Should I Go Ahead And Book Excursion

[taxmantoo]

I have an independent excursion booked in St Martin, sailing on 11/8. I fully expect the port to be removed or substituted. I also fully expect that if that happens, the vendor will refund my deposit. If they don't, I'll submit a claim to PayPal.

St Martin may represent a bit more of a challenge. The devastation is such that the infrastructure needed for your service provider to refund your deposit may still not be available by that date. Hopefully for you, Paypal will come through. Interesting to follow. Good luck.

[avian777]

... HAL does NOT stand behind it's shore excursions. Only if they are cancelled. (Duh ... cancelled excursions is the issue! Your opinions about the quality of HAL shore excursions vs those available from third party vendors have nothing to do with excursion cancellations.)

So wanting a better quality tour with fewer people is tacky and classless?? Well you go ahead and be herded like cats.

But you have no right to call anyone who does this classless. You have gone beyond the line IMO. (That is my opinion, and I have as much right to it as you do to your opinion that people who schedule HAL shore excursions are mindless animals who need to be herded!)

At the risk of inviting/encouraging another off-topic rant, I have inserted my responses above. TYVM

[avian777]

You know, I used to think that booking with HAL gave me some sort of protection and support if I needed it. Not any more. The excursion staff on our last HAL cruise were useless. They may "stand behind their vendors" but they sure don't stand behind their passengers.

 

I fell off a dock on an excursion. My fault, I'm not blaming the vendor or the Exc people for that. I smacked my back as I fell and I was in a lot of pain. Fortunately, it was at the end of the tour and the vendor's van was headed back to this ship. I decided to go back to the ship rather than have the vendor call an ambulance. I figured if the ship felt my injuries were too serious, they would send me off to a hospital.

 

The vendor called ahead so that someone could met me when the van arrived. Someone from Exc was there, and she knew that someone had been injured, but there was no wheelchair waiting and she made no move to do anything to help me. A VERY nice woman from the tour said she would speak to someone at the gangway, and a wheelchair arrived shortly after that.

 

The Exc woman said to call and have the nurse come to my room. That sounded odd, but I figured it must be HA or Exc policy. But when the nurse arrived (with the big orange first aid backpack), she said she couldn't do anything for me in my room. So we went to the medical center. That "house call" which the Exc person told me to do cost me an extra $48.

 

The medical staff were great, and fortunately I hadn't broken any bones, just made some muscles extremely angry. When I got back to my cabin, I realized that I'd lost my glasses in the kerfuffle. I wanted to call the Exc people to ask them to get in touch with the vendor, but I could not find an extension for them anywhere. Not that it mattered, the office was closed. I should have called the concierge, but in my agitated state I didn't think of that. DH went down to the Exc office but they were closed. He asked the front desk, but they don't know who the vendors are, so all they could do was send a message to the Exc office. According to the When & Where, the Exc office opened at 6. I was hoping that they would call me to let me know if they'd had any luck. When it got close to their closing hours, I hobbled down to find out if they'd heard from the vendor. The less than pleasant woman said "They're closed, it's 8 o'clock." as if I was too stupid to tell time. I asked if anyone from Exc had called the vendor and was told they'd sent an email. If they had bothered to call the vendor at 6, they might have found someone in the office.

 

I didn't hear anything about my glasses for a few days, so I emailed the vendor directly. They hadn't found my glasses, but they would keep an eye out for them. Still nothing from Exc, not even a message that the glasses hadn't been found.

 

5 days later, a few days before the end of the cruise, the concierge called me to tell me the glasses had been found and Exc had contacted him to verify my mailing address. Why couldn't they just call me? Probably because it was easier to send an email to the Concierge than to bother speaking to a passenger. The concierge was almost more excited than I was that the glasses turned up. (Everyone else I dealt with was WONDERFUL, only the Exc were bad)

 

So now I'm home, a week went by and still no glasses. OK it's Alaska and longer distances mean slower mail. But I contacted the vendor to ask when they mailed the glasses so I could keep a look out for them. The vendor still had them because Exc hadn't given them my address! The concierge was efficient, and I'm sure he gave the info to Exc. He was so happy for me he would never have dropped the ball. Whether Exc lost it or forgot about it or just couldn't be bothered, I don't know.

 

What I do know is that they did NOTHING for me but print tickets and send them to my room.

 

Interesting but off topic natheless! TYVM

[bUU]

St Martin may represent a bit more of a challenge. The devastation is such that the infrastructure needed for your service provider to refund your deposit may still not be available by that date. Hopefully for you, Paypal will come through. Interesting to follow. Good luck.

 

I agree very interesting. That's another reason for the list of reasons to go with the ships Excursion instead of independent.

 

This message may have been entered using voice recognition. Please excuse any typos.

[avian777]

... That's another reason for the list of reasons to go with the ships Excursion instead of independent...

 

Spot on, bUU!!!