Royal Caribbean Website is terrible!!!

[emileg]

As of tonight, after a couple of weeks, RoyalCaribbean.com is finally back from vacation, when using Firefox on a Mac.

 

For the past two weeks, every time I went to the site, I saw the message: OOPS - LOOKS LIKE ROYALCARIBBEAN.COM IS ON VACATION layered over a movie of a beautiful sunset over water. And, minn0315, I was using the same computer before RCL went on vacation, during its vacation and after it got back. Obviously the problem was not with my computer.

 

Welcome back, Royal Caribbean. Glad you had a good time.

Edited November 11, 2015 by emileg

[Coralc]

The new website is HORRIBLE. Why does it bounce you to the top of the page every time you click on something? It is absolutely useless for finding cabins within cabin categories. :mad:

[smarcbie]

Thats interesting that smarcbie wants to tell everyone that the problem with the website is the browser. IN this post by Smarcbie from 2013 they talk about how the website did not automatically cancel his reservation for non payment. ( so clearly the NON FUNCTIONING website has caused them issues) LOL

 

 

 

their post..."""For some reason, RCL never (automatically) canceled the 3rd cabin, even though the only payment made was a $500 deposit. It's still listed under my account.

 

Yes, I will call them ASAP. My primary concern was that I would be responsible for paying 50% of the cruise. Of course, I would also love if I got back some of the $500 deposit to"""""

 

 

Oooh you couldn't be more wrong about my earlier and very first posts. I was brand new to cruising and asked what is My Financially Responsibilities for Not Cancelling a Cabin. I took total blame. The reason for the question was to clarify if I would still owe the entire debt!!!! The deposit I lost was not the issue since I did not follow the rules. I never said that there was a website issue..... BYT-What there was came under a life issue. I thought that the room would automatically go back into inventory after missing the balance due date. My question was about procedure and not website............

 

So back to the website issue. There has to be a reason why some can access it while others cant. I was looking for that reason. I meant no offence and frankly I'm very surprised at your attack-reply. I was searching for a answer--that's it. But denying that some of us were shutout of the website and blaming the user brings no solution as to why this technical glitch happened. Again, there has to be a reason why the page went dead after hitting the 'book now' tab.....I know that it is common to shift the conversation to another issue, ie, ME, but the problem with the website did happen. So the Q is Why?

[legaljen1969]

I love RCCL it's my preferred cruise line, but there website is junk

 

I will have to agree. I love the company and their ships. The website is not incredibly user friendly though.

 

As to booking directly with Royal or using a TA, my parents always use a TA and generally have positive results doing it that way.

 

I booked directly with Royal and had a wonderful experience. Everyone I spoke to in the booking process was very friendly and knowledgeable. I had to make a few changes along the way, and all were handled with no problems.

 

In any case, I guess it just depends if you can find a TA who has some special tricks up his/her sleeve. If you feel confident enough to do it on your own, I would do it directly. That way if you want changes, you can just call Royal to make them instead of having to contact your TA to make changes.

 

There was a cabin that became available when I was booking my travel on Freedom in April. If I had needed to go through my TA, that cabin would likely have been taken by the time I waited for business hours on Monday and waited for a TA to look into the matter. It was a split second thing where a room hold was released and Royal rep was able to go in and get it for me as soon as the hold was released.

 

Just my two cents worth.

[WaveSplasher]

Tried to Book the Oviation today and i couldn't get through to the next part. I got stuck at choosing the dining option when the website wouldn't let me check the box... And that is a requirement to go through to the next step.

 

And I tried to hold the cruise for 24hrs. Same thing happen, website just hangs at the next page and refuse to load further...

[berylde]

Original post was on 11/09/2015. It is now 2 days later and still not able to "price" a cruise. Have tried 3 browsers

[Big_G]

Original post was on 11/09/2015. It is now 2 days later and still not able to "price" a cruise. Have tried 3 browsers

 

I just got in this morning for the first time in two days. I'm using Firefox on a Windows 7 computer. I tried four different computers and three different browsers yesterday and got no results.

