Marylebone37

17 minutes ago, Host Jazzbeau said:

But which doesn't have the corporate-wide debts and mismanagement that were already obvious at Genting long before Crystal's demise.

True on the debt front.  But AZ certainly seems have the corporate-wide mismanagement that is blatantly obvious at the moment.  This system cutover required a high degree of corporate-wide strategic planning and precise execution by management at nearly all levels.  And they failed miserably (and continue to do so).

16 minutes ago, Host Jazzbeau said:

But which doesn't have the corporate-wide debts and mismanagement that were already obvious at Genting long before Crystal's demise.

I realize that for sure.  Just something to keep on eye on if we start hearing reports of on board issues, to-good-to-be-true reduced deposits, special sales etc.  I'll be on board the Pursuit starting on Monday for 2 weeks so will keep my eyes and ears keenly peeled.  Well, hopefully I'll be on board since my online/web site cruise details are still VERY incorrect.  I honestly can't believe that I'm sailing in < 7 days and they haven't taken all those bookings on this voyage (it is not sold out) and made sure they are all "done and dusted" and 100% accurate for guests to view.  Really stinks!  

10 hours ago, islandwoman said:

For those of you who are concerned that Azamara could go under as a result of poor management of its website and the resulting cancellations and lack of bookings, I would like to tell you that I have seen no signs of cost-cutting onboard. Last night was "White Night".  There was a huge amount of food and drink.  The crew still seems happy, so apparently they are being paid and treated well.

I hate to even go here (but honestly I've been thinking about it)… Crystal operated pretty much as normal on board until the very end.  They weren't paying their bills and who knows what else was going on behind the scenes, but the onboard experience remained pretty much as expected until they went bust.

I know we're talking a bit of apples and oranges since COVID definitely contributed to Crystal's woes in a significant way.  But what transpires on board at AZ right now may not necessarily be indicative of what is truly happening at a broader level - especially at a company that is now owned by a private equity firm with zero public fiduciary/reporting responsibilities or disclosure requirements.

24 minutes ago, Mrs Miggins said:

We embark in Barcelona in 10 days.  Yesterday I received through the post, from my TA, a Guest Ticket Booklet, similar than I have had before with itinerary details, a list of the booked shore excursions. plus check in vouchers with bar codes.

I have previously received email confirmation of my correct OBC despite this not showing online.

I am confident everything onboard will be excellent as always.

 

Nice! I embark in Barcelona in 7 days and have received nada.  And in fact, when I log in, it shows two cruises on the same ship departing on 30-May.

Also got a blast email this morning (in US) about a new offer.  Their bookings are way down I suspect.

AZ EMAIL — Claim Your Bonus Nights: Book a European Cruise and Enjoy 3 FREE Nights!

Ready to set sail and make lifelong memories? We are thrilled to introduce an exciting opportunity for you to save on your next Azamara cruise! Book a select 2023 European cruise and receive three free nights, save 50% off your guest, and earn a $750 Onboard Credit*.

Discover the small ship cruising advantage as we take you to the heart of incredible hidden gem destinations. Step back in time and discover the fascinating history of the Ottoman Empire’s Cimenlik Castle in Canakkale, Turkey, and admire the breathtaking views of the Dardanelles Strait. Or after a day of sightseeing, take advantage of the clearest skies in Greece and relax while watching the sunset meld into a starry night in Kos. With Azamara, excitement awaits day and night.

Take advantage of this limited-time offer and enjoy extra time exploring your chosen destination with a friend or family member, while enhancing your journey with onboard credit for dining, shore excursions, or spa days. Book your voyage between May 23, 2023, through June 2, 2023, and explore Europe the Azamara way this year.

3 hours ago, Toronto Guy said:

I was finally able to find a travel agent site that showed available cabins for my sailing in August.  Almost all the categories have a huge number of cabins left, but the suites are sold out.  If the cruise line isn't getting its final payments (including mine), and nobody is booking future cruises because of this mess, they must be battling a huge cash flow problem right now......which makes me really not want to make my final payment now in fear they are going to go belly up.  All the signs are there.....I think we should be a little more concerned about the money they do have from us right now.

This concerns me also.  If you look around what has happened to some companies under Sycamore Partners’ ownership, it's quite troubling to put it mildly.  Buyer beware for sure (at least for the time being).

24 minutes ago, JAT0303 said:

Here is the official answer to the O.P. question.  Our cruise starts May 30th in Barcelona.  I just received the e-mail below.

