Holland America Line Privileges

[Fouremco]

A friend recommended a company who was affiliated with the Post Exchange system that offered "great deals" on cruises. This sounds very similar to that company. I never could get a real quote from them on the prices of the cruises they offered. The savings would have to be phenomenal to offset the initial buy-in and annual fee. They still call me from time to time. I would run from these folks and would not leave any contact information.

 

I'm quite surprised that Holland would be affiliated something like this.

Many of the mainstream cruise lines are affiliated:

 

AMAWaterways

Azamara

Crystal

Cunard

Holland America

Norwegian

Oceania

Princess

Regent

Seven Seas

Royal Caribbean

Seaboard

Silvers

Uniworld

Windstar

[ger_77]

It definitely looks like a time-share offering and Canadians are excluded. No worries there, I'll keep my money and cruise when and where I like.

 

Smooth Sailing ! :) :) :)

[RocketMan275]

Many of the mainstream cruise lines are affiliated:

 

I should have said "let them on board to pitch their spiel."

[wesport]

Just received an email for my cruise on the Westerdam this Saturday. There is a new program. Says to stop by the Privileges desk for a free gift. Searched the forum, but it specifically says it is not a credit card program. Any ideas.

[DaveOKC]

Just received an email for my cruise on the Westerdam this Saturday. There is a new program. Says to stop by the Privileges desk for a free gift. Searched the forum, but it specifically says it is not a credit card program. Any ideas.

 

Discussion on this board about a week ago.

 

http://boards.cruisecritic.com/showthread.php?t=2365028

Edited June 15, 2016 by DaveOKC

[blizzardboy]

Just received an email for my cruise on the Westerdam this Saturday. There is a new program. Says to stop by the Privileges desk for a free gift. Searched the forum, but it specifically says it is not a credit card program. Any ideas.

 

This free gift should be treated with the same suspicion that you would have regarding one of those free-vacation phone calls that one gets.

[RocketMan275]

Discussion on this board about a week ago.

 

http://boards.cruisecritic.com/showthread.php?t=2365028

 

Read post #15 in the above thread. Qsuzi stopped by their desk on her cruise. Bottom line, it's a travel service that you pay $1995 to join and pay another $95 per year membership fee.

 

I can't say for sure but it sounds very much like another cruise service I investigated which is affiliated with the military post exchange system. Don't just walk away, run, very fast.

 

Suggest you google "International Cruise & Excursion Gallery, Inc." adding BBB. Read the reviews.

[RocketMan275]

The website "small print" at the bottom of the home page says "International Cruise & Excursion Gallery, Inc. (“ICE”) a Delaware Corporation, d.b.a. Holland America Line PRIVILEGES™, is a registered seller of travel."

 

Strongly suggest anyone considering this to google "International Cruise & Excursion Gallery, Inc." and Better Business Bureau. Be sure and read the reviews.

[sue1898]

We received info about this last week on the Nieuw Amsterdam and allowed them to give us the 10 minute pitch. We turned them down. It really was a 10 minute pitch and we received $50 OBC for our trouble.

[1ANGELCAT]

Sat thru the spiel on Noordam in June. My free gift was a selfie-stick.

 

 

Sent from my iPad using Forums mobile app

[DeeniEncinitas]

I.C.E. is a time share deal ...

 

I also agree with you on this one!!!!!!

Denise:)

[rafinmd]

Makes me wonder about BBB. As I read it the company has an A rating while 26 of 27 reviews are negative. What' the system?

 

A:Awful

B: Bad

C: Careful!

D: Doubtful

E: Excellent

F: Fantastic

 

If that's the system it should probably be better explained.

 

Roy

[Donny-Joe]

We got an invitation to an event explaining this while on our NA Alaska cruise last week. I basically assumed that anything that requires a "seminar" to explain is not worth my time. Sounds like I was 100% correct. :)

 

Seriously, if it's such a good deal, can they not explain what it is and how it works in a brochure or a web site?

[BobandRuth]

We listened to an interesting sales pitch about HALPrivileges. We were getting interested, so I tried to find out more online. It turns out that you cannot find out more online UNLESS YOU ARE ALREADY A MEMBER (!). I told the salesman we talked to about this, and to him the restriction on information sounded perfectly logical. :confused: He said that if I wanted to find out more info, I should come and talk to him again. This makes no sense. If HAL has a good program and is proud of it, let people find out online as much info as they'd like. We are now very skeptical of a program that initially had interested us. High-pressure sales tactics can often backfire. They definitely have, for us, in this case.

