osandomir

And for us the food on Oceania or any other cruise ship has never been the best. You are right that the tastes are different and it depends on what you compare it to. We had much better meals on land back home and all over the world, but I wouldn’t call Oceania dining just acceptable even recently. And most people still don’t find it so bad. Maybe your experience was different. I responded to the other post trying to provide a balanced input.

Pay attention to the sales. We converted one of our cruises. With the sale discount plus the wine included in the price it was definitely less than what we paid when we first booked that cruise.

You follow this board closely so you probably noticed that more people rated Oceania food as good overall, definitely not awful. We always found it enjoyable. Probably not “the best” - it never was. With some choices better than others but still very good so we always were able to find something that we liked.

That’s correct, but even with the record locator PNR that Oceania normally provides when they send the flight schedule one can go to the airline website to see if the tickets are on hold (on request) or the ticket numbers are there. So the record locator normally is sufficient to see reserved flights and then the ticket numbers will be visible when the flights get ticketed. Some airlines allow to choose the seats even before the actual ticketing but others don’t.

Depends on the airline normally you can see the status of your flights online. Don’t call Oceania customer service. If it’s not ticketed by Monday call your TA (assuming you have one) and have them call Oceania air department to request the flights to be ticketed now.

It’s great that your TA took responsibility to make it right for you.

I found nothing bad about Oceania itself in this review. It only shows that the 70+ age reviewer was never taught about being kind to other people in general. I wouldn’t want to meet this person on the ship or anywhere else.

Since you booked through TA it’s their responsibility to find out with Oceania what happened. At the very least they should have a cancellation invoice from Oceania. If your TA can’t prove that cancellation was submitted and processed correctly and get your deposit refunded, then they are responsible for your loss. In this case all you can do is dispute this charge with the travel agency. That being said, I myself always make sure that I have all cancellation emails for the cruise and also for any travel arrangements that I canceled.

Some people find it more convenient to take a taxi than travel on the metro or bus in the unfamiliar city. To each their own…

I’d ask to talk to the chef directly. It looks like your complains were not communicated to the kitchen at all. I’m not sure about Viking, but on Oceania when I had a problem with the food a quick talk to the chef was enough and all my food was served to my liking after that.

We haven’t ever cruised on Viking, so I can’t comment there. But I’m curious why had you suffer from that salty food for so long. Did you try to talk to the chef? If so, did it make a difference or there was no chance for improvement.

Some people can’t see the difference between Oceania and Princess, HAL, Celebrity, etc… Then paying more for Oceania doesn’t make sense when they can sail and enjoy their cruise on the other lines for less. We also started cruising on the big ships long time ago. Since we booked our first Oceania cruise in 2012 we had no desire to go back to those cruise lines again.

My post wasn’t about the general dissatisfaction with the line. No one would be satisfied with for whatever reason missed port. But for most of the people, us included, that’s not enough to abandon Oceania and miss otherwise very good experience onboard. I just said that refund of taxes and port charges wouldn’t affect the dissatisfaction with the skipped port, not that it would influence the decision to sail with them one way or another, at least not for us.

I suspect that even if they’re returned no amount of taxes and port charges would affect customer dissatisfaction with the excessive port cancellations and poor communication on the Oceania part. That amount is really insignificant in comparison with the messing up of the travel experience.

The itinerary changes became a major concern for Oceania customers lately. Switching to Regent is great for those who can afford Regent’s prices - not much for others. Maybe your informed TA has a solution for the customers who are loyal to Oceania.

I agree. Even if you have never been there it’s not much to miss. For me it would be the least interesting port on your itinerary.

I remember that on the brand new Marina as well. Oceania still offers a tiny amount of the black caviar in the GDR on every cruise we have been taking with them. But it definitely not the same as that brunch’s offering.

This makes sense and obviously works for you and some other people as well for one way premium air in particular. Especially nowadays when all travel plans can be wrecked in a second it worse to pay even some extra to book the air through a cruise line.

I think no port cut would be approved by the management on this cruise.

It’s been long time since I checked mainstream cruise lines. This one indeed looks attractive. To be fair Oceania sails to Japan northern ports that you mentioned on the different itinerary, but nothing close to be as inclusive as those of HAL cruise. We also did Oceania cruise from Tokyo in spring and I agree that this is a magic time to visit Japan. Now we’re booked on the Tokyo to Singapore that includes Philippines, Indonesia and more in February 25. We’ll spend some time in Japan pre- cruise, but definitely will miss the Cherry Blossom this time.

Would you please provide an example of what cruise line offers a better itinerary to Japan. It’s definitely possible. We mostly cruise with Oceania but I would really be interested to look it up.

Those penguins are awesome. How was the weather conditions when you were tendering to the Falklands?

I can’t stop wondering why Oceania made booking/canceling their excursions so complicated both online and over the phone as well. Just off the phone with Oceania today trying to make changes to the excursion that we booked before SM was implemented. We kept OLife with free tours. Out of five tours I had booked three were free with OLife, the other two were paid by SBC and credit card. I needed to buy one additional tour in the new port and change one tour to another one in the other port. Simple, right…obviously not really. All that could be done only by calling Oceania, not possible to do it online. The attempt by the representative to perform this simple task created a whole mess in the Oceania system. It’s not reasonable to provide all the details here, but I can tell that it took long time, involving the web support, to clear this mess and find the solution how to book the tours that I wanted, apply 25% discount, and keep the OLife three most expensive ones free. One would never guess it was almost impossible to complete. Yes…we have a TA, but I prefer to book excursions myself to control the process and avoid miscommunications. All that said, our cruise is in April and we are looking forward to it. Hopefully, the onboard experience will be as good as it used to be on the many cruises that we had with Oceania .

It’s stated under “manage your booking” on your online account when you get to the page “Book your shore excursions”.

Great. But it’s also a lot more to see sailing in the Antarctica.