Parkland Hiker

Last week, the Japan cruise still showed on the App for us. I just looked now, and it no longer appears. I’m not sure when it dropped off, but likely was after our TA notified Celebrity that we had decided to cancel

This chart was in the letter we received from Celebrity, advising us that our booking has been cancelled. It was a form letter sent out to all cancelled bookings for all of the affected cruises. It listed our cruise, and then if you read across, it provided the 2025 cruises that you could lift and shift to. 2025 didn’t work for us, and even if it had, the 3 cruises we were given the option to lift and shift to were already sold out for equivalent stateroom. We would either have had to downgrade, or upgrade but pay the difference at prevailing rates. We chose to cancel and get a refund of our deposit and a FCC. We had already booked our Japan flights, so have decided to just go and do a land tour on our own

If this issue was a result of the Japan government requiring a certain number of cabins to be set aside for potential Covid quarantine, I don’t think Celebrity would have taken the blame on themselves as an error resulting in overbooking. They would have laid the blame with the Japanese restrictions

We were deck 7, and received a cancellation notice. We were never upgraded from a lower category- that was the stateroom we had booked all along, over a year ago, on the lift and shift from the 2022 cancelled sailing

We had just booked our flights 2 days before we got the cancellation notice from Celebrity! We haven’t done anything about cancelling the flights yet. Considering just flying to Japan anyway and doing our own land-only tour. Cruising around Japan doesn’t appear to be a strong possibility anymore

I agree with your comments regarding Cruise Critic. The number of people who look at Cruise Critic are a very small sampling of overall cruisers. We find very few people who have even heard of Cruise Critic when we mention it. So, if there are this many posts on thus forum, then I expect the numbers affected are significant

Celebrity is not cancelling the most recent bookings. We were originally booked on a March 2022 sailing on the Silhouette, which was cancelled due to Covid. We were then offered the lift and shift option for March, 2024, on the Millennium, which we booked. So, our veranda cabin (not a guarantee) has been reserved since March, 2022. We received our notification of our booking being cancelled yesterday. Celebrity provided a chart that shows that all of the fall, 2023 to spring, 2024 Japan sailings are affected. So it’s some kind of major glitch in their reservation system. Our TA is reaching out to the Celebrity rep that they deal with, to see what happened. In the meantime, their offer to lift and shift to March, 2025 doesn’t look too promising since on the Celebrity website those Japan itineraries already show veranda categories as sold out