Upgrade from Plus to Premier Onboard?

[JamieLogical]

I booked our 14-day August sailing on the Enchanted with Princess Plus. Today I tried to upgrade to Premier via that chat and it was a debacle. After they processed the upgrade, my booking balance showed I owed $1408 (cruise was paid in full back in May). By my math, that is $848 more than it should have cost at $20 per person per day.

 

I pointed this out to the rep and they then realized I had booked through a casino promo and that it really would cost me $1408 to upgrade, so they removed the upgrade and reverted me back to Princess Plus. After that, my booking balance showed I owed $1512! So now I owed even more than when they had upgraded me to Premier.

 

I am still on the chat so hopefully we can get this cleaned up and get my booking back to the state it was in before this whole mess.

 

In the meantime, I assume I would be able to upgrade to Premier on board for the simple $20 per person per day? If I do that, can I use OBC to help supplement the cost?

[Cruise Raider]

Yes, chat is pretty much worthless and hopefully, you can just get your booking back and you should be able to upgrade onboard. 

We’ve always been able to do so but when they’ve reached their max for capacity at the specialty dining, they may deny you.  Depending on what itinerary you are on, it’s unlikely they will be at the max on the premier package.  
fingers crossed for you!  
BtW, we have not gotten casino perks in a while but are you able to upgrade beforehand on the website for just $20 a day pp? 

 

[JamieLogical]

3 minutes ago, Cruise Raider said:

Yes, chat is pretty much worthless and hopefully, you can just get your booking back and you should be able to upgrade onboard. 

We’ve always been able to do so but when they’ve reached their max for capacity at the specialty dining, they may deny you.  Depending on what itinerary you are on, it’s unlikely they will be at the max on the premier package.  
fingers crossed for you!  
BtW, we have not gotten casino perks in a while but are you able to upgrade beforehand on the website for just $20 a day pp? 

 

 

No, I wasn't able to upgrade via the website or the app, which is why I used the chat in the first place.

[Cruise Raider]

4 minutes ago, JamieLogical said:

 

No, I wasn't able to upgrade via the website or the app, which is why I used the chat in the first place.

Oh darn!  I’ve never had trouble upgrading once onboard but, those are based on the itineraries we’ve taken.  
Hopefully, you’ve just gotten your original booking back to what it should be.  
 

[azbirdmom]

Unfortunately the folks who respond to the chat requests can do damage to casino reservations as you've just learned.  If they can't straighten it out then try to call the casino number to see what they can do.  Good luck and yes, assuming it gets straightened out you should be able to upgrade to Premier after you board.

[JamieLogical]

Well three hours of being on chat and on the phone and now my booking is finally back to what it was this morning. I am definitely not messing around with trying to upgrade before boarding and risk blowing up my booking again. We are still missing our shareholders benefit OBC from the "fixed" booking, but I just reapplied for that through the stockperks app and will deal with escalating that if/when it gets rejected by the app.

[Sprocket]

I’m sure you’ve already printed off your Personalizer with the corrected information, glad you got it fixed it can be a total PITA to get mistakes corrected.

Edited June 18 by Sprocket

[JamieLogical]

1 minute ago, Sprocket said:

I’m sure you’ve already printed off your Personalizer with the corrected information, glad you got it fixed it can be a total PITA to get mistakes corrected.

 

Yes, I had then send me a new confirmation and it matches our previous one except for the missing shareholders OBC. All our excursions and our Princess Plus are there and the total cost of the cruise matches what it was before and shows a $0 balance.

[JamieLogical]

I have more good news to report. I re-applied for the shareholder benefit through the StockPerks app last night after my booking was restored and as of this morning, they have already approved and applied the benefit to my fixed booking. So now we are fully whole again. Will definitely wait until onboard to upgrade to Premier. That way we can use the shareholder OBC and AARP Gift Cards to cover the cost.

[Retired-N-Happy]

23 minutes ago, JamieLogical said:

I have more good news to report. I re-applied for the shareholder benefit through the StockPerks app last night after my booking was restored and as of this morning, they have already approved and applied the benefit to my fixed booking. So now we are fully whole again. Will definitely wait until onboard to upgrade to Premier. That way we can use the shareholder OBC and AARP Gift Cards to cover the cost.