 

Dear Azamara Guest,

We are looking forward to welcoming you aboard. We wanted to send you some important information regarding your upcoming sailing.   Due to our IT system transition, you will not be able to complete your online check-in via our website as planned. Instead, you will now need to check in at the pier on the day of embarkation. For embarkation pier address, please click here.   To ensure a smooth and seamless embarkation experience, we ask that you arrive at the pier at the following times: 1:30pm-4:00pm: Suite Category Guests and Azamara Circle members in the Discoverer Platinum and Discoverer Plus tier levels 2:00pm-2:45pm: Azamara Circle members in the Discoverer and Explorer tier levels 2:45m-3:30pm: Guests staying in staterooms on Deck 7 3:30pm-4:00pm: Guests staying in staterooms on Deck 4 & 6, and all remaining guests Please be sure to bring your passport, and any other necessary travel documents with you to the pier. Our crew and terminal representatives will be available to guide you through the check-in process and answer any questions you may have.   Should you have any questions, please contact your Travel Advisor for more details specific to your country of residence or visit https://www.azamara.com/contact-us for your local Azamara call center number.   We look forward to welcoming you onboard and will do everything we can to provide you with a wonderful experience.   Sincerely, AZAMARA®

Yes, got it too. I’m pleased that management is becoming better with their communication… finally.  I suspect we on CC are helping to ensure this improvement.  I’ll see you on 5/30 in Barcelona!

32 minutes ago, Toronto Guy said:

I'm not aware of any TA site that currently shows available cabins for Azamara.  The one I usually use to see all available cabins that the moderator deleted hasn't worked since the new website launched.  Has anybody been able to find one that does show the cabins since the new website launched??

 

No, and I’ve tried a bunch of the reliable ones. The number of new bookings must be markedly down with folks not having ready access to cabin availability. 

It sure does speak to management's incompetence that they couldn't even take a few minutes today (or over the weekend) to update their web FAQ to let folks know online check in is not available.  It still says May 15th!  The vast majority of guests as we know are not using CC to avail themselves of the latest information.  

I'm sailing on 5/30/23, and wondering what to expect come Monday, when, according to their FAQ page:

Sailings May 15, 2023 and after: 

Online check-in will resume on azamara.com starting May 15th, 2023. 

Will I be able to check online or will I will I have to fly half way across the world with my TA paperwork, cross my fingers and toes, click my heels, and show up at the pier hoping that all be well.  I'll report back on Monday.

6 hours ago, G2G said:

As it was the 28th of April when we last heard from M’s Cabezas, I would hope we would be receiving another update on the resolution to “the handful of data issues still requiring resolution”.

 

Perhaps I misinterpreted her message regarding an update in the next couple of weeks??

 

From reading the boards and my own experience, there continues to be more than a handful of issues & regardless of the number of messages from them stating the errors have been addressed, they have not. 

 

 

She and her illustrious management team are just the worst, aren't they?!?! It's simply amazing to me — as we approach the TWO MONTH anniversary date of the system cutover — that there are still so many, many unresolved issues and disgruntled customers. 

6 hours ago, PhD-iva said:

You could try posting on the rollcall for that itinerary…….those pax might have a better idea……

I asked about this on the WC '24 roll call, and nothing is known/announced about Myanmar for that cruise either.  It is still on the itinerary for now (> 8 months away), but some believe there will be a replacement port or two added. 

Here is a link for the scheduled calls at Rangoon: https://cruisedig.com/ports/yangon-myanmar.  We now know (from CC) that Oceania canceled their May '23 calls, but waited to do so until almost the last minute.  And the next ship is not scheduled to stop there until mid-December.  Might be interesting to ask/look around on the various CC boards closer to the dates in the port schedule.

And I am not giving up on them (even given all the conversion issues, including my own, ugh).  I’ve asked for some corporate comms in other threads to hopefully prompt management to give the many stressed travelers (and TA’s) an update on the issues, resolution plan, and timeline.  That would go such a long way to help.  I am supposed to be embarking in about a month and will report back on the experience.
 

Please do read all the threads recently. It’s embarrassing to me, a guest who used to love the brand. What a train wreck. 

Surely you're not communicating for a reason,  Have the Sycamore partners banned you from saying anything?  After all that great pre-transition communication, for you to go silent regarding this complete disaster seems VERY suspicious to me.  What gives?

So true, CHTobi.  As Marcellus once said in Hamlet, Something Is Rotten in the State Of Denmark.  My gut tells me there is more to this than just an absolutely bungled system implementation.  

Please allow me to suggest that you write an article for your News section about the total fiasco of Azamara's cutover to their new systems, their lack of frequent/regular communications about the issues and anticipated resolution times, and the many troubles they are subjecting their guests to.  After a full month of issues, long hold times, closed phone lines etc. - enough is enough.  There is certainly plenty of information in various threads to create an article.  Maybe something like this would get their attention and prompt Azamara to start being more open and transparent about what's going on exactly. 

1 hour ago, Host Jazzbeau said:

IMO this has nothing to do with Azamara finances, so no worry about them going belly up.  This is about the process of disconnecting from Royal, every aspect of which has turned into a fiasco.  When it's all finally done [if ever!], Azamara should sue Royal for enough to build a new ship!!!

Azamara management's total incompetence would prevent them from doing so.

48 minutes ago, Grandma Cruising said:

When people mention running parallel systems, I don’t really understand how this could work.

If you’re moving from one system belonging to RCCL to another you bought in (Verison Seaware is a system that is being used by other cruise lines & holiday companies), how can you run in parallel, unless that was agreed with RCCL (and why would they when you’re now a competitor.).