[Diva Onboard]

How about their shore excursion section? It's laughable. We have a cruise planned for the first week in June and for months the shore excursions are all messed up. In one port all the excursions are scheduled for 9:00 AM. Imagine 2,000 people getting off the ship at the same time! You can't select a time. You can select the number of people but the language and time auto populate. Even calls to the shore excursion desk fall on deaf ears with replies that they will escalate the issue to a supervisor. Hello - the shore excursion website has been messed up since August with no resolution - things are still not working correctly. I'm afraid to purchase airline tickets for fear I'll end up on a cruise with nothing to do.

 

Can you imagine hundreds of people booking the same shore excursion for 8:08 AM (yes-8:08AM, that's one of the times posted) only to find out they will depart at 11:00 AM or the shore excursion desk printing those tickets for 8:08 AM only to see hundreds of people show up?

 

I don't know who Royal outsourced their shore excursion desk to but whoever it is they don't know what they're doing.

[jimdalva]

I have been online with RCI for nearly 15 years. I have never found the website to be down or unresponsive. Most of you that complain have an issue with your own computer/tablet/smartphone. Don't blame RCI for your technical problems.

 

Royal list my age as 115 (yes I entered my correct date of birth) and wont let me book any excursions, because they tell me the max age is 85!:confused:

[loman]

I guess I am the only other person that doesn't have issues with the website working for me. Just lucky I guess. I was doing a mock booking to check pricing and the website changed.It doesn't show the diagram of the ship so you can see the location of cabin. Not an improvement in my opinion. I won't be cruising anytime soon anyways.Maybe the site will improve in the future.

[JasonV1]

Per the Celebrity board changes were made yesterday and things haven't yet been fixed. Someone was told they hope to have it fixed by the 16th!

 

On Royal I can log in and view my booked cruises but I can't apply filters to see prices for specific cruises. I can't even change pages on the "find cruise" page either.

 

On Celebrity I can filter cruises and get prices but get an error when I try to view my booked cruises.

 

And no, it isn't my browser, device, or Internet connection (in this case). I've seen the same issues across both versions of IE (Edge/non-Edge), Chrome, Safari, and Firefox on Windows, as well as Chrome and Safari on my iPad.

[Squeezypumpkin]

What have the Royal Caribbean done to their website? No matter what you search for you get different dates, different destinations etc.

 

I can't find anything. I have wasted hours over the past couple of months.

 

I have been using their site for years previously and it's only this year that I have been having a problem.

 

Even when you log on to your own account the options for excursions for an existing booking is duplicated and also offers them to me in Spanish even though I have selected English.

 

You can't get a brochure in the travel agents and although I requested one on-line (along with one from Princess and Celebrity) the RCI is the only one not to have arrived.

 

What is going on?

[UKWLDCruise]

The RCI UK worldwide brochure for 2017/18 can be ordered here or you can just read it on screen and/or print out the bits you are interested in https://www.royalcaribbean.co.uk/brochure-request/

[EBFURR]

I am an IT developer for a major bank and have been developing applications, both web and client/server for many years. Yes, there are problems with the RCI website and they are for the most part application based and are not browser dependent. I see all the signs. I have also had occasion to work with people who have previously worked with Royal in their IT department and have heard the stories from the inside. Like most large companies they use a lot of contractors so there is constant turnover in staffing which does nothing to promote consistency. They also, like many large companies, use a lot of green card IT people. Some of these are pretty good but a lot of them are not. There is a reason that they work cheap and that is mostly lack of practical experience. There are IT degree mills overseas that churn out "developers" by the thousands. They can pass all the exams, but like most any profession experience is the best teacher. These people are thrown into the mix and expected to keep things going with no previous exposure to the applications and no experience to draw from. The external facing websites come under the umbrella of marketing and those folks are all about appearance and glitz. A web site needs to look good, but the bulk of an enterprise website is behind the scenes in the server code and database objects. This is where the ongoing problems lie. You need strong, experienced developers taking care of this area and it is not glamorous work. At my employer we have multiple levels of integration and acceptance testing before anything moves to production, even for internal facing sites. The process is slow and cumbersome but we have 99%+ availability on our applications. RCI simply does not do this. There is testing, but not nearly enough and not by qualified people. Glitches and bugs find their way to the production website. You have poorly written code being insufficiently tested. This is nothing new there and has been that way for a long time according to the people I know who have been there.