Hi Jaime....quick question?  It's 560 to upgrade for two over the course of our 14 day cruise.  After factoring out the 250 Carnival stock perk, it's still 310 to upgrade. The Enchanted doesn't have the new bar menus that are on the Sun, so I was just curious as to why you think it's necessary to upgrade to Premier on our 14 day cruise. 

We have 400 in OBC between the 250 in stock credit and 150 in FCD credit.  I think we're just going to possibly pay as we go if we go over our two casual credits and if we decide to go to the steak house and then apply the rest at the casino, lose a bit and cash out the rest.  

We'll definitely upgrade to Premier on our Sun sailings in October and January.

Edited June 19 by Retired-N-Happy

[lx200gps]

We usually do the Plus to Premier upgrade immediately upon boarding as it only takes a minute or two and lets us use some of our huge OBC stash. I have done it twice by phone and amazingly, both times I ended up with a human within a minute or two, no long waits and no need to attempt the Chat. Both times, the CSR was not sure if they could it and had to put me on hold for a minute or two while they checked with their superiors, but came back and told me they could. The first time, late last year, the upgrade went through almost immediately, and all references to Plus disappeared and were replaced by Premier. The summary page on the Personalizer  as well as our Travel Summary showed us as having Premier. Bizarrely, when I did the upgrade for a second time, just last week for  trip next February it was processed differently.  Instead of all the documents, Personalizer etc showing Premier, they all present it very differently. The Summary page shows us as still having Plus, as does the Travel Summary, but the TS also shows us as having a "Premier Upgrade".  I actually called Princess yet again to ask why we still showed Plus on the summary page, and the CSR checked and told us quite definitively that we did have Premier.  Needless to say we will be bringing paperwork with us in case there is a problem.

[JamieLogical]

48 minutes ago, Retired-N-Happy said:

Hi Jaime....quick question?  It's 560 to upgrade for two over the course of our 14 day cruise.  After factoring out the 250 Carnival stock perk, it's still 310 to upgrade. The Enchanted doesn't have the new bar menus that are on the Sun, so I was just curious as to why you think it's necessary to upgrade to Premier on our 14 day cruise. 

We have 400 in OBC between the 250 in stock credit and 150 in FCD credit.  I think we're just going to possibly pay as we go if we go over our two casual credits and if we decide to go to the steak house and then apply the rest at the casino, lose a bit and cash out the rest.  

We'll definitely upgrade to Premier on our Sun sailings in October and January.

 

We really can't justify the full price when we "math it out" but we can get close and I think both of us would just prefer not to have to think about it when we are onboard. First, both of us are going to be working while onboard, so having multiple devices on wifi will be a lot easier with the additional devices instead of having to constant log off/on with our laptops and phones. We could have handled that by just upgrading one of us to the 4-device plan and sharing the additional devices, but that alone is $20/day (we are only Gold). So then we are already halfway to the cost of upgrading to Premier.

 

The two specialty dinings are worth ~$160. We could probably get away with not doing any specialty dining onboard, but with a 14-day sailing, the MDR might get a bit old and we might want to break it up a bit. I will say that when we were on the Emerald for 15-days a few years ago, we ended up doing specialty dining 4 times and paying out of pocket for it (we had Plus at the time).

 

But actually, the main draw for me is the unlimited casual dining. When we were on the Enchanted in May for 7 days on a port-intensive sailing (only GiGi's is open for lunch on port days) we still managed to eat at O'Malley's three times, Ocean Terrace once, and Gigi's about 4 times. We had Premier on that sailing and liked being able to decide to do casual dining on the fly without having to worry about the cost. If we managed to do that much casual dining on a port-intensive 7-day sailing, I imagine we can eat there even more frequently on our 14-day with a ton of sea days (it's a repositioning cruise).

 

[Retired-N-Happy]

24 minutes ago, JamieLogical said:

 

We really can't justify the full price when we "math it out" but we can get close and I think both of us would just prefer not to have to think about it when we are onboard. First, both of us are going to be working while onboard, so having multiple devices on wifi will be a lot easier with the additional devices instead of having to constant log off/on with our laptops and phones. We could have handled that by just upgrading one of us to the 4-device plan and sharing the additional devices, but that alone is $20/day (we are only Gold). So then we are already halfway to the cost of upgrading to Premier.

