Gercru

It is a matter of structural stability.

Moreover, SB have no qualms in cancelling FCCs (in our case on Oct, 5) and feel no obligation to notify you, the customer

In my view, this attitude towards the customer justifies cancelling the cruise, no matter whether the promised FCC showed the correct amount. It is the company's very own duty to explain why the original FCC was not correct, and to inform the customer. 

It is just for this type of   negative experience with customer treatment that we decided, 4 years ago, to forget about  our 400+ days with Seabourn (most of which were good but became increasingly unpleasant) and turn to other cruise lines   -  not to our detriment...

May I give an example of a cruise line that acts much quicker and  in a more customer-oriented way than several cruise lines mentioned in this thread:

After numerous cruises with Seabourn (400+ days) and some less than pleasant cruises with them between 2015 and 2017, we decided to turn to TUICruises MeinSchiff fleet.

Last year we had to cancel a cruise at short notice after final payment date, for which the cruise contract stated we had to pay 80% of the cruise fare, 20,000Euros out of 25,000 Euros.

The 5,000 Euros we were entitled to claim back were paid by the cruise company. within just 1 day after cancellation.

When the cruise started, our TA wrote a short letter to the company, pointing out that the cruise was fully booked and inquired whether the company might be willing to refund part of our 80% charge. Within 3 days, we received 17,000 Euros without any further exchange of letters etc.

They did even better in 2020:

We had to cancel a 42-day cruise due to an accident on February 2, long before a pandemic was declared. We lost our downpayment (25% of the cruise fare).

After TUICruises had cancelled the cruise in March, we made a booking for a cruise in early 2022, and our TA was bold enough to politely inquire whether the company might be ready to transfer a small part of our lost downpayment (more than 6,000 Euros) to the new cruise, although we had cancelled without any reference to the pandemic. - Within two days we were informed that TUICruises would transfer the whole of our downpayment to the new cruise, thus relieving us from paying a single Euro for the cancelled cruise.

I think this cruise company was both very quick and extremely generous.

FWIW:

In Germany, prices for Montaudon range from 41 Euros  (same region as Moet or Taittinger) down to less than 20 Euros!

That's a great plan. Dine at the TK Grill, then come on CC and complain about the portion sizes. Does complaining work off calories?

That is neither a helpful nor a polite comment.

Do you really  advocate wasting food?

I would not really rely on a "sugar free" tag with Seabourn. I tried the "sugar free ice cream" in the Square a couple of times. Only a week or so later I bothered to enquire in detail. After some hesitation the person responsible revealed that the prepare their sugar free ice cream with glucose !!!

I find it absolutely disgusting that diabetics or other people who should monitor their sugar intake are being kept in the dark about the meaning of "sugar free" with Seabourn.

Today we received a colourful brochure from Seabourn (62 pages) with interesting special offers including cruises starting in early March ,2018 and up to April,2019. - The booking deadline for all cruises was March 13,2018....

What a waste of paper and money, and of course no good service to loyal customers.

We had 10 consecutive days at sea on a Seabourn World cruise (from Panama City to one of the Marquesas islands) and thoroughly enjoyed the experience.

LadyVol1,

thank you very much for your review. Especially your experience concerning your muster drill shows that all is not well with Seabourn at the moment.

I have a suggestion for those who feel depressed about sailing in Seaboard. Take a Royal Caribbean or Carnival cruise first. Then you will appreciate Seabourn.

This is, IMHO, not a very helpful suggestion at all. This discussion is about Seabourn quality going (slightly?) downhill or not in the luxury cruise market, not about paying a lot less for lower quality.

I haven’t seen any cancellations yet because of charters or because of a headoffice decision to deploy a ship elsewhere for higher profits.

It does happen, though.

We recently sailed on the Encore (September 2017) and I noticed that the Lobster dinner had been removed from the Thomas Keller Grill menu. I did not specifically notice lobster on other menus--but I was not looking for it either.

Nonetheless, in the little flyer where they explain the food outlets on Encore, they still explicitly mention lobster Thermidor in the TK Grill - apparently no one bothers to update the information; the Restaurant Manager had not noticed and when asked about it said it was just a general description...

Able Seaman,

in a five star hotel, you will certainly find a restaurant open for lunch (no self-service, with tablecoths etc.). The Colonnade is different ( e.g. the wraps and rolls lunch on Encore was nice to look at, but not what you would expect for lunch in a European-style five star hotel).

How come ships like TUI Mein Schiff offer very good quality lunch in their restaurants every day, though occasionally only 20 to 50 out of 2,500 guests attend?

On our Encore cruise (Sept.24 - Oct.4) the MDR was only open for lunch on a single day :-(((

Half-wilted flowers to and from Encore

My wife and I just returned from a Mediterranean cruise onboard Encore, and our impressions are verymixed.While a number of good features have been mentioned before, we are still shocked about how many things did go wrong. To mention just a few:

1. As we were the couple with the most sailed days on that cruise, we were sent a huge bunch (no, I won't use the word bouquet) of flowers to our cabin after the Seabourn Club party. About half of it was wilted. My wife said never before had she felt so insulted.
   
2. 
   We had booked one dinner at the TK Grill. We were seated at a table and wer handed our menus. After that -nothing for 14 minutes: No waiter turned up to take our order for food or drinks or even just mineral water. At the same time at a table nearby in an otherwise still empty restaurant , a waiter and two guests chatted amiably all the time without the waiter or any of his colleagues taking any notice of us. - Accordingly we left and promised never again to set foot into that venue.
   
