Need suggestion on how to deal with specialty dining credit issue

[luvseaside]

I booked our two specialty dining dinners (free with Premier) for our Aug cruise through the app but it only gave me credit for one person.  And stupidly I paid for the other person (argh) - I thought they wouldn't charge card immediately - they did.  So now I'm out over $75 and trying to figure out the best way to get my money back from Princess.  Do I take proof of the charge to guest services and just get OBC?  Or call Princess customer service prior to cruise to get it sorted?

[EDDY0827]

With the quality of Princess' customer service, I think that it would be easier and faster to deal with it onboard. Onboard, you won't be put on hold for hours only to have your call dropped and need to restart the process. You will speak to people face-to-face and they have a great command of the English language, easy to understand. These folks onboard have dealt with this kind of problem often.

[david63]

Cancel the booking and then book when onboard

[luvseaside]

9 minutes ago, david63 said:

Cancel the booking and then book when onboard

The app won't let me cancel or revise in any way.  I guess because it's been charged?

[nzOdy]

23 hours ago, david63 said:

Cancel the booking and then book when onboard

Don't do this. Those specialty bookings get filled quickly. You can find that once on board there are no reservations left.

 

We just went through a similar situation. We had a group of seven,  and booked the crown grill pre-cruise via the app. Ended up having to pay for five. Called customer service,  come to learn that the app is not coded to recognize package or even suite perk comps for specialty dining. They recommended 2 things.

 

1. Cancel through them, get a refund and then book on board. No way were we going to do that after experiencing the scenario where there were no speciality bookings left when the ship boarded on a cruise a few months earlier.

 

2.Once on board go to guest services and notify them of the booking issue. Their system has a record of your booking and the dollar amounts paid,  you then have  2 further options:

  a. Get refunded as OBC

  b. Roll the credit over to another specialty dining booking.

 

This is our experience of just a few weeks ago. It's up to you what you'd like to do, until they build some smarts into that app.

Edited June 30, 2023 by nzOdy
edited for sp. & clarity

[memoak]

19 minutes ago, nzOdy said:

Don't do this. Those specialty bookings get filled quickly. You can find that once on board there are no reservations left.

 

We just went through a similar situation. We had a group of seven,  and booked the crown grill pre-cruise via the app. Ended up having to pay for five. Called customer service,  come to learn that the app is not coded to recognize package or even suite perk comps for specialty dining. They recommended 2 things.

 

1. Cancel through them, get a refund and then book on board. No way were we going to do that after experiencing the scenario where there were no speciality bookings left when the ship boarded on a cruise a few months earlier.

 

2.Once on board go to guest services and notify them of the booking issue. Their system has a record of your booking and the dollar amounts paid,  you then have  2 further options:

  a. Get refunded as OBC

  b. Roll the credit over to another specialty dining booking.

 

This is our experience of just a few weeks ago. It's up to you what you'd like to do, until they build some smarts into that app.

I have never had an issue getting into specialty dinners once on board. As long as you don’t want to be seated as soon as they open. We always opt for 7:30 time slots and are usually in a very empty restaurant on pretty much every ship in the fleet

[CanadianCruiser21]

Cancel the reservation. Not sure why you aren’t able to via the app. They will refund your credit card. Maybe try uninstalling and reinstalling the app. My app recognized the 2 dining credits and I was able to apply it when booking in advance. 

[luvseaside]

On 6/30/2023 at 3:12 PM, nzOdy said:

Don't do this. Those specialty bookings get filled quickly. You can find that once on board there are no reservations left.

 

We just went through a similar situation. We had a group of seven,  and booked the crown grill pre-cruise via the app. Ended up having to pay for five. Called customer service,  come to learn that the app is not coded to recognize package or even suite perk comps for specialty dining. They recommended 2 things.

 

1. Cancel through them, get a refund and then book on board. No way were we going to do that after experiencing the scenario where there were no speciality bookings left when the ship boarded on a cruise a few months earlier.

 

2.Once on board go to guest services and notify them of the booking issue. Their system has a record of your booking and the dollar amounts paid,  you then have  2 further options:

  a. Get refunded as OBC

  b. Roll the credit over to another specialty dining booking.

 

This is our experience of just a few weeks ago. It's up to you what you'd like to do, until they build some smarts into that app.

