So my husband and I booked a 10 night Mediterranean cruise on the Norwegian Viva that set sail on May 25. We were stupid and included airfare as part of the package, because they were having a special deal. We also had them set the flight days to 1 day before the cruise and 3 days after the end, so we could have time in Athens and Rome outside of the sailing dates. The flight to Athens was a complete mess; here’s what happened:
We woke up on Wednesday to find that our original flight time had been pushed from 1:20pm to 5:00pm, due to a flight delay on the airline's part (no other explanation given to us). Our next flight was in Chicago at 6pm, and if we left at 5pm EST, we would get there at 5pm CST - tight but doable.
We get to the airport in the afternoon and find our flight is now delayed to 5:25pm; now we're getting worried about catching that 6pm Chicago flight.
Continue to sit there and it’s delayed further to 5:45pm; we'd never catch that Chicago flight. We call NCL and they say to talk to the airline (United).
So we call United, and the best they can tell us is to ask our flight attendant to contact the Chicago flight and hold it for us.
At this point, it’s all moot, as our first flight is now delayed to 6:25pm, and we would arrive after our Chicago flight.
It’s roughly 5pm now, and I begin frantically calling NCL and United to try to figure out what we're supposed to do - do we take this first flight and hope for some solution in Chicago? United tells us they have no other flights today that would get us where we need to go (everything is booked) from either our home airport or Chicago and that we would have to stay overnight in Chicago if we go there. Okay, but if we do that, what happens then? United tells us we have to talk to our "travel agent" (e.g. NCL) and have them coordinate our plane tickets.
So I talk to NCL's "airfare specialists" who were absolutely useless. They could not/would not help us, and just told us to talk to United. They would then forward me to United which ended up going to a voicemail box that told me that my situation would be resolved within 30 days. Awesome.
I finally found someone at United who thought she could get us from our home airport to Newark, then Amsterdam, then Athens. But she couldn’t finalize the whole thing, because Lufthansa (who were the carriers for our last two legs of flight) would have to sign off on it (I don’t know why, that’s just what I was told).
I then spoke to a nice gentleman at Lufthansa who said the United lady had fried everything up, but he would fix things - eventually he had us set up for a new set of tickets leaving the next morning that would get us to Athens eventually. I could see the new flights in my United app, and *received an email confirmation of them*. So we went home, expecting to be able to leave the next day.
Later that night, I try to check us in. No record of these new tickets. United says they have no idea what I’m talking about. I try to call Lufthansa and their US support line is giving a busy signal (no joke). After multiple attempts, I finally try calling the Canadian support office, who confirmed that they were getting a busy signal too when they tried calling the line; also confirmed that he could see no new tickets in his system and that there was nothing he could do to help us, and that we need to speak to our travel agent.
I then called NCL's "airfare specialists" again, and they’re shut down for the night. Awesome. So I call the personal cruise consultant line, and get told there’s nothing they can do, I have to wait till the airfare office is open in the morning.
At this point, it seemed like a risk to try to rely on them to resolve this and get us to Athens in time, as they had been zero help so far, so I just said eff it, and shelled out $3600 for Delta tickets for an airport 2 hours away; we managed to get to Athens in time for the cruise, thankfully.
As for what happened to the new tickets that strangely disappeared - my best guess is that because they were tied to that original confirmation number, when we didn’t show up in Chicago, somehow the whole thing got cancelled, including our new tickets. I don’t know what we could have done differently in this situation to resolve it better.
Another lesson learned - make sure you check what is surrounding your cabin, not just on the sides, but above and below. Our cabin is apparently above a dishwashing station and there is non-stop clattering and a thumping noise from the washing machine. It goes all day from about 5am to midnight. So far our complaints have started an "investigation" - at this point, I would take a downgrade room-wise, so long as it’s quiet. I’m so tired that I’m having trouble getting through our excursions; too exhausted to enjoy them, and we've still got 5 more days to go.
I’m feeling pretty disheartened about this whole trip - we've spent a *lot* of money on this trip, and it’s not the experience I was hoping it would be.
