Rodinglane

We received a notification from Holland America today regarding our May 8 Baltic cruise that they are “closely monitoring the situation…”  concerning  events in Ukraine and that we’ll be notified if there are any changes in the itinerary. 

I’m rather surprised that HAL isn’t simply cancelling St. Petersburg since obviously the situation is not going to improve for some time.  I’m not sure what it is they are going to “monitor”.    I have to say I’m disappointed that even if it were safe for HAL to go to Russia, since the country is now under heavy economic sanctions, it seems highly inappropriate for us to spend our dollars there.   But I guess that’s business…

Our strategy is to wait until final payment is due in early March and if they haven’t announced an alternate itinerary we will cancel.  We do not wait to take the risk of the days in St Petersburg being replaced by sea days which is quite possible. 

Just out of curiosity I contacted HAL today to see if they had any information since we are on a May 8th Baltic sailing with final payment due March 9th.   But they aren't saying anything, other than we'll be notified if there is a change.    Our concern is that if HAL just replaces the 2 days in St Petersburg with sea days, then then we would definitely  cancel.  But if they would at least substitute for other ports, we could still be interested.   One would hope somebody at HAL has been doing some contingency planning all along,  but maybe they're just hoping passengers will still sail even with extra sea days.   But then I understand finding substitute ports may of course be logistically difficult given the amount of cruise traffic in the Baltic during the summer. 

Anybody else heard from their cruise lines of the likelihood of a substitute for St Petersburg?  We are 99.99% certain we will not be calling at St. Petersburg at this point!

27 minutes ago, terrydtx said:

I think some are missing the point about canceling ports, if travel bans are imposed by NATO or EU countries to Russia the cruise lines would be unable to keep any Russian or possibly Russian allies ports in their itineraries. I saw one news report today that the Putin imposed puppet governments of Lithuania and Estonia and Latvia were supporting Russia in its aggression with Ukraine, so those ports could be part of any EU sanctions and bans. In these cases, the cruise lines are not making the decisions to cancel ports in their itineraries it is the EU or other governments.

Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia are members of the EU and NATO.  All have unequivocally spoken against Russia and their latest actions against Ukraine.    They are most definitely not puppet governments of Russia.    I'm not sure where Terrydtx gets his/her news, but a little bit of searching the major news channels does not support this assertion. 

We are a group of 10 that were going on a Baltic cruise in May.   As soon as Celebrity cancelled the cruise on April 16th we all applied for a refund.   Everybody received their refunds last week, although some are still waiting for shore excursions to be refunded.

We received absolutely no communication at all from Celebrity the 80 days or so we waited, and when we tried to call we were told to speak to our Travel Agent, who eventually did call on our behalf and found out that our refunds were being processed (this was about 3 weeks before we received them).

So I guess our experience wasn't so bad and fortunately we did not need the money right away.  We're relieved to get our money back, but it's left a bit of a sour taste in our mouths, and like others we're not sure how we feel about doing business with Celebrity again.

Sure, I understand that it was an extraordinary time for them, and it was really unfortunate so many people were laid off.   But what bothered me the most was the sheer lack of communication.   We never received a single email, other than the initial cancellation email, the entire time we waited.   And even when we filled out the refund request web page there was no follow-up email, leaving us to wonder if it had really worked. 

I used to work in IT and I know that it would not have been so difficult for Celebrity to send out periodic mass emails to their customers (they certainly know how to do that for sales marketing!).   In fact it shouldn't be that hard to put together a simple tracking system for customers to get an approximate idea of their refund status, especially since it sounds like Celebrity do have some idea of when things will be processed.   After all the IRS managed to do this for all of the stimulus payments for millions of people.  I can understand these features not being available at the beginning of this process, but they've had plenty of time now to build something like this.  It's not rocket science and good software development teams can easily create this sort of thing literally in just a few weeks.  I also think it's questionable whether the refund process has to be entirely manual, but that may depend on what kind of 3rd party software they are using (but even then there's usually a lot that can be at least semi-automated, and good IT departments are used to doing these kind of ad-hoc operations). 

I can only conclude that communicating with their customers has been and is not a priority for Celebrity.  Yet, a few well-timed and informative communications from Celebrity could have done a lot to quell people's anxieties about the refund process.   To me it seems that they simply just don't get it.      Future business matters to Celebrity more than ever now (their survival depends on it), so you would think they would do everything to provide timely communications to ease customer concerns.   But not so  - we got nothing, absolutely nothing.

And the FAQs on their web site still say that refunds would be processed in 30 days.  It would only take a person literally a few seconds to fix that, but again it's obvious customer communications are not a priority to them.  So I ask myself, is giving them my money a priority for me?

I hope we can go cruising again, maybe in 2022.  But I will think twice about booking with Celebrity given their cavalier attitude in how they've dealt with this whole process (although I suppose to be fair many of the other major cruise lines seem just as bad).   Or I hope by then there are better consumer protections in place, because corporations need to learn to behave more responsibly with our money.   But it could be worse - we are also waiting for Virgin Atlantic refunds and the latest on that is that it will be at least 4 months, that's assuming they don't go bankrupt in the meantime! 

Again, so much angst could have been avoided with proper communications.  Perhaps the issue was they laid-off their communications director, because it does rather appear they are operating without one...