Pangea59

One word of caution on Princess OBC through Stock Perks. I’ve taken 5 cruises this year and want to share my experience on the recent two cruises I just had Shareholder benefits applied to. On the first three cruises, applying the OBC through Stock Perks was flawless and yes, NEVER give your account information to where you hold your CCL stocks. In my case, we are with Vanguard but I made copies of only what was needed and filed the manual way. Once Stock Perks verifies your “MANUAL” submitted document, you can apply benefits to any Princess cruise that is NO MORE than 90 days from cruise embarkation. Once you get within 90 days of another cruise, just go into Stock Perks and update the new reservation number, no need to be manually verified again. Now onto the last two cruises, VERY IMPORTANT INFORMATION! When Stock Perks confirmed OBC was applied to my next two cruise, which took about 12 hours, I thought all was well and done. However, only 3 days later while searching Princess cruises, I realized the same cabin became available on a Back to Back cruise. I called Princess and asked, can I change from cabin B752 to B755, this would make my cruise a whole lot more convent as to not have to switch cabins for he second leg of my cruise. I did all the checks and balances and said all the right things, I.e. “If by changing 3 cabins down the same hallway changes my price, then don’t make the change”. Once the change was made, I confirmed “did this change my price in anyway?” I was told, “No, everything is the same. So before hanging up, my last request was, please make sure to send me out the email of my itinerary with the new cabin change and balance sheet for my records. I was told the email would be generated in 15 minutes by the system. KEY NOTE: Always ask the right questions throughout the call. The call is being recorded and that’s a good thing, you can reference it later (date & time) and they WILL go back and listen if needed. It took less than 10 minutes and the email arrived. When I looked at my new itinerary, I now had cabin B755 for both legs of the cruise, whereby allowing me to stay in the same cabin for 27 days without having to move. The problem I quickly noticed was, I went from a zero (0) balance to now owning money. This rattled me to no end because I was already past the final payment date and my cruise could have been canceled, I would have lost hotel arrangement and non refundable flights. When I called CS, I explained the cabin change and what was confirmed earlier, that the change would NOT affect my price. I went around on many calls, I was told “you should know, ANY cabin change normally comes with an additional charge”. Once again I explained, but I confirmed BEFORE the change, do NOT make the change if there’s an additional charge. I was getting no where with the CSR, so I asked for a management escalation. KEY NOTE: Specifically ask for a management escalation if the CSR can’t help or doesn’t understand. Through the escalation process, I finally got a manager. I once again sprained the issue, that I was told there would be “No additional charges”, to move three cabins down in the same hallway. I referenced the earlier call and was adamant about what I said prior to the cabin changed. I asked for management to go pull the call and listen, the changes should not have been made if it changed my price. The manager actually went and listened to the call, then confirmed what I said, but then said, “there was no change in price when the cabin changed, the change in price took place one day earlier, so the agent you spoke to was correct” So of course, I still had a balance on what was a zero (0) balance account three days prior. I pointed out to management, “There’s a problem in Princess process and I’ll tell you where you should look”. What I noticed on my new itinerary was, the price increase was ONLY one my wife’s base fare, my base fare didn’t change. So when talking to management, I told him, you need to see why, two people in a cabin would have two different fares, that just doesn’t seem possible. I explained, who ever heard of a husband and wife, in the same cabin, sharing the same bed, where one person paid 3x more than the other, that’s the first clue, the cabin change didn’t cause the issue. If the cabin change caused the issue, both base fares would have changed and not just one. NOW, back to Stock Perks and OBC. What I had to do on my end was, figure out what happened in 3 days, going from a zero (0) balance to know owing money. The ONLY thing that happened was Stock Perks contacted Princess and verified my wife a shareholder and to apply the OBC to the bookings. IMPORTANT: What I found out was, when Stock Perks verifies your a shareholder status and tells Princess to apply the OBC, this is a “Manual” process on Princess. What happened in my case was, BEFORE my wife’s OBC could be applied under her name, a “Promotion Code” was removed from her name, but once OBC was applied the code wasn’t returned, whereby making her base fare 3x more than mine. Once I figured this out, I thought I was clean sailing, only to get off the phone and say to myself “I’ve only been talking about one of the two segments, maybe the other booking that we had OBC applied to has the same issue”. Sure enough, I checked my other sailing and I owed more money on that cruise as well, back to the phones, but this time I just said escalate to “management name”, he’ll know how to fix it, I just spoke with him 30 minutes ago on another booking. JUST KEEP AN EYE OUT: Stock Perks works and OBC is nice, but after you apply it, make sure to check your cruise carefully. The Princess part of the process for applying these OBC’s is manual and mistakes can be made. GOOD TO KNOW * Keep records of balances, payoffs and cabin numbers * Write down the dates, times and names of agents you speak with * Ask for a management escalation if the call is not progressing * Ask for the earlier call to be listened to, this verifies what you said * NEVER give out banking information login details (use manual process) * Verify your booking AFTER applying shareholder OBC * There should NEVER be two different base fares for guest 1&2 in cabin ABOVE ALL ELSE: Don’t worry, everything is resolvable, you just may need to lead Princess in the right direction and do some deductive reasoning and investigation on your own

Touching on the discussion about BBB complaints, they indeed still work. You just have to properly file the complaint under the correct location for Princess, there are three in total. I filed under the California location, which is their Corp HQ. Then write a detailed email to customer relations, once customer relations calls you back on your complaint, if it doesn’t go well or you don’t see results. Then tell the agent, “I filled a BBB complaint, do you want the case number?”, then explain, “It’s ok, I know you can’t help me, but now that I made my complaint public, your Director Collin has no choice but to respond to my BBB complaint” Once you get the Customer Relations to call you, that means they are taking your complaint seriously, if only to give you $100 future onboard credit to have you quickly go away. However, don’t accept that if you have a legitimate complaint, just tell them “I outlined what I want for a resolution in my BBB complaint, would you like the case number?”. What generally happens at this point is, the agent will say, let me do some more research on your case. What that truly means is, wholly crap, I better go read the public review on BBB to see how serious this is. I did EXACTLY this after an amazingly bad trip and I received a 100% refund for my 14 day Alaska cruise. I won’t go into specifics but it was horrendously bad, on two issues, illegally bad. The key here is, document the issues, be nice in your tone, show pictures if you have them, open a BBB complaint and in my case, it helped to have a video. A video and or picture is worth a 1000 words. I was surprised I was able to get 100% refund on a 14 day Alaska cruise but I knew if I thought my way through my approach, intelligently articulated my point of view and the legal severity of the issue, then couple that with publicly letting BBB and the world know, I stood a good chance of getting more than $100 future OBC. I will end with this, BBB can still be a powerful tool, even though Princess isn’t accredited with them. If you go in and look, they like to respond with a positive outcome to your complaint to BBB.