cruiserchuck

I am thinking about booking a 27 day cruise (Barcelona to Cape Town) on the Riviera this November. I found the information linked below on Oceania's website (dated as of 2018), which states that on the Marina and Riviera, for a Concierge Veranda and below, you only get one pre-cruise reservation per restaurant, no matter how long the cruise is. https://oceaniacruises.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360005477653-How-many-dining-reservations-am-I-allowed-in-each-specialty-restaurant I received a call from Oceania today, presumably since I was on their website yesterday checking the pricing on the cruise. I asked the rep about the advance specialty dining reservations, and she said she would look it up and send me an email. In the email, she stated I would get 3 reservations per restaurant. Does anybody have recent experience with this issue?

We used Uber, and the cost was about $25 to Waikiki on a Friday around noon.

When we cruised on POA last week, the earliest arrival time available was 11:00 am. We arrived right at 11:00, and were onboard by about 11:30 am.

The Booking Terms and Condition allow one free exchange under certain circumstances. "12.2 Furthermore, even after the confirmation invoice has been issued, the Guest is also entitled to exchange free of charge, once only, the purchased Journey (“Original Journey”) with another Journey (“New Journey”) on the following conditions: (i) the date of departure of the New Journey is within 180 days earlier or 180 days later than that of the Original Journey; (ii) the request for the substitution of the New Journey in place of the Original Journey is received by the Company not later than 120 days before the departure date of the Original Journey (200 days for Ocean Residences); (iii) there is availability of spaces on the New Journey; (iv) there is no specific restriction attached to the Original Journey Package which overrides the Booking Change Policy; (v) the New Journey Package has the same Journey length or a longer journey length than the Original Journey Package; (vi) the New Journey Package is booked in the same Suite Category or in a higher Suite Category than the Original Journey Package. If the conditions stated above in this clause are met, the substitution of the Original Journey Package with the New Journey Package will be free of additional administration fees. If the above conditions are not met, the booking change shall not be approved, and the Original Journey Package is cancelled according to cancellation policies as described on paragraph 13 below. If the price of the New Journey Package is higher than that of the Original Journey Package, the difference in price as well as in insurance premium will be borne exclusively by the Guest. If the price of the New Journey Package is lower than that of the Original Journey Package, the price difference will be granted to the guest in the form of a Future Journey Credit which will be valid for 2 years starting from the issuing date."

So if you pay in full early to get the 5% discount, you are not entitled to request a refare? Or only after the final payment date? I was looking at the standard terms and conditions and noticed that Explora reserves the right to raise prices before final payment if the cost of oil goes up, among other reasons. Specifically the T&C provide: "3.1 No change to the Journey Fare will be made once full payment has been received by the Company. 3.2 The Company reserves the right to modify the Contract price at all times to allow variations for: a) air transportation costs; b) fuel costs for the propulsion of the vessel; c) dues, taxes or fees chargeable for services such as embarkation or disembarkation fees at ports or airports. d) the exchange rates relevant to the Journey Fare. Variations may be upwards or downwards. For paragraph a) any variation of the Journey Fare will be equal to the extra amount charged by the airline. For paragraph b) any variation of the Journey Fare will be equal to 0.33% of the price of the Journey for every dollar of increase of the fuel per barrel (NYMEX Index). For paragraph c) any variation of the Journey Fare will be equal to the full amount of the fees." I was hit with this type of charge years ago by Holland America, and am still annoyed by it, since oil prices tanked by the time I took the cruise.

I checked one of the many brochures O previously sent me, and the itinerary on the November 4 cruise has not changed. So it appears to be a miscommunication about the November 4 cruise being cancelled. The cruises after that one were cancelled, and the new itineraries were released this week.

I just received an email from Oceania about the holiday sale. It mentions the same up to $5,400 dollar savings as the black Friday sale. I am holding out for something similar to the Extraordinary Savings sale we booked under in May.

The November 4 cruise from Rome to Barcelona is still showing up as available for booking on Oceania's US website. The new cruises following that one also now show up. The November 4 cruise does not appear to have been cancelled.

After visiting Istanbul recently on Riviera, my iPad/Google Maps thought I was in Turkey for the rest of the cruise. It kept bringing up Google Maps in Turkish. Kind of a pain.

On my recent Riviera cruise, one night we had to wait for about 5 minutes before being seated for dinner. We sat in chairs right by the entry/exit doors, and saw about five couples walk out. All of the men were wearing black casual walking shoes, as was I. This is about as formal as my footwear gets nowadays.

Thanks. I called NCL first, who confirmed that I should be entitled to the FCC. The NCL rep told me the official request has to be made by my TA. She said my file would be noted regarding today's sale pricing. I reached out to my TA, who was closed for the day. Hopefully I will get this finalized tomorrow.

