Riocca

I will admit I have very little knowledge about golf but is it possible that this was a Perry Golf cruise and if so is there a course near Foynes that would be popular with golfers?

Cruise line organised CC meetings always seemed to be a RCG thing, we came to Celebrity/Azamara from mainly P&O and Princess and had never experienced one with them. After experiencing meetings with Azamara I did volunteer to organise one on a Princess Cruise, never again it was far too much trouble and Princess basically weren’t interested. Azamara at least are providing a venue and putting on the calendar other lines leave it up to the CC roll call to decide a time and place which doesn’t always work out well.

Why? Just flip the search criteria to latest departure and you would see the last cruise in the offer is the 9th November.

Interesting article reading between the lines I think they knew 2023 would be a challenging year. https://travelweekly.co.uk/news/tour-operators/azamara-boss-hints-line-to-build-new-hardware

By that criteria we may be losing Royal Caribbean, Celebrity, Princess & NCL who all have similarly attractive sales on at the moment. Or it could just be the sales season to boost what is normally a quite booking period, incidentally I did see a press release that Azamara did have their best ever “Wave” season for bookings. I do feel the odd one out however as both our online accounts have been working fine since the end of May, and other than a couple of minor irritations find the website reasonable and better than the old RC one. Made final payment on an upcoming cruise with ease every thing updated immediately something that was not possible previously. Yes we have had problems but that was down to human error with someone making an action on one of our bookings that they were unfamiliar with, it was corrected and I received an explanation and apology within a week.

I think that’s the US deposit cost, just added more info to the previous post.

U.K. deposit is £250 pp but as you correctly say is non refundable. Currently 2025 sailings come with the early booking bonus of an Experience More package which includes $300 Shorex OBC, Premium drinks package for 2 pax and unlimited Wi-Fi.for one device.

For those worried about luggage tags there is a page on the website that provides links for printing luggage tags for all the ships. https://www.azamara.com/gb/booked-guests/before-you-board/packing-tips

U.K. t&c’s were updated last year but as blag correctly says previous t&c’s didn’t allow for any free changes for bookings made off ship. During the pandemic free changes were being allowed as but that stopped some time ago. That said the current t&c’s as shown on the website do allow for changes of sail date and ship with a fee of £75 pp it also goes on to say the new cruise will be charged at the current prevailing rate. Presumably you would therefore lose any incentives included in the original cruise, copy of the relevant information following:- 1.10 Can I make changes to my booking after it has been confirmed? Should you wish to make any changes to your confirmed holiday, you must notify us in writing as soon as possible. Whilst we will endeavor to assist you, we cannot guarantee we will be able to meet any such request. For guests wishing to make a significant amendment to their booking outside of 90 days from departure, such as changing the ship or sail date, note that a booking transfer fee is applicable. Please note that any amendments for hotels, transfers and flights may result in the loss of the amount that was collected at the time of booking for these additional components. The transfer fee is £75 per guest which is limited to the first two guests on a booking, therefore any additional guests will not be charged as well.

To be fair the suggestion came from someone we have gotten to know quite well over the years in Azamara’s customer service department I’m sure it’s not in the procedure manual and no email addresses were given out. However we are well aware of the ships email address so we’re able to pose the question ahead of time, would never share email addresses on a public forum or the information we received.

Maybe we’re just lucky, we booked onboard in 2019 for an October 2020 med cruise (3 ships meet) using 3 free nights it was a good deal and included the onboard booking perks. That was cancelled and our deposit was saved as FCC, after a few attempts to find a cruise that worked with free nights we were able to book the same cruise for October this year. The FCC was used as the deposit we got a good deal using the free nights and kept the onboard booking perks, we did only receive $200 OBC instead of the original $300 but I wasn’t worried as I was grateful to get what we did. However after a few problems with the booking recently with Azamara making a mess of converting a b2b booking into a single booking they realised it should have been $300 and added the OBC. Other than the previously mentioned issue the transition of our account has been fairly smooth so hopefully we are in the majority not the minority. The OBC issue is obviously a concern but hopefully that will be resolved soon, maybe the rules appertaining to the use of OBC will change and cause consternation but is not a concern for us. As an aside with old system ships didn’t know the passenger manifest until they received it the week before a cruise. Recently I had a query relating to our October cruises that customer service couldn’t answer and suggested asking the ship, so we messaged the ship regarding the query not only could they see our booking and answer the query they also had details of our packages and OBC that’s got to be an improvement.

Especially as we all know how “good” the Royal Caribbean IT department is.

