UK6

Just to let everyone know that we arrived in Bordeaux on time and boarded Scenic Diamond without any problems and everything seems fine and well organised on board..The service and attention is excellent. I understand the ship is about 50% full.

Writing this as we spend Saturday morning cruising in really nice spring sunshine.

Thanks Canal archive. Bordeaux 11 day cruise. This will be our fourth river cruise with Scenic and also have done a full Australia tour with Scenic.

UPDATE: Had to have a whiskey this morning, as guess what, the paperwork arrived in the post 20 minutes ago, and all the information we were needing seems to be there.
So now we head to the airport with some confidence that everything is going ahead, and this hopefully means that everyone else who has bookings going forward will see the administration situation improve.

Thanks notamermaid.

We are meant to be collected at the airport, as our outgoing flights were known before the IT issues so fingers crossed on that. There are still two days to go, so who knows we might receive something before then. 

72 hours before boarding and we have not received anything, either by e mail or post.
Canal archive are very fortunate to be receiving their specific information.
This is ultimately the fault of Scenic, but we did book through one of the large U.K. specialist cruise travel agents where you never speak to the same person twice and they have not been proactive at all. It has been the worst pre departure service I have ever received and pre Covid we travelled a lot. We have no idea of emergency contact telephone numbers and we do not know where the ship will be docked. Obviously if we do succeed in boarding we are still hoping for a good cruise in the hope that none of the above issues are causing problems on the ships themselves.

We depart two weeks tomorrow and have not received any information since the day we booked. There is a no proactive communication at all. We do not know all of our travel details, spoke to our TA who said it is taking two weeks to get any information, so that’s after our departure date….

The good news is that the weather is fantastic in the U.K. at the moment. 

A good question from ptcgal if you excuse the pun we are in the same “boat”.
They are clearly in a mess. Hacked or something else, well run businesses have contingency plans for things like this happening, a few days of problems is understandable many weeks of shutdown is not.

Given the amount of time taken so far without any solution and the lack of proactive communication to customers, will the company be able to survive this.

Hi, we booked through a TA and they have been calling them on our behalf but not to date making much if any progress. With their systems down I assume they have to do things manually which must be a nightmare. 
I just don’t understand how a large company can have their systems down for so many weeks and it makes one wonder about what is really going on. 
 

Now the 12th March and the systems are still down. I have never heard of any professional business having no IT system for around a month and still no sign of it being fixed. We have a booking with them in April and cannot access and have not received any information/communication from them since this  “system” issue. We wonder if there is more to this. 

I don’t know why anyone is surprised by the way Regent treats its customers prior to the actual cruise taking place. They are the worst cruise company I have ever dealt with in terms of money pinching inflexibility, they are simply awful. Sad to say I was somewhat relieved when they this week out of the blue cancelled our March 2022 Tokyo/Tokyo cruise as at least now we will get our money back (of course they need 60 days to do that, of course they do, I think we are meant to feel sorry for them). I have today already booked with a competitor with a better deal and complete flexibility, that’s it for me with Regent. It’s a shame as the one cruise we had with them in 2019 was fine. Good luck to those stuck with FCC’s and 

I hope it all works out for everyone affected by Regents actions.
Not that I understood the earlier reference to the song in an earlier post but oh-bla di, ob-la-da.

Hello again Flossie009,

Thank you very much for your comments, I believe you have summarized everything very well both in terms of the inferior way we are treated by Regent by booking from the UK versus for example one of their major competitors Silversea who choose not to discriminate against Brits (I don’t see what UK consumer law has to do with this). 
Also you are correct that we will probably wait until the final payment is due before making the final decision but we are really concerned that we have zero flexibility in these difficult times, to be clear we want to go on the cruise and assuming the virus is under control by then we would, but if the situation is still a concern for us personally and the cruise is going ahead we will only have a choice of losing all monies paid and in those circumstances we will cancel before the final payment and have to take the pain of losing our deposit. Anyway if all goes well we will see you in Japan next year.

Thank you to both Marc and Flossie for the quick comments. Unfortunately as Flossie says it appears that RSSC has a policy to treat UK customers to worse terms and conditions than elsewhere. I must say I very much regret having booked with RSSC and feel this makes the likelihood of us having to cancel much higher as we would lose a very large amount if we pay the balance and then decide the travel situation is too risky for us even if the cruise goes ahead as we would lose everything. I am sorry we will miss the Japanese cruise and also of course the loss of our deposit in these difficult times. Will stick with Silversea in future. 

I hope this post is considered relevant to the topic. My wife and I sailed with RSSC in November and we are booked with them again for next April Tokyo/Tokyo. I was surprised that RSSC will not offer theIr Regent Reassurance to already booked cruises (we like them had no idea about the virus when we booked a long time ago). On asking them yesterday they said standard terms apply and if we decided not to sail even with 10 months notice we would have standard terms applied and we lose the 20% deposit no voucher option possible. (We are from the UK and it looks like RSSC discriminate negatively against non N American bookings regarding a $100 cancellation fee referred to in an earlier post) we don’t want to cancel but would like the reassurance just in case the situation is still fluid next year. We have sailed with Silversea many times and they have as standard a very flexible change and cancellation policy regardless of the current virus. Overall we are disappointed with RSSC on this and don’t now know what we should do before the rather large final balance is due?