If you booked through a travel agent, do you contact the travel agent about obtaining FCC for a price drop, or do you contact NCL directly?

The itineraries for the cruises that have been cancelled for 2024 are very similar to the cruises in 2023 that folks have been complaining about not being allowed to cancel with a full refund. They were scheduled to go through the Suez Canal and the Red Sea and other areas of the Middle East.

We are currently staying at the Casa Camper hotel in Barcelona, and the AC is working. We are really enjoying the hotel and the City.

I am guessing they offered OP a no cover charge meal in a speciality restaurant on next Oceania cruise. And if cruise was booked under Simply More, they will throw in free drinks. 😀

I observed it in the main dining room. We did not have a package. On some nights, the wine steward walked by our table many times, and they stopped by our table to see if we wanted alcoholic drinks, and when we said no, they took away all the wine glasses. On some nights, I never saw a wine steward nearby, and no one ever stopped by our table to ask if we wanted alcohol, and the wine glasses were never removed. I suspect if I had a drink package and asked the waiter where the wine steward was, I would have seen them more.

$250.

We just disembarked Riviera, and did not have a drink package. Some nights we saw the drink server walk by many times, but some nights we never saw the drink server in our area. Would have been a concern if we had a drink package.

We just got off Riviera today, and thought the food was excellent. It was only our second Oceania cruise, and the first was 9 years ago. I wonder if after 8 cruises on O, you are too familiar with and not as excited about the food. That happened to us on Celebrity. After eating basically the same food over and over, we were no longer as excited about it, and did not enjoy it as much.

Here is a link to a recent article written by a consumer advocate discussing a ban by NCL after a customer initiated a credit card dispute. https://consumerrescue.org/cruise-fiascos/cruise-line-do-not-sail-list-banned-from-cruising/

I have heard/read over the years that some cruise lines will ban you if you do a credit card chargeback. Maybe that is what happened here.

In this case, there was no promise of a refund if the ship did not dock. We have only missed one port in Europe over approximately eight cruises, so I have probably gotten too lax in booking excursions that do not promise refunds. The one port we missed before also was Livorno. In that case, we had a ship tour booked, so we received a refund.

Currently onboard Riviera, and we received notice of our first port cancellation today. We were supposed to go to Livorno tomorrow, but due to severe weather conditions, we are going to La Spezia instead. Weather reports show high wind warnings for Livorno tomorrow. We originally had an independently booked walking/eating tour of Livorno scheduled. Luckily we cancelled it a few days ago. Otherwise we would not have received a refund, since the tour company has a 24 hour refund policy, and we learned about the port change less than 24 hours before the scheduled start of the tour.

Have you contacted your credit card company and initiated a dispute? Others have reported receiving FCC offers after doing so.

Rather than continuing to hijack @Sthrngary’s thread, I decided to start my own thread on our Riviera cruise, Italian Artistry and Turkish Icons, November 9 through 19, 2023. The cruise started in Athens, and we are making stops in Kavala, Istanbul (overnight), Messina, Naples, Civitavecchia, Livorno, Marseille, and ending in Barcelona. This is our first big post-Covid trip, and we were inspired to go back to Naples after visiting the Getty Villa about six months ago. We have been to Naples twice before, visiting Pompeii the first time, and Herculaneum the second time. We wanted to return to Naples to visit the National Archeological Museum, which displays many items found at Pompeii. Like many others on this board, we are refugees from Celebrity. Celebrity has been our primary cruise line for many years, especially on European cruises. We sailed with Oceania once before, on the Marina to South America in 2014. Although we enjoyed our Oceania trip, we did not feel at that time that it was worth the premium over Aqua class on Celebrity. Since we had not cruised for almost 4 years, we no longer had a preferred TA. We found a new one on a site that lets TAs compete for your business. In May, when I started to look at cruises that stopped in Naples, Oceania was having its Extraordinary Savings Sale, and was advertising an A3 cabin for $1,999 per person, lower than a concierge cabin would have been on a similar cruise on Celebrity. The TA we chose advised us that the $1,999 advertised rate included $300 of onboard credit that we would be paying $300 for. Following the TAs advice, we opted out of paying for onboard credit. So it was a no-brainer to go with Oceania at a rate of $1,699 per person. Our TA also provided a generous amount of OBC. We generally do not take ship tours, and do not drink much alcohol, so we were pleased that we were able to book under Oceania’s promotion that excluded those items. We were also able to book award travel in coach on American Airlines for relatively few miles. So for us, we consider this cruise as experiencing extraordinary sights with an extraordinary deal on Oceania. To be continued.