People on Princess afraid of blackballing.....

[mafig]

This is so ridiculous.

But then I wondered, does anyone here on Celebrity feel the same way.

There are people on the Princess board who are afraid to file a dispute with their credit card to get THEIR money back on cancelled cruises because they think that Princess will either blackball them from future cruises or revoke their Captain's Club status.!!!

 

Has this crossed any of your minds?

 

 

[hcat]

No

[Gracie115]

No, I haven't gone the credit card charge back route yet, but certainly might.  Princess owes us over 13K, they have a few more weeks to issue the refund and if not then will call our cc company.  

 

I could care less if I were "blackballed" by them, though to think they would do that is absurd.  Right now our 13K is more important than any status on any line.

[simon stingray]

Do you really think that any of the cruise lines are in a position to pick and choose which customers they want on future sailings.

[mafig]

1 minute ago, simon stingray said:

Do you really think that any of the cruise lines are in a position to pick and choose which customers they want on future sailings.

Do I think that?

Of course not.

I'm just astounded and flabergasted at what I'm reading over there.

 

[wwcruisers]

I would think that it would be more of a problem to use THAT particular card again, for future cruises. That's one reason why we have always considered going to the CC companies to settle a dispute with the cruise line to be the 'nuclear option'.

[Happy Cruiser 6143]

No.  It's a legitimate dispute.  I have paid for something which was not delivered.  I was told I would receive a refund for the undelivered product.  It has not materialized.  I was told within 30 days.  At the end of the 30 days, if I have not received my money back, I will file a dispute.

[simon stingray]

9 minutes ago, mafig said:

Do I think that?

Of course not.

I'm just astounded and flabergasted at what I'm reading over there.

 

Apologies mafig. 

 

I was really referring to the people on the Princess board.

 

I also think that it's ridiculous.

[davekathy]

43 minutes ago, mafig said:

This is so ridiculous.

But then I wondered, does anyone here on Celebrity feel the same way.

There are people on the Princess board who are afraid to file a dispute with their credit card to get THEIR money back on cancelled cruises because they think that Princess will either blackball them from future cruises or revoke their Captain's Club status.!!!

 

Has this crossed any of your minds?

 

 

Never even thought about it until you brought it up. I could care less! If that was the case, their (insert any cruise line here) loss not ours.

 

Edited April 14, 2020 by davekathy

[paulh84]

There are a lot of hysterics going on. Yes, you can get 'blackballed' but that is due to friendly-fraud if your dispute is not legitimate, it won't come from the cruise line. There is a massive backlog to handle (across all lines). From a credit card issuer perspective, the have to acknowledge your dispute with 30 days and complete their review within 2 billing cycles at a maximum of 90 days. If everyone and their brother disputes legitimate charges just because they aren't happy with the speed the refund is realized, the card issuer is going to allow the merchant ample time to refund the charges before they take a chargeback on it. Card issuers also don't have to honor a dispute if the charge (ie your cruise deposit) posted more than 60 days ago, so it's not exactly a clear cut process. 

[MarLieb]

No, I wouldn't care.  If it got to a point where I had to dispute a charge, I can't imagine ever wanting to sail on that line again.  But then again, I am not loyal to particular lines the way many here on cruise critic are and I understand the emotional attachment some may have after sailing many, many times with a particular cruise line.  

[UnorigionalName]

Very often companies have policies of black-listing/banning people (not just credit cards) who initiate chargebacks, even if the chargeback is legitimate.

 

If they will do it in this instance, who knows.

[Want2Cruise 701]

Absolutely no.  I've actually considered doing this and giving Celebrity just another week  We cancelled a cruise for later this year and have yet to get our deposit back.  The reservation was with a refundable deposit.  When I booked the cruise, they took my money real quick, and the charge hit my card the next day.  Normally when I've cancelled a cruise, I've always received a refund from Celebrity within a week tops.  It's my money they owe me.  I hardly think they will do anything.  If they do, they are not the only cruise line out there, and a cruise is not the only vacation out there either.

[Gracie115]

1 minute ago, UnorigionalName said:

Very often companies have policies of black-listing/banning people (not just credit cards) who initiate chargebacks, even if the chargeback is legitimate.

 

If they will do it in this instance, who knows.

 

I might add...or cares?

[markeb]

36 minutes ago, paulh84 said:

There are a lot of hysterics going on. Yes, you can get 'blackballed' but that is due to friendly-fraud if your dispute is not legitimate, it won't come from the cruise line. There is a massive backlog to handle (across all lines). From a credit card issuer perspective, the have to acknowledge your dispute with 30 days and complete their review within 2 billing cycles at a maximum of 90 days. If everyone and their brother disputes legitimate charges just because they aren't happy with the speed the refund is realized, the card issuer is going to allow the merchant ample time to refund the charges before they take a chargeback on it. Card issuers also don't have to honor a dispute if the charge (ie your cruise deposit) posted more than 60 days ago, so it's not exactly a clear cut process. 

 

I think this is the much more important answer. Yeah, the cruise line may well not accept that credit card in the future, but at this point, it's highly unlikely that a dispute of a legitimate charge is going to speed up your refund. It's equally likely to slow it down as the vendor can now claim their investigating your dispute, and they're given time to do that. Whether your credit card issuer grants the refund while that's going on is anyone's guess, but if you're already 30-60 days into a refund process, you could theoretically reset the clock to 0 by initiating a dispute. And your dispute is with the charge (which is legitimate), not the refund...

