Question for Kitty9 (Darcie) or others on this board with similar experiences

[loranfa]

You were kind enough to offer the name of your travel agent last year. I have not had an opportunity to utilize his services as yet. I hope that I can ask your advice on another matter.

 

My husband, daughter, and I are scheduled to sail on the Independence Day Weekend cruise sailing this Thursday (July 1) from New York City. We had originally made these reservations in September 2002.

 

It seems that our tickets and documents have been lost in the mail. The travel agent that we used mailed us the tickets US Priority Mail, rather than sending them Fedex as she usually does. She assured me today that she will make arrangements for pier pickup of the tickets. I also called Cunard. They did not seem to think that a pier pickup would be a problem.

 

I tend to be a Type "A" personality who struggles with not having everything in order before I leave for a trip, so this is difficult for me to leave for New York without documents. Do you have any experience with a similar situation and could you offer any advice for us.

 

To make this story even a little more humorous - the big draw for this trip was that the Queen Mary would be docked in New York Harbor on Sunday night, so the passengers could watch the New York City fireworks with the Statue of Liberty in the background. Now it seems that the Coast Guard is not allowing any commercial traffic in the area, so we will be traveling to Newport, Rhode Island to watch their fireworks. The article goes on to say that Cunard has contributed $20K to New port to beef up their display.

 

I hope that these two separate event is not an omen for how the rest of the trip turns out.

 

Thank you for any advice that you can offer.

 

Loretta Faturos

loranfa@aol.com

[Bill S]

Loretta: welcome to the club! I am a type-A person as well, and went through a similar experience last December. We were booked on a Holland America South America cruise departing from Valparaiso, Chile. Our cruise documents never arrived before the date of our flight to Santiago. Our TA advised us to take our booking confirmation and all should be OK. Of course, we were a bit apprehensive leaving for South America without any cruise docs! Well, when we arrived at the pier without luggage tags, we just gave the stevedore our cabin number and they had plenty of luggage tags-they just put our cabin number on our tags and attached them to our bags and our luggage made it fine to our cabin. When we went to the check-in counter, we advised the agent that we only had our booking confirmation and she asked for our passports and called a supervisor over and he punched a couple of buttons on the keyboard and voila', he said no problem and processed us for immediate embarkation, no fuss, no muss. So, if Cunard is as half as organized as HAL (or vice versa), you should have no problem. Hope this helps! Have a great cruise!

[loranfa]

Bill S - Thanks for the information - it makes me feel a little better.