chris24a

Thanks all for the comments (and the sympathy 🙂 ). We did indeed opt out of the included flights so that we could add extra time at the start (for safety) and at the end (for extra sightseeing in Argentina). We accepted there could be a cancelation risk in doing this - thinking of insurrection, earthquake, plague, that sort of thing. It never crossed our minds that they might just redeploy the ship when they already had passengers booked on it. Lesson learnt indeed! Thanks also for the suggestions - we're currently looking at an option with Aurora, though we'll still have to move the flights. We'll make something work, it's mostly just a pain in the proverbial. I think that Shackleton had the right idea - build your own ship and hire some people to sail it for you.

Apologies if I've posted this in the wrong place - please don't flame me. I just wanted to share our recent experience with Noble Caledonia. 😞 We spent years researching and saving for a once-in-a-lifetime voyage to Antarctica, and finally settled on the Noble Caledonia cruise ‘Antarctica – Land of Heroes’, an extensive cruise to the Falklands, South Georgia and the Antarctic Peninsula. We booked early to make sure we could select the cabin we wanted and Noble Caledonia happily took our deposit, thereby (we thought) guaranteeing our place on the cruise. Safe in the knowledge that our place was assured we booked our return flights to Buenos Aires, again early enough to get the exact flights we wanted. Three months after taking our money Noble Caledonia decided they could make more money by redeploying the ship MS Island Sky to Easter Island and cancelled our cruise. This was a crushing disappointment for us. Worse still, Noble Caledonia resolutely refuse to offer any kind of compensation for the loss of our flights even though this was entirely their decision. Now we feel utterly betrayed as well as disappointed. Noble Caledonia’s booking conditions are desperately one-sided. If the customer cancels for any reason they forfeit a massive expense – anywhere from 10% to 100% of the total cost. If Noble Caledonia cancels for any reason they don’t incur any expense at all – they merely return your deposit. It’s one thing to write such escape clauses into the small print, but it’s another thing entirely to actually treat your customers with such contempt. The Noble Caledonia business model is based on alienation of existing customers for short term gain. If they have done this to us they will certainly do this to others. Avoid this company at all cost!!! As a result of our experience we will never attempt to book with Noble again, but also we now are very wary of all cruise companies. 😞