 

Edited to add:  Like everything else, the T&C's of the actual contract almost certainly spell out the timelines for refunds. The fact they've never gone that long aside, I'm sure they've given themselves a lot of time to actually complete them.

Edited April 14, 2020 by markeb

[Mr. Click]

The lodging division of Princess owes me $1900.  When I canceled those bookings a month ago they said 7=10 business days for a refund. Last week they said more like 60 days.  I looked around the house,, even outside I see no signs that say bank, loan company etc.  I have a similar problem with another web site and some concert tickets for an even that was canceled.  They told me 72 hours. That too was a month ago.    This mornring I sate down to start filing disputes with my credit card company.  So far 6 tries and ever time I hit the dispute button it just goes into never never land for 10 minutes and logs me out.  That means that there are a whole lot of people out there who are trying to file disputes so am I afraid? Nope.  

[Georgia_Peaches]

Well I know that NCL will ban cruisers who open a charge back with their CC company so I know it's a thing.  Personally, if a cruise line were holding on to my money for a long period of time, I wouldn't want to sail with them again anyway, so I would be willing to risk the ban.  Not sure any cruise line will be in a position to be choosy about their clientele when things start running again.  

[jelayne]

IMHO the 30 days was a  optimistic time frame that became  impossible with the second round of cancellations.

Excluding Galapagos sailing  Celebrity has cancelled about 100 cruises, at a conservative 1600 passengers per cruise that is about 160,000 cancellations.  A simple cancellation for a party of 2 is 4 transactions (cruise fare 2x and port fees 2x) would be 640,000 transactions.  Of course many  have  purchases like excursions, dining, interenet, which add more transactions and some have a partial refund and FCC.  

 

We called  our TA to cancel our cruise due to the volume the TA was  processing cancellations in sail date order.  It was 8 days before our cancellation was processed by the TA.  When it has been about 40 calendar days if I don"t have my FCC then I will call.  I think they are swamped with cancellations and calling just slows down the process.

[markeb]

I have this vision of a poor man's version of SABRE requiring every transaction to be hand entered into a DOS screen...

 

The travel industry in general's failure over the years to invest in real IT is fascinating. I can buy a plane ticket with my mouse, or in an app, but the airline itself for the most part still uses SABRE or its successor. It would not surprise me in the least if the actual cruise line is having to hand enter every transaction, possibly including the credit card information again,rather than click an "are you sure" button before crediting the account...

[cl.klink]

2 hours ago, mafig said:

This is so ridiculous.

But then I wondered, does anyone here on Celebrity feel the same way.

There are people on the Princess board who are afraid to file a dispute with their credit card to get THEIR money back on cancelled cruises because they think that Princess will either blackball them from future cruises or revoke their Captain's Club status.!!!

 

Has this crossed any of your minds?

 

 

 

Really really no

 

- Joel

[Fouremco]

1 hour ago, markeb said:

Edited to add:  Like everything else, the T&C's of the actual contract almost certainly spell out the timelines for refunds. The fact they've never gone that long aside, I'm sure they've given themselves a lot of time to actually complete them.

In fact, the X CRUISE/CRUISETOUR TICKET CONTRACT is absolutely silent about refund timelines. The word "refund" and variants (refunds, refunded, etc.) appear 19 times in the contract, but there is no mention whatsoever of the amount of time afforded Celebrity to make the refunds. 

 

https://www.celebritycruises.com/content/dam/celebrity/pdf/Celebrity-Cruise-Ticket-Contract.pdf

[markeb]

1 minute ago, Fouremco said:

In fact, the X CRUISE/CRUISETOUR TICKET CONTRACT is absolutely silent about refund timelines. The word "refund" and variants (refunds, refunded, etc.) appear 19 times in the contract, but there is no mention whatsoever of the amount of time afforded Celebrity to make the refunds. 

 

https://www.celebritycruises.com/content/dam/celebrity/pdf/Celebrity-Cruise-Ticket-Contract.pdf

 

And the lawyers are writing a new section as we type...

 

Pretty surprising, in all seriousness.

[Fouremco]

Just now, markeb said:

 

And the lawyers are writing a new section as we type...

 

Pretty surprising, in all seriousness.

Agreed. In fact, the whole contract is ridiculously one-sided. 

[markeb]

Just now, Fouremco said:

Agreed. In fact, the whole contract is ridiculously one-sided. 

 

Of course. And we blindly accept it, with arbitration clauses and a requirement to file legal disputes in Miami because they're a multi-billion dollar international corporation and we have no real choice. Other than not to cruise. Because all common carrier contracts are similarly one-sided...

[Pushka]

Not a cruiseline but an airline. Our refund for a flight was taking much too long. It wasn't our preferred airline but we had booked using a membership number we had with them. We were sent the nastiest letter from them threatening that if we ever did this again we would be delisted. That was maybe 10 years ago.
 

We had to do a similar thing just a month ago with the same airline. We could get a refund, their call centres were down, and they sent us a voucher instead. I had copies of "chats' showing us specifically we did not want a voucher but a full refund as per the fare we booked. Lodged dispute with AMEX. We didn't attach our membership number but instead of the threat we received a very apologetic letter. That airline is now in (our predicted at the time) trading halt. Virgin Australia.