Hi. I booked a cruise with Celebrity for our family of 4 which was advertised as flights included. However only once booked and paid for were the available flight options given. I found the choice of available flights was very limited, with additional costs for most - and felt the free flights was a bit of a case of false advertising. But got some free flights that were not great times but the best I could find.
However have since decided would like to extend our vacation/holiday and have looked into options for doing this. Want to fly back 4 days later form the final destination port and found an ideal flight available direct from the airline website at €900 for all of us. However when I called Celebrity (who answered after a record for me of 3 and a half hours of being held in a queue) to see if it would be possible the to move our free flights (expecting to have pay for this) and they quoted €1150 a person which is more than the airline wanted for all of us - this would be a staggering €4600. And on top of that said would have to pay €60 cancellation fee for each person as the flights have already been ticketed. I know cruise companies can sometimes be poor value with shore excursions etc, but this is just scandalous and a blatant rip-off. It’s frankly unethical.
I then said obviously we are not going to pay €4600 for something that I can direct from the airline for €900 for - but what if I just book independently through the airline and then just don’t catch the cruise booked return flight. They said to in order to do this we would still have to cancel the return flights and pay the €60 cancellation fee for each passenger as a no-show counts as a cancellation. I don’t understand the logic of this because how can I be charged a cancellation fee for something that was free? I understand from the airline’s website that you have to pay the cancellation fee in order to get money back or vouchers in lieu to cover the cost, but in this case the flights were free so I don’t care about getting any money back?
I have usually found Celebrity customer service to be excellent, but been very disappointed with them over this (understatement).
Any thoughts or help would be very greatly appreciated.