 

The two specialty dinings are worth ~$160. We could probably get away with not doing any specialty dining onboard, but with a 14-day sailing, the MDR might get a bit old and we might want to break it up a bit. I will say that when we were on the Emerald for 15-days a few years ago, we ended up doing specialty dining 4 times and paying out of pocket for it (we had Plus at the time).

 

But actually, the main draw for me is the unlimited casual dining. When we were on the Enchanted in May for 7 days on a port-intensive sailing (only GiGi's is open for lunch on port days) we still managed to eat at O'Malley's three times, Ocean Terrace once, and Gigi's about 4 times. We had Premier on that sailing and liked being able to decide to do casual dining on the fly without having to worry about the cost. If we managed to do that much casual dining on a port-intensive 7-day sailing, I imagine we can eat there even more frequently on our 14-day with a ton of sea days (it's a repositioning cruise).

 

Is O'Malleys ever open at lunchtime?

[JamieLogical]

Just now, Retired-N-Happy said:

Is O'Malleys ever open at lunchtime?

 

It is on sea days. We went there for lunch on both of the sea days on our sailing. We did Ocean Terrace for dinner one time. We did Gigi's for lunch on embarkation day and on one or two of the port days (only one casual dining open for lunch on port days). We also did dinner at GiGi's once when we had an aborted attempt at dining at Catch by Rudi and were just STARVING.

[Retired-N-Happy]

7 minutes ago, JamieLogical said:

 

It is on sea days. We went there for lunch on both of the sea days on our sailing. We did Ocean Terrace for dinner one time. We did Gigi's for lunch on embarkation day and on one or two of the port days (only one casual dining open for lunch on port days). We also did dinner at GiGi's once when we had an aborted attempt at dining at Catch by Rudi and were just STARVING.

We usually go to the MDR on embarkation and sea days, but with so many sea days we will probably go there twice to use up our credits and on port days go to the buffet or pay a la carte at Gigi's to burn a bit of our OBC.

[JamieLogical]

For those of you who have upgraded to Premier onboard, where did you go to do it? Guest Services? Or can it be done at any bar/restaurant?

[lx200gps]

2 hours ago, JamieLogical said:

For those of you who have upgraded to Premier onboard, where did you go to do it? Guest Services? Or can it be done at any bar/restaurant?

As soon as you board the ship, right there on Deck (6?) right off the gangway there will be at least one table set up with crew members ready to process the Upgrade for you. No need to go to GS or a bar/restaurant, the Upgrade table will be VERY obvious ;o)  The upgrade is immediate.

[JamieLogical]

18 minutes ago, lx200gps said:

As soon as you board the ship, right there on Deck (6?) right off the gangway there will be at least one table set up with crew members ready to process the Upgrade for you. No need to go to GS or a bar/restaurant, the Upgrade table will be VERY obvious ;o)  The upgrade is immediate.

 

Perfect! Thank you. You may not know the answer to this, but I assume that the upgrade will be charged against my onboard account, so if I have GS process my AARP gift cards later that day or later in the sailing, they would cover the cost before the final onboard charges post to my credit card?

[ccqueenanne]

1 hour ago, JamieLogical said:

 

Perfect! Thank you. You may not know the answer to this, but I assume that the upgrade will be charged against my onboard account, so if I have GS process my AARP gift cards later that day or later in the sailing, they would cover the cost before the final onboard charges post to my credit card?

 

Yes, it'll just get added to your onboard account - it won't be charged to your credit card at that time.

[lx200gps]

1 hour ago, JamieLogical said:

 

Perfect! Thank you. You may not know the answer to this, but I assume that the upgrade will be charged against my onboard account, so if I have GS process my AARP gift cards later that day or later in the sailing, they would cover the cost before the final onboard charges post to my credit card?

You assume correctly ;o) I pulled one of our Stateroom Account sheets from a trip last October on the Discovery. Each of us had a line item called "Plus to Premier Upgrade Bundle" which came to the expected $140 for each of us (it was a 7 day trip). So yes, the upgrade cost is a charge against your account which can be offset by any OBC. Not sure about gift cards as we've never had any.