raananh

Another general question: if we purchase Travel Insurance from Celebrity during booking, and they cancel on us, will Celebrity give us any of the $450 or whatever they offer per-person for them cancelling a cruise? Any advantage of Celebrity Travel Insurance in such cases? Anybody who got cancelled and had Travel Insurance with Celebrity for their cruise which just got cancelled?

General question: we purchased Travel Insurance for the October 2023 cruise that was just cancelled on us. The insurance is NOT through Celebrity. We always purchase insurance for our vacations, but, thankfully, we never ever had a claim against Travel Insurance. So, in this particular case, where Celebrity is offering a ridiculous tiny $500 refund for flights, can we place a claim against the Travel Insurance? Sounds like a paperwork nightmare of getting the proof-of-payment for the flights then claiming $500 from Celebrity, then claiming the difference from the Travel Insurance. Also, how do Celebrity or Travel Insurance know if flights are refundable/changeable or not? I have to get a letter from the airline that the flight is not refundable/changeable?

Trust me that I want the cruise lines to be regulated as for how they handle bookings and how they compensate customers for booking mishaps like this one. I agree that cruise lines, RCL, Carnival and Norwegian are US-Based in the sense of their headquarters and primary operations are based in the United States. The cruise lines avoid paying taxes to the USA with their ships registered outside the USA. Hence they got a BIG ZERO relief funds from the USA for them needing to shutdown during Covid (unlike the airlines which got tons of $$$$). I think that if the USA tries to regulate the cruise lines as for how to compensate customers, the cruise lines will move the booking operation over-seas. And the USA knows that. That's why my impression is that cruise lines are totally not regulated by the USA government.

I agree with you. But cruise lines are not "American companies". Most of their customers are not even Americans. Whatever caused an "oversold" situation, be it a booking system issue (unlikely), cancellation of another cruise and shifting the customers to this cruise, greed (let's sell the same cabin for more money), etc, should have serious consequences for cruise lines, by law. Already this costs Celebrity $450 per person, $500 per person for flights, many customers who chose to cancel and get a 100% refund (loss of sales), customers who will not book again with Celebrity, agents busy dealing with this instead of selling more cruises, etc. My strong impression is that this whole fiasco is due to bad management, lack of planning and bad decision making. Even without this incident, I think the cruise industry made a lot of management mistakes that annoyed customers and hurt sales. I own stocks in RCL. We need something (regulations) that will force cruise lines to save themselves and be better managed. I doubt that will happen. I think the trend is worse and worse management + worse service for the cruisers.

We also got "oversold" on the April 12, 2023 cruise. Got a call from Celebrity. I asked "I booked a specific cabin. How can a specific cabin get sold more than once?" The Celebrity lady replied: "I can't explain that." We booked directly with Celebrity long time ago and actually paid almost the whole amount in advance - a small balance of $500 was left. The reason we paid so much in advance is because we had a credit from another cruise that was cancelled by celebrity (corona virus) last year. Also, the "oversold" happened after we already purchased excursions for $1000s almost 2 months ago. We will probably switch to the October 6, 2024 cruise because, so we were told, we can get that cruise for the same price we paid. The prices actually went up. So we will get the 2024 cruise for less money.