We’ve done 19 Azamara cruises since 2010 with 4 being since the pandemic, can honestly say our last cruise in March this year on Onward was one of the best. No problem committing to further cruises in fact we currently have 6 booked and can’t wait until our b2b cruises in October.

Interesting, I’d not thought of that possibility before and could be why the transfer was delayed as it would be a much more laborious process. Possibility is RC didn’t want to transfer the linked Celebrity information, but whatever the reason it would explain a lot as once you introduce a human element the likelihood of errors increases.

Once this is sorted I’m sure the senior management team are going to have to answer some tricky questions from the investors. Talking last year to one of the experienced customer service staff they were being assured that the transition would be smooth and seamless, I don’t think either of us actually believed that. Azamara have taken on a lot of new staff to try and alleviate the problems but they have no experience of how cruise bookings work, they are all super helpful and are trying their best but Azamara are still relying on just a few of the original experienced staff in Wichita to resolve problems. Our own experience with the change until recently was not that bad with only one piece of information not being transferred from RC. But if as reported there’s a lot of missing or corrupted information transferred then it’s a difficult situation and keeping customers informed could alleviate many of the concerns. Unless of course this is headed towards litigation in which case it’s possible that the legal people are advising what can and cannot be said, only a thought.

Most others are just using what the Seaware system has to offer with mainly cosmetic customisation. My feelings are that Azamara are trying to replicate certain aspects of the RC system such as converting OBC to local currency. Our biggest problem was caused by them combining a b2b booking into one booking, apparently this is to help the ships manage b2b passengers more efficiently. However the promotional offers, a hangover from RC , make doing this very complicated.

Not actually correct, the on ship services that you mention are run by V Ships a totally different company who provide crew management and logistics for a number of other cruise lines. All onboard staff are actually employed and paid by V Ships this was a very early change after Sycamore purchased Azamara. Versonix are providing the back office systems and I assume the mythical IT department are also provided by Versonix, looking at some of the problems we’ve encountered I sense that they were caused by someone who didn’t fully understand the effect of the changes they were making.

I suspect the latter, Seaware is no doubt customisable but probably within given parameters, RC’s system was bespoke and provided options that suited them best and we’ve all become accustomed to their way of operating. To other cruise lines we’ve sailed with onboard credit is exactly that and was only available once onboard, I’ve a feeling that that’s the was Seaware is written and Azamara are trying to find a work round to provide what went before. There’s no way Azamara could have produced their own bespoke system and the choice of off the shelf systems is very limited so like it or not we’re going to have to get used to the new system. Booking tours with OBC and finding available cabins excepted it’s a far more comprehensive system than RC’s if you spend time looking around, and I except it’s not intuitive, there’s a lot of good information available within the booking. I was able to make final payment very easily for our next b2b booking, once Azamara had sorted it out, that was something that wasn’t possible with the old system.

Cut off date was 1st February 2023, so you should be retaining your Discover status, best thing is to submit the online form that’s on the account website quoting your original loyalty number.

Not so much your bag but if you look away the food will be gone off your plate, they had plenty of staff on monkey watch but the little blighters are extremely fast. Our driver was the son of the owners and extremely knowledgeable, it’s lovely to be up close to the wildlife.

We did Pumba with Crystal before Azamara started the South African cruises, if the Azamara tour is the same have to agree it was excellent but if it includes lunch beware of the monkeys. We have booked South Africa with Azamara for 2025 but there are no tours showing at the moment if they are offering Pumba we won’t hesitate to book it again.

No there’s no liquor for sale in the shops, but then there’s no need as you can get a drink in any bar to take back to your cabin.

The majority of cruise ships shops are run by either U.K. company Hardings who Azamara used to use or US company Starboard who currently operate the shops on Azamara. Starboard consider themselves to be the more upmarket operator and tend to offer more designer brands usually, in our experience, at higher prices. Small ships like Azamara’s tend to have proportionally small retail space so what’s available is very limited, only time we look in the shops is if we have OBC to offload and nothing else to spend it on.

A lot of the current problems seems to stem from Azamara trying to convert OBC to the currency of the booking as it was with the RC system and the new system not being able to achieve this. That always seemed crazy if we book with a U.S. cruise line and the onboard currency is in US$ then we’re more than capable of using that currency pre cruise as well, after all the OBC is given in US$. If we make a non OBC pre cruise purchase that has to be paid for in US$ then the option could be for Azamara to convert the cost to local currency or pay in US$, the latter would be beneficial to us as we use a credit card that offers commercial rates and no fees.

That was the same in 2018 on practice day but on race day there was wind to add to the swell, we luckily got ashore early as independents but the tours were held back as tendering was suspended. Apparently when it did recommence the tender ride was very unpleasant but at least they did get to the race.