Thanks for the advice!  I think we'll just go with option 2 and talk to guest services once onboard.  I'm fine with using as OBC credit - was going to spend money in casino anyway!  🙂

[luvseaside]

11 hours ago, CanadianCruiser21 said:

Cancel the reservation. Not sure why you aren’t able to via the app. They will refund your credit card. Maybe try uninstalling and reinstalling the app. My app recognized the 2 dining credits and I was able to apply it when booking in advance. 

I too am confused why I don't have ability to cancel the specialty dining.  I can cancel main dining reservations just fine.  Appreciate all of the feedback.

[JGmf]

Similar situation happened to me: I reserved specialty dining for night 1 and paid for it...even though it's gratis as a suite passenger.  From reading these boards, I knew I should get the $100+ refunded via guest services when on the ship.

 

So on our recent June cruise, the first person I talked to in Guest Services (maybe he was a trainee??) said he couldn't refund the money and said I should consider booking ANOTHER restaurant night and he'd waive the charge.  Nope. Bad answer, but creative...I'll give him that.

 

Next day, I talked to someone else who seemed to know what she was doing - she credited my folio.  Thank you. 

 

Anyway, it can be done.

 

(That said, Princess really does need to upgrade the booking software so that suite reservations aren't charged for that night.  It seems to me like a basic coding fix).

[nzOdy]

14 minutes ago, JGmf said:

(That said, Princess really does need to upgrade the booking software so that suite reservations aren't charged for that night.  It seems to me like a basic coding fix).

As a past software developer I would tend to agree,  the only thing that would make this hard is if they have a really bad data model behind their systems. Given how everything seems keyed off booking ID once you're a booked passenger I could see a tangled database model making it hard to get back to basic customer metadata. Bad data models are one of the hardest and most costly things for any escompany to correct as you often have to rework every software system that works with any of those data objects.

 

They are likely balancing the cost of retouching all their software with the cost of addressing customer issues caused by these shortcomings.

[Steelers36]

3 hours ago, nzOdy said:

As a past software developer I would tend to agree,  the only thing that would make this hard is if they have a really bad data model behind their systems. Given how everything seems keyed off booking ID once you're a booked passenger I could see a tangled database model making it hard to get back to basic customer metadata. Bad data models are one of the hardest and most costly things for any escompany to correct as you often have to rework every software system that works with any of those data objects.

 

They are likely balancing the cost of retouching all their software with the cost of addressing customer issues caused by these shortcomings.

I disagree.  The guest reservation record should be flagged for a number of dining credits.  In fact, this particular one should not require anything at all since it can be derived from category of cabin booked.

 

However, perhaps this is what they went by in the past and there actually is a counter type field that contains the number of SD credits for guest.  In this situation, it should be set to 1 or bumped up by 1 if other credits exist.  As long as that field is passed to the Princess App (DMW process), that process knows by reference that guest has SD credit(s), so no charges should occur.

 

When a res is made in DWM, the counter should be reduced until it hits zero, at which time the guest is charged.  The cruise res system of record (POLAR) does not need to be updated by a back-feed as it contains the original grant of SD credits for the guest and DMW ought to be able to manage the res process once it is initialized with the SD credit count.  I do not see any need for touching "every software system" at all in this situation.

[nzOdy]

10 hours ago, Steelers36 said:

I disagree.  The guest reservation record should be flagged for a number of dining credits.  In fact, this particular one should not require anything at all since it can be derived from category of cabin booked.

 

However, perhaps this is what they went by in the past and there actually is a counter type field that contains the number of SD credits for guest.  In this situation, it should be set to 1 or bumped up by 1 if other credits exist.  As long as that field is passed to the Princess App (DMW process), that process knows by reference that guest has SD credit(s), so no charges should occur.

 

When a res is made in DWM, the counter should be reduced until it hits zero, at which time the guest is charged.  The cruise res system of record (POLAR) does not need to be updated by a back-feed as it contains the original grant of SD credits for the guest and DMW ought to be able to manage the res process once it is initialized with the SD credit count.  I do not see any need for touching "every software system" at all in this situation.

Yes, if they're just being lazy and not passing bits on requests then it is a pretty simple update.

I mentioned the other scenario, as I have experienced situations in the past where something simple like this ties all the way back to an ill fitting data-model that does bleed through every system.