a valid airfare. This might buy you some time to make sure the celebrity emergency travel team can get you on your way 3. If you do encounter issues on your travel, make sure to raise with guest services when you get on ship. They might be able to help you out / get it resolved before you leave the boat. Also, ask for FCC if you believe it’s warranted. Their first offer is usually low, so I would recommend asking if that is their best offer. FYI - first offers were a specialty dining meal. Also, they are likely to give you FCC before getting high speed internet. 4. Try your best with dealing with the contact center, but if you aren’t making good headway; I would recommend emailing engagementcenterseniorleadership@celebrity.com. I believe they’ll make up for the shortcomings of the phone team. Thanks again for everyone’s support and looks like this forum helped us put closure on this nightmare. THANK YOU.

Hi everyone, thank you so much for even spending a minute giving us your attention and helping us get some resolution. It’s Sunday evening for us here and we’re drafting up our factual email to the leadership team so we can send tomorrow morning. Fingers crossed we get some traction and get this resolved sooner rather than later. I agree with everyone that it’s a weird, complicated (at least when you try to explain it to a bank), and in some ways unethical to be disputing the airline charge so it’s best that we sort this out it with Celebrity directly. While this may be the case, we did raise to the bank that this situation was happening so there was some sort of record of a duplicate payment for services rendered. It may be for nothing, but at a minimum; it’s another third party to have a record that this has happened. Worst case scenario, it may have to be handled through small claims court which I really hope we don’t need to go through. Now to some of the questions: - we booked through a travel agent but billed directly by celebrity. While I have done my best to offload the issue back on them to handle on our behalves, it’s not a productive path.. I had to make a trade off and at a minimum, I have access to voice recordings between celebrity and the travel agent about the issue and resolution. - we didn’t call the emergency number from Celebrity. It wasn’t something I knew of as this was my first time booking a cruise package with Celebrity and I was trying to keep my entire party calm while making the most logical decision with the information I had in the airport at 4am. I’ll keep that in mind if I ever choose to cruise again after this one. I did the best I could… - I stand corrected, my baby was not a newborn, but 6 months at the time going on her first vacation. In my mind, still a newborn (they grow up fast). Thanks again for all your replies and will share an update whenever we hear back.

wow! Thanks so much everyone! I genuinely feel your care for our situation and I'm blown away how amazing and powerful this community is. I'll definitely check out the links to send emails to those folks! thanks so much @wrk2cruise ! In regards to the credit card company, I've started a dispute process so fingers crossed that gets some attention as well. We enjoyed the cruise as best as we could and the people were lovely. Our baby girl was 6 months old and was the only passenger under 18! She had a blast and while the post cruise service has been a nightmare, the cruise was great!

Hi there, New to the forum and hope someone out there can help me. My family and I were excited to go on our first vacation since 2019 on Celebrity Summit in May. We booked a flight and cruise package with Celebrity and were able to check-in to our cruise but had issues with completing our flight check-in. We didn't think twice since we were able to select our seats and assumed this was normal since we were flying with a newborn baby on lap and figured credentials needed to be validated at the airport so we didn't think twice. We went to the airport and tried to check-in and were shocked to hear that we did not have valid tickets for the flight and were no even on the flight manifest. The gate agent was able to trace back into the system and it displayed that our flights were voided. We never had any payment issues so this was a huge shock. We were informed that Celebrity did not pay for the tickets and we had to leave the line and purchase new flight tickets. At 4am in the morning, we were left stranded at the airport with a newborn baby, elderly couple and a cruise that was going to leave without us. We had no choice but to purchase the tickets.... Thankfully we still had cruise tickets and were assured by the Summit team that the funds would be refunded by the emergency travel team. We did our best to enjoy the cruise the best we could knowing that we would have to handle this situation after our vacation. For the record, the extra amount paid was over $2500 for 6 guests! Since we've arrived on land and over the last 2 months, our entire family has been trying as hard as we can spending countless hours (literally a full time job) trying to navigate the complicated contact center teams to figure out when the refund for the flights would arrive. I can't emphasize this enough, but we have received inconsistent information, runaround and told to keep waiting. We were OK with waiting knowing that the full amount was approved / refunded. It now feels like we were being pushed out so far that we'll just go away. We were even told a month ago that the funds / refunds would be processed by this week. It's now 2 days past the 'deadline' and still do not have the refund pending.. in fact, we were told that we wouldn't be getting refunded at all and would be getting some time of gift certificate (for a smaller amount paid) for future flight use with an expiry date.. this makes no sense. I don't think my ask is unreasonable - just looking to get back what is owed for services that should have been handled by Celebrity from the onset. I'm not sure if anyone has had a similar experience, but any help or guidance would be great... I'm beyond frustrated I'm writing this while still sitting on hold with Celebrity ... been on the call today alone for 3 hours and redirected for the 5th time.. now getting transferred back to the first team i spoke to.... UGH.