 

Also, there should be no system outages during preparation for "sales" and such, at least not during peak hours (day and evening). We do any deployments that require a system outage early AM on Saturday and provide advanced notification. These are usually major functionality (back end) changes. For content changes there really should be no outage at all. It just has to be planned and staged properly.

 

Moral to the story: It is not your imagination; these sites have problems. Changing computers or browsers will not really fix most of this since these are server side problems. The problems are due to insufficient staffing and management of the IT operation. The cost cutting/saving ax is not limited to on board items. The only way this will ever change is if RCI realizes that it is costing them more in revenue than it would cost to do it correctly. I guess they figure people just go to a travel agent or third party site if theirs is down so they do not see a revenue impact.

[irun5k]

The problems are due to insufficient staffing and management of the IT operation. The cost cutting/saving ax is not limited to on board items. The only way this will ever change is if RCI realizes that it is costing them more in revenue than it would cost to do it correctly. I guess they figure people just go to a travel agent or third party site if theirs is down so they do not see a revenue impact.

 

What is strange is that the most highly visible public companies that that are pulling in 8 billion a year and depend on their website for some percentage of sales have a solid web presence... the difference in cost between the crap they have now and something nice is total chump change for a company of this size. So I wonder how much of it is them being cheap and how much is just not having a qualified CTO and staff below him/her.

 

I'm the chief engineer for a small (< 50 person) software company, and I can say that I'd never allow my shop to ship anything that is of such low quality. It isn't just the web site/front end technology, I think their back end stack has serious issues as well. All you have to do is try to browse excursions or book onboard activities and you can see that nothing really went through any meaningful QA cycle. On the other hand, they have to know.... so it must be that they just don't care.

[EBFURR]

What is strange is that the most highly visible public companies that that are pulling in 8 billion a year and depend on their website for some percentage of sales have a solid web presence... the difference in cost between the crap they have now and something nice is total chump change for a company of this size. So I wonder how much of it is them being cheap and how much is just not having a qualified CTO and staff below him/her.

 

I'm the chief engineer for a small (< 50 person) software company, and I can say that I'd never allow my shop to ship anything that is of such low quality. It isn't just the web site/front end technology, I think their back end stack has serious issues as well. All you have to do is try to browse excursions or book onboard activities and you can see that nothing really went through any meaningful QA cycle. On the other hand, they have to know.... so it must be that they just don't care.

 

Agree. That is what I was trying to convey. They have back end issues possibly including server & DB infrastructure. My contacts state that most of the effort and budget goes into the presentation layer and that is telling. It seems that a lot of frustrated people come out of there. I have worked for small companies over the years and I know that you could not get by with this. You would be out of business. On the other hand, RCI looks at the back end shop as a revenue consumer and not a revenue generator. As long the site looks pretty they are happy. Things go wrong, people get yelled at and fired, rinse, repeat.

 

So I wonder how much of it is them being cheap and how much is just not having a qualified CTO and staff below him/her.

 

I think A leads to B. :)

[cruiselvr04]

Not an IT person. However I have huge issues with RCCL site. I can not access my crown and anchor stuff after an hour on the phone with them. They can't seem to fix it. I was told someone would call back to help and that never happened.

I can't book anything on line. I get so far to check rooms and I get the spinning circle. This is on my home computer and my iPad. Drives me crazy. Yesterday it would not show what rooms were available but if I went to another travel site I could see them. If I was a new customer I would give up. I would simply try another cruise line. So frustrating.

Very poor way to do business.

[Rewind]

I'm in IT myself (from desktop support, servers, networking, and now Data Warehouse). I've contemplated applying for Royal IT jobs in the past but the more I think about it, the more I came to the same conclusions on my own. If their IT has been this bad for this long, they are not getting support from management and it would not be a good environment to work in.

 

The sad part is an argument could be made that they are loosing potential money due to their poor systems. If a user could reliably manage their booking from start to finish, including specialty dining, excursions, etc. plus the ability to change rooms, adjust their booking rates with price drops, etc. Royal would not need to pay commissions to TAs or staff as many people in their call centers to do those same tasks. Less money being paid out, less money in call center payroll, but increase in IT payroll - I'm fairly certain it would still be positive revenue for Royal.

