Aussie Gal

I too am waiting for the 2021 itineraries to come out as we would like to cruise either from Australia or Singapore back to Southampton without doing part of the World Cruise which occurs on the Sea or Sun in the middle of the year.

I have noticed that the Island Princess is also making her way to Singapore in November of 2020 and will be there on the 17th December but after that it is a mystery as to what or where she will be going.  

We would be interested in finding out what the plans are for the Island whilst she is in Asia and if she will be returning back to Southampton early in the New Year such as March or April of 2021.

I hate having to wait but guess that is part of life!

Jennie

That's fine. We will make sure that we use all of the cards. Not hard, especially as we each have a coffee most lunchtimes and I often have one for breakfast. With only 15 on each card, that won't be hard to do on a 14 day cruise.

Jennie

Thanks for your quick reply. I now can understand what is happening. I have a coffee card left over from our last cruise on the Sea Princess,  so we will return all the drink in our refrig except for the gin and tonic and that will leave us a new coffee card to be used with our old one which will probably be enough coffees for the cruise.

Jennie

I have just discovered this topic so I am very much out of date with Coffee Cards as we lasted cruised on Princess in 2017.  We always use a coffee card as we do love our Espresso Coffee each lunchtime and often at breakfast. We will be on the Sun in just over 3 weeks time and cannot wait.

We are Elite and we when we organize our refrigerator with our "free drinks" we prefer to remove everything except the gin and tonic although we often replace everything for a coffee card.

Does this still apply and if there are no coffee cards anymore, do we pay for our coffee each time we buy one or is there another way of being able to buy the coffee at a discount price?

Jennie

So true though Viking were very fair when I needed to cancel and rebook earlier this year. 

Jennie

I have just gone into my booking with Viking which was changed to May, 2020 and we do not have to make final payment until January 2020, which will be 4 months out which I feel is very reasonable.

Jennie

Paige,

What a shame you fell asleep whilst "Death of Stalin" was on. It is a good film to watch. We saw it earlier this year in the cinema.

Jennie

Paige,

I have finally found and read these three pages. So glad you put the link on Facebook otherwise I would have missed your wonderfully funny narration. It sounds a great cruise even though the weather is just being normal and boring!. I remember when we were in Scotland one September, it was quite cold and when we returned back to London, Scotland had their hottest day all summer at 24C! (78F) We laughed as we are so used to such high temperatures during our summer. Anyhow, I will now look forward to reading your adventures each day.

Jennie

Cynthia,

Am enjoying reading your posts and looking at Dave's wonderful photos. Keep on having fun each day and hope that Trivia brings some wins! Give our regards to Julie.

Jennie

I have been looking at the Princess website this morning and we can book a cruise on the Golden from Melbourne in January, February, March and April 2020, so I don't think she will be going to P&O in a hurry.

Jennie

Many thanks to both of you for blog AND pics! We're going in Dec of this year on Regent circumnavigation. We've done it once before, but looking forward to doing it again. Hope we can endure the heat. We don't do too well in humidity.

 

Thanks again:cool:

I think the hottest place we visited was in Darwin though Bali was also hot. We were lucky when we visited Cairns as we went to Palm Cove on the first afternoon and there was a lovely cool breeze coming off the ocean. The next day we visited Mossman Gorge and Cape Tribulation and again I don't think the heat was too bad.

Enjoy.

Jennie

We are using Spaindaytours when you google their site top left ( our day tours ) scroll down you will see Cordoba, will be there May 2018 Horizon

Thanks so much for that. I have gone ahead and organized a tour with them to Cordoba. We are also on another tour with them that another member of our Roll Call has organized from Bilboa. Our cruise is still 18 months away, we will be on Oceania's Marina in September, 2019. Already our Roll Call is 6 pages with lots of people organizing tours.

Jennie

Hi peterfisher

we arrive the 11th of May and have a excursion to Cordoba what can you tell me about places to see and do there.

Can you tell me the name of your tour company you will be using as we will be in Malaga next year and we are looking for a tour company to take us to Cordoba. We were last there in 2000 and what we saw then is very hazy so we want to return.

Jennie

I would just like to let you know how impressed I am with Viking. Today one of the Australia representatives phoned me to help me with our query as Head Office in the U.S. reads these posts and wanted to be able to help. The upshot is that we are able to change our booking to 2020.

I cannot thank their Customer Relations staff too highly for working out who we were and for making sure that we could be helped. Thank you Viking.

Jennie

This is what I have read as well. If I had read this when we first booked last June, I wouldn't have gone ahead with the cruise as it goes against all my principles of "fair play". If I receive confirmation of this when I speak to a Viking representative then we will just have to weigh up whether to cut our losses, cancel and lose the $1000 deposit or go ahead and keep the booking even though it would have suited us so much better to change it to a later date. I know that if we keep the original date we will be very critical of the whole "Viking" experience and we will be comparing it to all our other 30+ cruises. Also I would like to know why there are 3 different rules for cancelling - one for the U.S., one for the U.K. and one for Australia.

Jennie

Thanks. I will let you know the outcome of my phone call.

Jennie

I am sorry to say it is my understanding in Australia that the deposit is lost if you change your cruise to a later date. Viking have a very restrictive deposit policy, compared to most other ocean cruise lines. I think it is a carryover of their river cruise policies where deposits with Viking, and many other companies, are non refundable (unless you take out their insurance at the time of booking)

Thanks for replying so quickly to my question. In other words, if we want to change our booking say to 2020 instead of April next year, we are hit with another deposit and we lose the first deposit! That seems to be a very unlawful practice.

