SpockSail

Steve:

Lets change this to a domestic situation.  We are booked for a New Orleans to St. Paul river cruise with flights out of Minneapolis to SFO.  If the cruise terminates in St. Louis because of low water conditions and we have additional costs due to rescheduling flight, extra nights of hotel and meals before we can get a flight home, does "trip interruption" cover those?  What documentation is required to file a claim? 

I checked a Canada/New England Princess cruise we are booked on in Oct 2018 and the schedule does not match the itinerary Princess is selling.

The site may not have updated the port changes made by the cruise lines due to the new whale friendly speed limit in the St Lawrence River.

I checked how many ships are in port....

TC: What is the website you are using to do that for the Caribbean ports?

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Well, that was interesting. I was expecting TC2 to reveal the closely held secret kept by the Regent Illuminati to getting grand poobah level service :D but find a wide difference of opinion. That's good. Different people have different tastes and desires. It was helpful hearing what works for them.

This will be our first time on Regent after doing multiple mass market lines and I am sure whatever we find it will be a step above our prior experiences. Fortunately, we have never had a bad experience on those lines, but never really a great one either.

We generally like to be seated at larger tables with different people each time, unless we make friends with a particular couple or group, as we enjoy meeting people from different backgrounds and different parts of the world, unless we are dining in a specialty restaurant when we like to dine by ourselves. This is the 12-day Paradise Awaits Eastern Caribbean cruise on Dec 8 out of Miami, so we should have time to try out the different approaches mentioned here.

From reading other threads it seems that Regent is particularly responsive to their customers' needs and if they are not meeting your expectations, you just need to bring that to their attention. If that doesn't improve the situation, work up the chain of command until it does. This is a vacation and there is no reason not to enjoy it.

Thanks to all who responded.

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In a post about getting good service in the MDR, TravelCat2 wrote the following:

The secret to loving the service in CR (even when it is crowded) is to find a server and stick to their section. They learn you and your preferences and can make recommendations. We find that our favorite wine is waiting for us. This has little to do with us being long term customers and more to do with letting our server get to know us.

How do you do get the same server on Regent with open dining ?

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Thanks to all who replied.

If no particular airport is favored at the end of the cruise (assuming the cruise ends in Brooklyn) I guess we will pick based on cost, airline and departure time - just like doing it on my own. I'll look at the major sites and see which has the best situation for us and see if EZAir can make it work.

The reason we do air, and at least the transfer to the departing airport, through the cruise line when we can is we got burned a few years ago when the ship was 6 hrs late into port because of bad weather and we missed our flight to LAX and the connecting flight home to Sacramento. I had to try and remake the schedule by many $$ phone calls from the ship and it took two extra days to get home.

Those who booked the travel through the cruise line just sat back and the company rebooked everything, including meals and hotel stays if necessary. The company eventually reimbursed our extra expenses (after much work on my part) but it was a terrible end to what otherwise was a great trip.

I am willing to not get the absolute lowest airfare in exchange for them doing the work if it becomes necessary. And they have more clout than I do to reschedule things because of the volume of business they do with the air carriers so we are likely to get better rebooking options.

SS//

After having cruised on several other lines, we have just booked our first Princess cruise; the 11 day "Classic Canada & New England" on the Royal Princess, from Quebec City to New York City leaving on Oct 5, 2018 and I have a question about the EZAir program.

It is too far out to see the air options (not displayed now and says check back 330 days out, which will be Nov 10, 2017) but the website says the cruise will end in EITHER Brooklyn or Manhattan.

1) We plan to arrive 10 days early landing in Neward, rent a car and drive to CT on business and then back to NYC where we will spend a few days sightseeing and then fly to Quebec City. Can we fly into Newark (which is nowhere near Quebec City) and then fly home out of NYC and on dates that do not match the cruise departure and arrival dates? Regent Seven Seas calls that a "deviated air flight" (either using different airports or not matching the arrival and departure dates of the cruise) and charges $150pp for the privilege.. .

2) Rather than booking the NYC to Quebec City hop separate from EZAir, can we set that up as part of the EZAir flights to the ship (I doubt that there are any direct flights from San Francisco to Quebec City anyway) AND break up the inbound legs by several days?

3) When will they confirm the debarking port as being Brooklyn or Manhatten? It is difficult to play the "which flight" game when you don't know which airport to use for departure.

(BTW, I was astonished to see that the cruise is already about 80% sold over a year in advance of the sailing - it must be a very popular cruise.

