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Hi Richard

 

These boards are full of comments about wonderful cruises and great experiences on the ships, particularly about service and friendly and helpful crew and Officers. Rightly so and why you have so many loyal guests! However the board is often full of shoreside issues and IT/website problems which keep letting down a great product. The exception to this is of course your great team in the UK and Nicole and her team in Miami - you are all very responsive and must find this very frustrating! Can you give any reassurance that these shoreside problems are being addressed? Thank you.

 

Liz & Malcolm

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By way of illustration, some of the issues that have come up on Cruise Critic recently are:

- Confusion about exactly which terminal a ship will be docked for embarkation/disembarkation (for both Singapore and Sydney the e-docs sent out just before the cruises included the wrong cruise terminals)

- Shore Excursions clearly wrong in the e-brochure and voyage planner ( e.g. excursion that starts at 9:00am when Ship doesn’t dock until 12noon)

- website hiccups such as not being able to log into ‘My Azamara’ for days on end.

 

I also would want to add Azamara’s Chief Blogging Officer, Bonnie McLaird, to the shoreside bits that work well. She is extremely responsive and helpful and it’s great that Azamara has someone in this role.

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What Host Grandma said! We were on that first Sydney to Auckland cruise aboard Quest that had the movable embarkation point. For those of us who arrived in Sydney up to a week early to enjoy the CBD that lugging the luggage across town only to be right back at the Circular Quay the same night was a royal pain.

 

We are booked on the Journey in May-June of 2019 from Barcelona to Greenwich. We have already been looking forward to this cruise for almost a year. We will be at Normandy during the 75th anniversary of the D Day Invasions! My only concern is that the Journey we first went on in 2006 still has the one thing that Quest did not (and why we will not be going back on Quest): the second embark-debate entry way. I use a regular size manual wheelchair and being able to use the crew entry with its much flatter and stepless gangway is well worth any waits we had before a female security person could clear me through. We love Azamara and I would love to sail them more often but for this one problem especially if tides are low.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Hi everyone,

Asa business, we are always trying to improve and the teams in Miami and in theUK work extremely hard and take a lot of pride in getting things right. We areon a journey to getting better and if you have any specific feedback, please shareit with me and I’ll take a look and come back to you. I believe I remain the only UK Cruise Managing Director to post their email on Cruise Critic. As a reminder, here it is again: RTwynam@azamara.com

In terms of port changes and terminal changes, we operate in ahighly dynamic environment and things change. We do our best to keep youupdated as often these things are beyond our control.

In terms of the commentsaround Greenwich and London, I’m actually meeting with Port of London Authority this Thursday with RCL Marine Experts as we continue our discussions to see if oneof our ships can still reach Tower bridge. We took the decision to announceGreenwich in order to give our customers clarity. Greenwichwill not change as the port, but we remain hopeful of delivering a Tower bridgeexperience.

 

With reference to Northern Lite’s question on second debarkgateway, please leave this with me whilst I gain a response for it.

Many thanks,

Richard

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Hi everyone,

As to NorthernLite’s question on second debarkgateway, please leave this with me whilst I gain a response for it.

Many thanks,

Richard

 

Thank you. We spoke with the Hotel Manager on Quest while on the Sydney-Auckland cruise about the problem. He had also worked on Journey and knew what we were talking about. It appeared from both the outside and inside that neither side of Quest had a watertight entry one deck down from the main one for crew to use. Other than a very short wait for security this seemed the easiest way to manage non-walking wheelchair users as the crew area was curtained off and as the ships are smaller I feel safer without having 3 or 4 pool butlers pushed into service to lift anything on those narrow gangways. We thoroughly love the smaller ships for the wonderful service, new friends that are easy to find during just one sailing and the food is way up there as are the lovely special touches like the AzAmazing Evenings! And the accessible suites are perfect. I am already looking at 2 more cruises on the Pursuit in the UK area so really hope the Journey comes through for us too.

Regards,

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  • 2 weeks later...
I guess you’re not likely to get a quick answer on this, given the nature of the question.

 

As long as it is an honest one, I am willing to wait for an answer. I had not thought back in 2007 when the 2 ships were docked aft to fore in Cartegena to look at Quest that closely. All passengers on both ships were given passes to visit the sister ship to theirs but we had a excursion planned that took up most of our day. Since then the Journey has been dry docked but I cannot imagine why a working second hatch would be removed.

 

Thank you, Grandma, for all the information you and Bonnie provide.

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  • 3 weeks later...
More crickets. Is it that difficult to email someone aboard the Journey and ask them to go outside and see if there are still 2 hatches working? A big clue would be if the crew is walking in and out of one but not the other.

 

If you have a question of Mr Twynam you should email him directly at rtwynam@azamara.com. This sub-forum closed weeks ago so I doubt he’s checking back in.

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