I can see that if a company is moving to new software and has to migrate their own data across to the new system, it would be entirely sensible to run both systems together until you are sure the new system is working properly. However in this case the data being migrated to the new system is from one company to another. Surely to run in parallel would mean RCCL continuing to take and manage Azamara bookings - that seems unlikely.

Hi Grandma, there are many IT strategies that could have been properly executed to ensure a smooth transition. But those details are probably not appropriate to the topic/concerns at hand. Azamara totally screwed it up… whether that was in the system/data turnover contract negotiations early on or during the actual system conversion itself.  

23 minutes ago, laurieb said:

This is exactly what I was thinking.  Blame RCCL for this, not Azamara.  RCCL has done nothing to assist in the smooth transition away from them.  We have no idea what kind of barriers were set in place by RCCL regarding the data transfer.  Maybe a little (or a lot) less criticism and more support and patience is called for...

I am all for support, BUT, that's a two-way street.  How about some frequent and clear support from them in terms of communications on what the issues are, what they are doing to resolve them, and the expected timeline for completion?  Please, give us anything — by email or right here on Cruise Critic (and especially with a thread titled like this one!).  

But no, they are majorly stressing lots of people out by leaving us all wondering when things will be fixed after nearly a MONTH!! since the date when the migration should have been completed.  Come on Azamara, we'll gladly show you our support if you show some transparency and support to us, your loyal guests who do really enjoy and admire the brand.    

27 minutes ago, uktog said:

I am not concerned about the ships end as they migrated to a new management system very smoothly some months ago but I agree that this front end, which is what drives revenue hasn't worked

I am pretty concerned and am happy that I only have a single paid in full booking with them at the end of May.  These IT "folks" (to be kind) are still in charge of their other management systems which require constant vigilance, software and operating system patches/upgrades, disaster recovery planning/testing, and more.  If these same "folks" who couldn't even manage a rather straightforward migration of reservations for 4 small ships are responsible for the ongoing oversight of many other complex systems, it will only be a matter of time until things degrade further across the brand.  Such a shame as I have been a true Azamara fan!

And wouldn't some frequent communications from management to booked guests be nice to advise us the issues, progress against plans to remedy the issues, and reassurance that all be corrected by X date? They did all that pre-cutover communications staged very well, but nearly nothing since then except for that one email from the CEO that some received and many did not (I did not get it, even with a May, 2023 booking).  

Yes, you sure would run parallel once you received the data files.  It's like Data Conversion 101 — very basic stuff for any IT department.

And as DenGNNJ mentioned above, we've been talking mostly here about their front end booking engine and customer reservation management system.  I wonder how bad things are with their inventory management, catering, and all the other systems that are relied upon to run a successful cruise operation? With this kind of corporate IT management in place, it must be pretty bad.  I wonder how long before we hear of the on-board experience being impacted, which admittedly, has not been the case of as of now (well, at least here on Cruise Critic).

The poor data? That's why any IT department with a brain tests the data conversion algorithms, fixes the errors, re-tests them again, fixes the errors, re-tests them again… and so on and so on… until they're down to a small subset of data integrity issues that can be manually dealt with. I can recall many posts both on this Board and others commenting on the poor systems at RCCL/Celebrity/Azamara.  Aren't they just having the last laugh! Sorry, don't mean to be preachy, so just frustrated with all this crap and I've got a cruise coming up with AZ in 5 weeks times.

As a retired IT guy with a lot of experience doing system upgrades and data conversions over the years, I just can't fathom doing a system conversion that produced over 50,000 reservations with errors!   They surely received multiple iterations of live test files from RCCL months ago that should have been run through the new processes and loaded into the new system multiple times in the lead up to the big cutover.  Bugs are found and problems corrected during each of these test runs.  Sure, there will always be tens (or maybe even hundreds) of unique errors that could not be reasonably anticipated… but not > 50,000.  And this is a small cruise line in the grand scheme of things with a fraction of the reservations of the huge companies in the industry… which makes it all the more appalling.  The senior management of this new company has really let its guests (and investors) down and I hope appropriate action is taken.    

3 hours ago, excitedofharpenden said:

I thought it was a good and factual email. Not sure sorry is appropriate, but rather putting peoples minds at rest that they are working hard to sort and nobody is going to lose out. 

 

Phil 

I'm most definitely sure that an "I'm sorry” or “I apologize” was appropriate in the very first sentence or two of her first wide email blast to customers since this fiasco under HER watch! I would have appreciated her sincerity to own up to Azamara's horrendous transition/account migration planning and execution.  Instead, it shows no guts whatsoever and just another example of meaningless corporate-speak. 

2 hours ago, PirateWife said:

The Azamara website says to fill out the Future Bookings & Loyalty Support Form if one's Current Tier Points and/or Points is incorrect as shown on the Azamara website. Does anyone know where to find this form?

Go to: https://www.azamara.com/account/faqs

The form is in the Loyalty Account Information section: https://www.azamara.com/b2c/account/support