Silver Discoverer 2 March Ho Chi Minh City to Hong Kong

Has anyone else seen the email from Silversea (arrived 11pm UK time yesterday) about this expedition cruise? We booked it to experience Vietnam and especially the Mekong Delta as an expedition cruise rather than on an ordinary cruise ship. Now we find, 3 days before we set off, that the ship will not sail in the Delta and there will be no use of zodiacs in Vietnam!!! Silversea are offering a discount off our next cruise but even so, if we'd wanted to do a straightforward Vietnam cruise we could have chosen others, including Silversea ones, which cost much less.

Hi,

If I were you I'd be extremely angry because it appears that you are being "gamed" by SS, who will almost certainly have known some time ago of these changes but have left it to the last minute in order to make the likelihood of you cancelling remote and therefore minimised their revenue and profit exposure by maximising your dissapointment. In my view that entitles you to be inventive and demanding in your response to reddress this very clear unfairness. If they have not been pro-actively clear in offering you both a full refund AND suitable compensation then they are in my opinion legally sunk in the UK if they were to defend a claim from you for a refund AND compensation unless the cause of this was clearly outside of their control and that you were informed as soon as possibly after they first knew. If however it is for reasons within their control eg commercial considerations then you are in an even stronger legal position.

I'm not going to suggest to you a specific way forward but will instead suggest that in the event that you had started the cruise without having received that email I believe that under UK consumer legislation you would be entitled to either a full or at least a very substantial refund of all of your costs including the cruise and travel costs plus compensation for "dissapointment" under it's various legal descriptions. I was one of the first people in the UK back in 1981 to have taken a travel company to the High Court and won very substantial compensation and our claim is still used as a "precedent".

How you proceed from here is up to you ie whether you proceed "under protest" or any other of your options but you do have several potentiall attractive options accepting that you have been placed in a position of minimal options that all will have the consequences of a major dissapointment.

In the past , the adventure ships have been very proactive and quite "adventurous" in managing itineraries that have problems.

Notwithstanding that they appear to have truncated some important content ; I opine that they will to do everything that they can in an effort to make the cruise interesting.

Having said that , I would be making as much noise as I could in attempt to maximise the compensation value… :-)

Thanks, both, for your observations.

It doesn't seem likely, given the time it takes to organise cruises, especially expedition cruises, that Silversea have only just discovered they aren't allowed to use Zodiacs in Vietnamese waters. I don't think the cruise is going to be anything like an expedition cruise, yet it isn't going to be of a "classic fleet" standard.

We'll talk to SS and our TA tomorrow

Good luck .... let us know what happens. :)

Seeing recently another similar thread has reminded us that I didn't complete this story. When we pursued this, including through our TA, Silversea offered to let us cancel.

After a lot of thought, we decided to go after all and accepted the compensation (cruise credit to the value of 30% of what we had paid), partly because of the holiday being so imminent, and partly because of post-cruise arrangements we had made with our family.

In the event, our fears about the cruise not being a full expedition experience proved justified, and there was also a series of issues with a two-day visit to China during the cruise which in our view was badly planned and even more badly handled. When we followed up after the cruise, Silversea slightly increased the compensation.

We feel that in this case Silversea acted properly. They listened to us and responded reasonably.

I should also say that this was happening while the UK was anticipating the Beast from the East. Once we'd decided to go, BA decided to stop flying in and out of Scotland, preventing us from connecting to our flight to Asia.

The Silversea UK flights team was really helpful in booking us through Qatar airlines. We did think it strange that the desert-based airline could cope with a bit of snow that was too much for BA!

sloopjohnb