uktog

Very good point @excitedofharpenden We have had the same issues with 3 nights. I know others will chime in that it’s worked for them but it’s a case of “all depends on the price of the cruise”. If your sole driver is booking to use the three free nights you probably will find a cruise where it makes a difference but your additional spend may be quite high. If you are booking for a particular itinerary you want you are much more likely to find the free nights have little or no value Theres also a problem that hopefully will be fixed by the time you come to use them - not even your travel agent can see the “value” of your free nights it’s not published they have to contact Azamara wait until someone does the calculation then come back to you. Two calculations on a cruise of the same length and same advertised ballpark price won’t necessarily give you the same “discount”. It’s all a bit hocus pocus. My own view dump the free nights and go for a flat % off advertised fare (say 25%, 50% 75%). Easier to understand

The chairs are not put out there on that whole itinerary all season for safety reasons, this was discussed with staff onboard. The reason was the weather conditions can change very often and so quickly it would be challenging to monitor that as well as everything else and to bring them in/put them back out would use up a lot of time. Not random at all, perfectly sensible to me.

Waiau River hasn’t been around for a while 🥲 but Craggy Range is. DH reminds me he drank a lot of Plennley Estate Cab Sauv

Yes it’s a lovely taste which was why we had to find it (or anything better than Veuve de Verve or Monta something they offered) on our last cruise. I read that Moet is having quality issues these days as it struggled to secure enough grapes last year some officianados could tell there was a change in taste in recent bottles. I’ve often thought Moet was clever marketing hype (as Morangie is with whisky) and brands like Nicholas as very underrated

It wasn’t the Nicolas champagne when we were on Onward it was an inferior French sparkling white Veuve de Vevre. Disappointing and took a lot of effort to spring some Nicolas into the Atlas place. Even then it kept getting switched out! For wine, get to know the sommelier in the restaurant as they also typically will share some higher value bin ends with Ultimate package guests. They do have some other known offerings eg Penfolds, Kendal Jackson and sometimes a Mondavi Pinot Noir but we found it a much better experience to tell the sommelier what we were eating and let him choose.

5 sailings since restart, 4 very good cruises one certainly not so and as that was the most recent it plays on the mind. Lack of effective and timely communication has contributed to the cancellation of two future cruises and also led to the non booking of replacements as was the original intention. Two others booked and looking forward to them in 2024 at which point we will know more where we sit for 2025 with Azamara. We also now have cruises booked with other lines through to 2025 and are refocusing on river cruising for some of our travels. Hope Azamara sort themselves out good and proper for 2024, where for one of the cruises, the ability to book shore excursions with ease and without needing to involve phone calls or our agent will be fundamental to our judgement. We have two cruise again vouchers to use, bought in good faith two years ago - we really hope we are using them to make more bookings in 2024 and beyond.

and it looks like the risk of that was not fully appreciated - and possibly the attention to detail/sample checking/interim testing when doing the work was lacking. Sad but they really got a lot of collateral reputation damage from this

That was my thought as well. And manual rekeying will introduce errors that were not there before!! I appreciate litigation might limit what they can say but I have never heard of litigation meaning customers are told nothing at all for over a month

Honestly, I think the problem is bigger than replicating systems - some of this might be some of the cause but they are not functioning effectively in terms of providing customer support. Whether there is insufficient resource, wrong skill sets, wrong focus, too much self belief, who knows - probably its a combination of all these. Their communications strategy is also shot, you can have IT disasters but can still manage the comms - some financial services organisations showed they could do that very well in the past such that few customers actually remember previous meltdowns, but the difference was they got on top of the comms, they did not immediately fix the issue but they kept talking..... And if something was complicated, why was it not tested first????