3. At the Restaurant, my wife and I had doubts over the ingredients used in a dish styled Porcini Ravioli. When I had the chance to ask the two executive chefs who were on board at the time, they both firmly defended what the menu stated. It was only when I found out that the ravioli filling in fact contained not only the very expensive  porcini but also the much cheaper button mushrooms (and you could taste it) both executive chefs had to admit -in the presence of the Hotel Director- that they had been less than truthful towards the passengers.
   

4.How can Seabourn expect guests paying quite large sums of money to be happy with such an experience? It is a slap in theface of both the guests as well as all the other staff who offervery good service

P.S. Sorry I cannot get the numbering of paragraphs right with my electronic gadget

450+dayswith Seabourn

970+cruise days

We will be boarding Encore shortly. To my disappointment, I just found out that Seabourn apparently decided at least as early as December 2016 not to go to Xlendi, but to Mgharr:

http://crew-center.com/mgarr-gozo-cruise-ship-arrival-schedule-2017

It is an insult to passengers not to give correct cruise port information and to state that Xlendi is their Gozo destination

As you can see from his entries on his website ("latest comments") , he is apparently on one of the "Little Sisters"

lincslady,

these things still happen with Seabourn!

Only after we asked our TA to book flights to/from Rome for the upcoming cruise on Encore did Seabourn bother to point out that they had not mentioned two things: the cheap flight only included hand luggage and you had to pay for seat reservations.

If we had known this in advance, we would not have booked through them (that is the Rotterdam office).

I do not expect many Seabourn guests to travel with hand luggage only...

A quote from Berlitz:

Note that quality has been reduced substantially... disappointing cheese and meat selections...,prosecco is served rather than champagne...all in all it's a much less upmarket product than previously.

@wripro: Sometimes it is very difficult not to take into account the service delivered by the European Sales Office. After a large number of Seabourn Cruises our TA inquired about the price of a75-day cruise (part of the 2013 World Cruise). We were given a quote and decided to book. When our TA tried to book, she was told -without being given any explanation- that the price was not € 26,900 p.P. but € 72,000 .

The sales person was wrong; but it took us some time (inlcuding a complaint sent to Seattle) to be given the correct quote.

After this letdown, how can I class this cruise company a five-star company?

Much to the chagrin of many Seabourn fans, I think Douglas Ward, author of the Berlitz Guide, is right.

After our last cruise on Odyssey in spring, I hesitated to post a critical comment on these pages and chose to wait a couple of months. Let me say something about Seabourn from a European traveller's point of view.

After 440+ days on Seabourn ships, my wife and I feel that the quality delivered is so inconsistent that the high fares do not fully reflect the quality offered. - Even early last year we never expected to be impressed when we decided to try TUI's Mein Schiff ( now a fleet of 5 ships for up to 2,500 passengers each) - now rated 4-star plus by Berlitz, very close to Seabourn ). But I am sad to say that the TUI experience was overall very satisfactory and they were particularly good where Seabourn has been failing its customers for some time.

Good things first and very briefly: Food on Odyssey was excellent (thanks to Executive Chef Jes Paskins);and cabin service as well as food and drinks service was impeccable all the time.

The downsides were numerous; I will mention just a few:

1.The brochures for the ports of call only arrived in our cabin after we had left the first port of call; no apology or just an explanation was given.

On the last day before arrival, someone forgot to put the breakfast times for the day of disembarkation into the Herald (. When I noticed this shortly after 8 p.m., I mentioned it to one of the guest relations people in the square and suggested to let the passengers know quickly (i.e. before they might retire). They were barely interested. Only when I told the cruise director, there was a flurry of activity and a new edition of part of the Herald was printed and distributed at about 10 p.m. This was just one of several instances where no one in the Square was really interested in whether something was amiss.

The worst experience was the day when the printers were not working properly in the Squa´re because for several days the computers had not been serviced properly. Several passengers tried to print out certain material and would leave because of "no toner" "no paper" etc. One of the staff in the Square apparently made the printer work again; the printer printer printed all the stuff several guest had wanted to print ours before, and the staff member then let those prints lie - on purpose- for everyone to see. When I asked to rectify the situation immediately, otherwise I would ring the security officer, the "classical" answer was: "You can phone whoever you like".

Of course she was rebuked officially, but should that have happened on a Seabourn ship?

2. We tried in vain at the time of booking (10 months in advance) to get a portside V2 cabin (we were told the had not been made available for booking yet and our TA should inquire with the European booking office at regular intervals). Our excellent TA did as told, but a few weeks before the departure date she was told that all cabins were sold. - This was the first time we had -for a very special reasons- asked for a cabin on the portside; why did no one ever offer us a cabin?

3.. When we mentioned this problem after getting on board, the guest relations manger promised to inquire and to come back to us, because she apparently could not understand either why there should have been a problem. - But that was it: She never mentioned this topic again and tried to evde any conversation bordering on the question of cabins. We assume she got an unsatisfactory answer from Seattle and did not want to pass it on to us - but that is no decent way to deal with a problem.

4. Berlitz expressly complains about the quality of hors d'oeuvres, and we agree 100% with regard to the Observation lounge. Apparently the staff have to serve the tapas on fairly broad porcelain spoons. During the first days into the cruise, they would heap grated blue-vein cheese on the spoons and offer it. This is just ridiculous; no one in their right mind would try to choke by stuffing a spoonful of grated/crumbled blue-vein cheese into his or her mouth...

5. TUI cruises , in marked contrast to Seabourn, do offer lunch in decent surroundings with white tablecloths, even if only 50 out of 2,500 passengers attend. For almost double the price, Seabourn does not, at least not regularly.

So, while many things with Seabourn are still excellent, it makes you wonder why they are increasing prices while lacking quality in particular in the areas of guest services and bar food.

At the moment, no five star cruise line.