TIA

SS//

My experience with the major cruise lines is they lowball the fare and make up for it by charging exorbitant amounts for every little thing. (Listen to the song "Taxman" by the Beatles and you will get the idea).

Our experience with NCL's food and service matches the OP's, so we now avoid them at all costs (pun intended).

The OP may want to try an all-inclusive cruise line like Regent. You pay more up front, but the end price is about the same and you don't have to get your blood pressure up about every expense.

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Just got an email from Regent via my TA that the Dec 8 sailing to the Eastern Caribbean dropped San Juan (the first port) and replaced it with Basseterre, St. Kitts. This is great for us as we have been to SJ but not St. Kitts. I'm sure the people of SJ could use the port fees and tourist dollars, but from with I am reading and seeing, they have much bigger issues now and ahead of them. 8^(

Excursions for SJ were canceled, but the list for St. Kitts is not showing yet. No information is posted or in the email regarding when that will open.

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Not being world travelers (yet) my question was about the voltage rather than the style of plug, but I found the answer here http://www.worldstandards.eu/electricity/plugs-and-sockets/.

It seems we are behind the curve (and the voltage) as most of the rest of the world is on 220 Volts. I never knew there were so many types of plugs. :o

SS//

US style electrical outlets are not too plentiful. I had to juggle phones and IPads that we were using.

Are the European style 220V or can you use adapters to convert the style of the plug to US 110V style?

Let me know how you like that suite. We are booked in the same one in early December.

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The forms show as completed, but when I try to look at them, I still get the same error. This was after calling Regent and having the rep check to see if the forms are "approved".

Oh well.....at least we are booked.

TravelCat2:

We are flying from San Francisco to Miami and I am going to be a competitor in an event in FL before the cruise, so we would have had to pay the deviation fee anyway. With not paying the $175/pp deviation fee, the $ back from Regent for not using their air, the ability to select the carrier and upgrade for more seat room and the low cost of picking flights and seats this far out from our travel date, our best choice was to book the air ourselves.

A friend who does a great deal of cruising on Regent and recommend them to us said he is very happy with Regent's air choices when he takes cruises that require international flights.

If we like the Regent experience, our next cruise will probably begin and end outside the CONUS so we will let Regent do the air and see how we like that. Hopefully by then their website will be functioning correctly.

[RANT] IMHO, there is NO excuse for a major company to make a site live or altering an existing live site before the programmers have thoroughly "exercised" it, selecting all of the possible screen options with both expected and unexpected inputs and testing the interface with dummy copy of their database to assure they understand how it is altering the data. Usually, the error handling code is many times larger than the actual core of the program so coding shops skimp on the error handling to push the product out the door, with expected poor customer experience.

The person in charge of this for Regent needs to get it right this time, or the CEO should assure that that person is looking for another job. I could go on, but it would only be to vent as this kind of thing is a major pet peeve of mine. [/RANT]

The Regent website is like many these days, full of great graphics and decent flow from page to page, coded by artistic designers, but sorely lacking in actual function created by the programmers.

We have booked the Explorer for a December cruise to the eastern Caribbean (first time on Regent) through a TA, after doing HA and NCL to see if we liked cruising). After the booking I went to complete the Guest Registration Form. It locked up and refused to allow any changes and now when I attempt to see it, it comes back with a "programmer type" error message"of "Index is outside of the bounds of the array".

Having taught programming back when dirt was young, I know what this means. I called Regent and the nice young lady said they were aware of the issue, but their programmers cannot find what is causing the error. What??? They need to clean house in their IT department if they cannot find a simple coding error like that. Interactions of webpages with the database where the information is stored are complex but not unique and are well documented.

I had also tried to amend my wife's profile and it would not allow any changes to hers either. Regent said that my profile "was awaiting approval" and I could not change hers until mine was approved. How could hers then be approved since mine could not be because I couldn't complete it? There is no mention of any approval process on the site. It has been over a week now and both of our profiles are still locked, but at least now they show as completed.

When I told the young lady that for a company that marketed and priced their service as "high end, all inclusive cruising" this was making me have second thoughts about Regent, since if they cannot make their website function which is their public face, what can we expect on board?

She said that Regent will be rebuilding their website "this year". That's good news, but only if they get someone who knows what they are doing (and tests it before going live). And "this year" leaves eight months from now of customer frustration on who knows how many cruises, assuming the redesign comes in on time.

After reading the CC board posts about Regent, it seems that people dislike the included air process (we booked our own) but love the on board experience. I hope that is the same with us or we will be searching out other options for our travel.

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