[emdia43]

What is strange is that the most highly visible public companies that that are pulling in 8 billion a year and depend on their website for some percentage of sales have a solid web presence... the difference in cost between the crap they have now and something nice is total chump change for a company of this size. So I wonder how much of it is them being cheap and how much is just not having a qualified CTO and staff below him/her.

 

I'm the chief engineer for a small (< 50 person) software company, and I can say that I'd never allow my shop to ship anything that is of such low quality. It isn't just the web site/front end technology, I think their back end stack has serious issues as well. All you have to do is try to browse excursions or book onboard activities and you can see that nothing really went through any meaningful QA cycle. On the other hand, they have to know.... so it must be that they just don't care.

 

 

There you have it.... the website is a mess, that is the Status Quo. Let us all meet here again, same time same place, one year from now and NOTHING will have changed. I have been saying this for several years now- way before this thread started in 2015!

[irun5k]

Royal would not need to pay commissions to TAs or staff as many people in their call centers to do those same tasks. Less money being paid out, less money in call center payroll, but increase in IT payroll - I'm fairly certain it would still be positive revenue for Royal.

 

It would have to be a win for them. They'd at least be close to breaking even almost immediately, and the downstream effect would be huge. They want us all spending more money on board- the best way to do that is to make the experience seamless and bug free so that people will pre-book all these extras. Can you imagine what would happen to Amazon's sales if you had to fight their web site constantly?

 

Just look at the attached, it is probably just a couple SQL update statements to fix that.

 

 

Edit: what the heck, speaking of bad software. Is there some magic to making images show up inline in your message instead of as hyperlinks? And forget about actually attaching an image, it has some seemingly random weird dimension constraints... a "jpeg" can be 19.5 KB, 620 x 280 (huh? a banner ad aspect ratio?) but a "jpg" can be 97.7 KB. Same media type, no? image/jpeg?

Edited April 21, 2017 by irun5k

[EBFURR]

The sad part is an argument could be made that they are loosing potential money due to their poor systems. If a user could reliably manage their booking from start to finish, including specialty dining, excursions, etc. plus the ability to change rooms, adjust their booking rates with price drops, etc. Royal would not need to pay commissions to TAs or staff as many people in their call centers to do those same tasks. Less money being paid out, less money in call center payroll, but increase in IT payroll - I'm fairly certain it would still be positive revenue for Royal.

 

There's your problem. You are trying to apply logic to the situation. That is not allowed in a corporate environment. :D

[ThirstyCruiser]

They are probably using a staffing model becoming all too common in IT - one team of constantly changing developers codes it, then throws it over the wall to production support, another team of constantly changing "resources".

 

No one eats their own dog food.

Results are driven by schedules, not quality.

Developers don't care about quality, security, performance, scalability or availability. They care about one thing - get one transaction to work one time so you can tell the project manager "it works", to be able cross that item off the project plan.

 

The people that code that garbage aren't the ones carrying the pager that goes off, or manning the phone to hear the ire of the customer, so why put effort into building something robust. If it works for one transaction type, on one browser, on one O/S, the same combination they likely use for demos for upper management on a test system with no load, its a success. If you are lucky enough to run that same client combo and do the same transaction type, it works perfectly for you too.

[Rewind]

I was going to post the code needed to fix those data issues - but I can't even post pseudo code to CC. Good security but there should be an option of a code block.

 

Oh, there is a code option... that doesn't work.

[cruisewiththekids]

I guess RCCL doesn't want my booking. Tired of battling their website to try to book a cruise this morning. I could call, but really prefer to do it myself. Guess I'll move on. Lots of other cruise lines offering similar itineraries.

[pharaoh]

The website is horrible. I have the most problems when trying to plan a cruise, searching for itineraries. That page will not load for me on Safari and it has been like that for months. I have no problems with cruise planner or logging in to see my booked cruises, it is just the search page. I can't access it from my computer or phone. I always have to use Chrome in order to see it. Very frustrating.

 

FWIW I book a lot of Disney stuff, and their website is just total garbage too. Both companies really need to bring in some good talent to fix their websites. It's unbelievable that companies as large as RCI and Disney don't have working websites.