Hoonose

A further update. I received an email from Kimberly Baldwin to tell me that the Australian office responded to her email and they are sending me a check for the refund amount.

Thank you all for your concern and suggestions. And a big thank you to Kimberly who was so considerate and helpful. I wish there was some way I could change the header of this thread!

Just a quick update. I called the number and was eventually able to speak to KImberly. She was (as ceilidh1 above said) outstanding and a pleasure to deal with. 

Apparently the refund is handled by the Australian branch of Princess and Kimberly has been forwarding my emails to them. They are the ones who haven't bothered to get back to me. Kimberly has given me a number to ring here in Australia and she is emailing them today as well. Hopefully I'll be able to get somewhere with them.

Thanks to Kimberly and the other lady I spoke with at Customer Relations. You've restored my faith in Princess.

Thanks folks. I've been emailing Kimberly the last few times. I'll try calling her tomorrow on the toll free number and extension she gave me when she last emailed me on 3 December. Hopefully the number works, I realise it won't be toll free. 

Now that I know the location I'll be able to work out the time difference. I'll let you know how I got on.

Thanks for your response. The last reply I got which was on the 3 December has a toll free number 1-877-888-1869 but I'm not sure if I can call toll free numbers from Australia. If anyone knows I'd appreciate hearing from  you.

Also I'm not sure where in the USA that Princess Customer Relations are located so that I can work out the time difference and the best time to call. If they're not prepared to answer my emails I doubt they'd be willing to ring me in Australia.

I was booked on the Regal Princess for a cruise commencing on 7 October 2020 from Southampton, England. Between March and May 2019 I made some onboard purchases via PayPal totalling $667.11AUD.

In anticipation that the cruise would be cancelled by Princess I cancelled these purchases on 26 March 2020 and sure enough the cruise was subsequently cancelled some time in May 2020. Given the pressure that Princess was under I decided to be patient waiting for the refunds. However, when the refund(s) had not arrived by 1 November 2020 I wrote to csteinke@princesscruises.com to enquire. Apparently he is the Customer Relations Manager and I found his address in an earlier thread on this forum.

When I didn't receive a reply I followed it up on 15 November and 1 December and eventually received a reply from Kimberly Baldwin of the same department on 3 December informing me that a refund had been paid to my PayPal account on 25 June 2020. I checked my account and there is no record of the refund. To be sure I rang PayPal and they could find no record of having received the payment so I wrote back to Kimberly Baldwin the same day informing her of this and asked if they could provide some evidence of the payment so I could take it up further with PayPal.

To date, despite Kimberly's assurance "Please contact me if I can be of further assistance. I hope you are well and safe and I am here to help you." and further follow up emails they have not responded. As a loyal Princess customer and having reached the Elite loyalty level I expected a bit more consideration than this and it doesn't inspire me to cruise with Princess again once things are back to normal.

Today I tried to file a claim with PayPal but it was rejected because the original payments were made more than 180 days ago.  

Thank you for a great review. I'm going on a Princess cruise in two weeks that includes Kitava and Kiriwina. Before I read your review I was wondering whether I would bother going ashore at either of these islands. Now I can't wait to get there and I reckon they'll probably be the highlight of my cruise.

Thanks again.

I have always found Aussies to be normal, very friendly people, not odd at all.

Yep, that fits me to a T but I'm not sure about the rest of them.:)

I wonder how difficult it would be for the web site developers add to the web page something that recognises what country you are from and up pops a box during the booking process stating something like "as this is classified a non Australian cruise the account will be in US$ and gratuities at $?? per day per person will be added to your account".

They can and have used such a pop-up in the past.

The Sun Princess has operated in Australia for several years. Last year she spent a season in Japan before returning to Australia in October 2014. Prior to booking the repositioning cruise from Hong Kong to Sydney I rang Princess to check what onboard currency would apply on this cruise. I was assured that since it was the Sun Princess then the currency would definitely be Australian dollars. I still had my doubts because I couldn't imagine that the ship would operate in Japan using AUD but still went ahead with the booking a couple of days later.

Sure enough, the first time I used the Cruise Personalizer I was confronted with a pop-up asking me to acknowledge that I understood that the onboard currency was USD before I was able to proceed into the personalizer. This is the only time I have encountered such a pop-up so I can only assume that it was an issue for this particular cruise since Australians made up over 1700 of the 1900 odd passengers. The point I am making is that it is possible to provide the advice, it's just a pity that it was provided after the booking was made and not before. I would have still gone ahead with booking in either case but a bit of honesty doesn't go astray.