It is sad that the whole customer support side is still in such a mess and showing no signs of improving. If it is genuinely improving and things are happening - where is the communication? I have faith in the marine and engineering management aspect of a cruise with Azamara, they successfully migrated to their new system a year ago and I hear nothing but positive comments about it, so from the safety and compliance angle all is well. But there is no point in having safe, compliant half empty ships. This week they lost a significant amount of revenue from me. I had been emailing, my agent had been emailing, my agent had been calling yet no one could give an appropriate response. In the absence of an appropriate, consistent and relevant answer on vaccine requirements/exemptions for a voyage that called at ports en route to South Africa, we knew that cruise, and the preceding one as it was b2b was a no go, but had hoped to transfer the deposit to something else. I believe this should have been possible. All we got was canned responses that they were working through emails and when we did call we were told to write in, we ran out of time re cancellation deadlines. Losing the will to live and getting right to the wire on cancellation penalties, the two cruises were cancelled this week (albeit we lost money as a result). We have made alternative plans with another line, something we would never have done a few years back. It saddens me to feel this way about Azamara, I have two big cruises for 2024 which I hope we can still take (expensive flights all booked already) and that this debacle will be well past us by then. But it has hurt us and we share @fruitmachine view - they cannot keep going at reduced capacity and issues with revenue generating activities such as shore excursions. And even if they can keep going, how many will be lost in the fall out - might our alternative plans convince us to switch our loyalty elsewhere wholesale? And they are really going to have to incentivise travel agents, certainly here in the UK, where many are proactively highlighting other lines to previous Azamara bookers.

So why don’t they put a message explaining the situation on their website to reassure people?

Trouble was in Onward if you don’t have a spa pass you couldn’t access the showers. DH as a gym user raised this in his feedback so it may have changed now

And do they do proper toast or just pale dried out bread?

I find Facetiming in restaurants and public areas on ships an uncalled for spoiler of the overall ambience. Some even consider it bad manners especially in restaurants and I have seen on other lines staff approach guests asking them to move somewhere less intrusive if they are making such calls. I applaud this approach. Do Viking staff do likewise? I hope they do

Thank you for your postings - they have been very helpful - and safe travels home

Don’t hold your hopes out at all. The upgrade scheme is very limited (used to require blind bidding often resulting in rooms in less desirable locations) and is currently non existent with no idea if or when it’s returning. It’s run by an outsourced activity to generate revenue from rooms they cannot sell. If you want a particular room type book that from the outset don’t hope for upgrades. You’ve time to make the change now or alternatively focus on what’s going to be great about your current room and on the itinerary you will enjoy.

Following particularly interested in the Saturn voyages

I believe I’ve been a double influencer in the past a bad influence on others whilst under the influence

There’s the rub ….. by telephone. In this era of technology that’s not the way many people want to work. Booking shore excursions pre cruise used to be an evening job when you had the time to sit down and plan it all. I refuse to sit on a phone probably listening to music or advertising material to service a holiday!!!

There was no OBC involved in my Seaware transaction just straight cash to pay for an excursion and it still had to go through the TA with Explora so I’m a little concerned OBC isn’t the reason. If you have to wait until the cruise is fully paid on Azamaras books before you can book excursions yourself that for many guests booked with large agencies is going to be only about 14 days before the cruise. I have a cruise to Japan next year, at our age it’s probably a one and done so will be doing many excursions and would have wanted to set them up several months ahead. You can do on several competitors so if it proves the case that this ridiculous system is permanent it will be another factor that will encourage us to cruise with other lines.

Thanks, it is doing nothing to convince us to sail with them longer term which you would have thought they would have wanted to do - you are correct, the experience is dreadful unless you are a travelling influencer, vlogger or guest travel agent 🙂 .

Should show now.

I commented on your other post. Requiring you to work through your travel agent for shore excursion bookings is beyond stupid

Yes we seem to have a new rule that excursion payments have to go through your travel agents - if this is actually the new way of working it’s ridiculous and will absolutely drive people away at least from the cruise line’s excursions and possibly from booking full stop. I fear it is how Seaware is set up based on what I saw on Explora. Didn’t Azamara understand how their customers preferred to do business with them before implementing this product, did they not notice this problem or had they no choice?

Snap!