Over the years I have changed a booking to another date when dealing with other cruise lines such as HAL, Princess, Celebrity, Cunard and Oceania and I have never been penalised.

I know that in the U.S. the following paragraph applies

In fact when you look up Viking Cancellation Policy on their website, this shown under the Australian Link and it reads

The following charges will apply (Broken out by days before departure) 121 days or more is $100 per person which is fair enough.

If we Aussies are being penalised and we lose our deposit because we need to change to another date for our cruise, then that will be the last time we ever deal with

Viking. I am sure that Seabourn, Crystal and Silverseas would be happy to have our business. I am only wanting to move our deposit to another cruise not cancel completely and yet the penalty works out to be as though I was cancelling out altogether.

I will phone Viking tomorrow and see what they say. As the ship is still being built, who knows if it will be ready anyway. They do seem to be building far too many ships at the one time and it does remind me of what happened to Renaissance way back in 2001.

Jennie

Whatever. It made us look more closely at the cruise, anticipated weather, viability of ports and flight strategies; we ended up canceling. I had plenty of money sitting in a do nothing savings account but if j didn’t have to pay the balance now I probably would have let it ride. I’ve never canceled out on 20+ prior cruises on 10+ lines but I guess we were due. I’m sure Viking will find a replacement.

When you cancelled, were you hit with a cancellation fee? We would like to change our booking to a year later but when reading the fine print at the back of the book, it says for any change you are charged a $500 p.p. fee. Would that money then go on to the new booking or would Viking keep it as some sort of extra for changing the booking?

We booked last year and we did pay out $1000 for deposit for the two of us, though we don't need to pay the full amount until 120 days before the cruise.

I have never come across a cruise line before, that charges so much for a change in the booking and I am wondering if it is better to cut our losses now and lose the $1000 deposit or persevere and change our cruise to another time, namely a few months later than we had booked. By the way, our cruise is fully booked and it isn't until April 2019.

Jennie

We frequently have this feeling after trivia:)[/quote

 

Our team also had this same feeling in trivia but in the case of the email I did write ports :D. I was typing too quickly this morning!!

 

Jennie

We were pretty much just dumped at the village and left to wander about. The tour had more aspects promised.

I know Oceania had its contractor cancel the previous day and the guide told us he was contracted at 11pm the previous day.

 

 

My letter essentially stated that everyone was impacted in one way or another with various aspects of abnormalities on this cruise -- whether bad food, missed ports, excursions that missed , mechanical issues with ship or weather. Oceania should provide compensation to everyone on board whether requested or not as good will.

Yes we were left to wander around both villages for 30 minutes or so but that didn't worry us so much. I have had worse ship excursions than that, so we were quite happy. In fact our worst ever was on another Oceania cruise, when we took a bus trip through New York and we returned back to the ship like drowned rats and freezing to death. I immediately went to the Shore Excursion desk to complain. I had to write out a report but we never received any compensation for that particular excursion, in fact we never heard back from Oceania!

I too wrote about the mechanical issues and the missed ports, especially missing Fraser Island as that was one of the reasons that we took the cruise other than catching up with our overseas friends, of course

At the moment, I am still waiting for our credit to come through for our two missed excursions. It was promised within 15 days of leaving the ship and since then I have had my TA get on to it and the latest is that they were going to send it across to our credit card supplier at the end of last week and then it could take another 14 days!!

We should have taken up their offer of cash instead of waiting so long for a credit, especially as one of the missed excursions was on our 3rd day of the cruise.

Jennie

Paul, I too sent a letter to Oceania detailing the good and bad aspects of our cruise. I praised the wonderful staff but also let them know we weren't happy with the food in the Main Dining Room and that we were disappointed that our time in Cairns and Darwin were on Public Holidays. I did mention that we weren't happy with the four missed points but I knew that we wouldn't gain anything from that as I know from previous cruises where we have missed ports that it is the Captain's right to do that.

We also received a similar letter to yours with just a few changes and we too received the $500 F.C.C. which we were happy with as we did book another cruise for 2019 whilst we were on board. I felt it was good P.R. and it showed that they do care about our feedback.

On another note, we did the same excursion as you in Port Moresby - the Village Experience - and we had no trouble at all with our guide or bus. Did something go wrong with your bus or guide?

Jennie

What a great idea. So many times players brought out their phones at the smallest dispute. One wonders where they kept their phones, tucked away in their pockets or in their hands! Too often this happened. Also quite a few teams tried to have 9 or 10 members in their team and even though Julie warned them, it took quite some time for the extra members to be dropped. When being in charge of Trivia you need to be very firm.

Jennie

I believe that Julie is boarding the Nautica in Japan. She is having 2 months off at the moment and then will be on the Nautica all the way to London where she leaves it later on this year.

Jennie

I am sure you will be fine. Your itinerary is better and you are leaving a week earlier so you could be at sea on Christmas Day, Boxing Day and New Years Day. Also your Head Chef could be different which I believe can make all the difference to the food.

Jennie

Yes, I can Cynthia which is great as I need my glass of wine each evening before I start cooking!! No more cooked meals, beds made, laundry done etc. We were spoilt for 5 weeks, weren't we.

We are hoping you are feeling more like your old self by now. Our love to you and Dave.

Jennie