[Gr8daze]

We went to the presentation onboard last week. This is what I gathered the program to be.

 

Initial $500.00 down and balance of $1,500.00 due in 90 days. Renewal annual fee is $99.00. It is similar to buying on Amazon, hotel stays and air fare through HAL Privileges. Percentage of what is spent "inside the program offers" is booked into an account that will reduce future cruise fare.

 

We got this pitch on a recent cruise. Beware they use 50% in example calculations as the percentage of other travel spend that goes toward cruise credits, but when we looked up examples like hotels in major cities the percentage rebated back was never more than 10-15%. At $12-15 per night going to cruise credit it would take a very long time to get my program fees back. The free 7 night resort stay that is included with the initial purchase was at Outrigger resorts. Not exactly luxury.

 

We passed.

Edited August 6, 2016 by Gr8daze

[RocketMan275]

I.C.E. is the parent company of the travel agency affiliated with USAA insurance. I have had mostly good experiences with them except for the last one. They have been generating a lot of complaints lately.

 

I would say you've been very lucky. There are at least three travel affiliates with the same address in Scottsdale, Az. One is ICE, one is the USAA affiliate, and one is the affiliate listed through the Morale, Welfare, Recreation (MWR). Read the BBB reviews, read yelp, not good.

[PsyberDave]

There was another thread on this topic, but it was closed today and I would like to add some more details...

 

We sailed on the Nieuw Amsterdam last week and attended the sales pitch for the Holland America Privileges Program, complete with complementary wine and a fruit and cheese plate. We also met with a sales lady the next day and grilled her good about the details of the program.

 

So, here's how it works: As others have noted, the program is one where you purchase goods and services through the program and earn cruise credits as you buy things. There is an initial buy-in of $2,000. And, there is a $99 per year charge that they can take in the form of accumulated cruise credits rather than actually charging $99. You are also required to make one purchase through their website (more on that in a second) each year to keep your account active. It can be for just a few dollars. They may offer a couple hundred off the sign up fee as an incentive to get you to sign up. Additionally, they were giving a $500 Visa gift card as a sort of instant rebate making the buy in $1500. On top of that, they give you a week's stay at a resort for up to six people. In our case, it was for the Grand Mayan which is a timeshare resort on the Riviera Maya, not far from Cancun, Mexico. We've actually been there and it is nice, albeit expensive, even if you are staying for free. Food and drinks at the on-property restaurants and on-property store are costly. Nevertheless, it is a lovely resort. So, your two grand sign up fee nets you $500 in a Visa gift card (which you can use like a debit card anywhere you want), and a week stay at a resort, the value I would guess is around $1,000 to $1,500. It's kind of a break even. But we weren't looking to go the the Grand Mayan again, so its value to us was questionable.

 

Back to the privileges program...As a member, you would log into their website to purchase hotel stays and merchandise rather than using sites you would normally purchase things from (e.g. travelocity.com or amazon.com, etc.). Doing so results in rebates as percentages of your purchase amounts in the form of cruise credit dollars for purchasing cruises on all of the cruise lines owned by Carnival. Rebates can be up to 60%. Theoretically, you can accumulate rebates to completely cover the costs of cruises; i.e.you can cruise for free. Again, every year they take $99 of your accumulated credits and you need to make at least one transaction per year to keep your account open. Credits are also transferrable so you can gift a cruise or upgrades to someone.

 

They said that booking hotel stays through their website was like booking through Expedia or Hotels.com and the like. They showed several examples and noted that the hotel prices were exactly the same as prices on other popular booking sites except you get to accumulate credit towards cruising. Others have noted the rebates are as low as 10%, but the examples we saw were 30 to 60%. If the cost on the site is not as low as you find elsewhere, they said you could call customer service to match the rate and maintain the original rebate, too. More on that in a bit.

 

We don't travel all that much, so I didn't think the hotel rebates would amount to much cruise credit for us. My thinking was that buying household items on their website would be a better way for us to accumulate cruise credit since we do more spending in that category, normally. There is also a wine category for wine delivery, though it is not currently available in Canada. I don't remember some of the other categories.

 

When we met one-on-one with the sales rep one of the things we asked was to see the website. I particularly wanted to see the prices on the household goods. I can tell you right now that the website is not finished. Searching for household items was cumbersome and poorly executed. Perhaps a minor annoyance, in the scheme of things, but when you want to locate a particular item and have to browse through hundreds or thousands of irrelevant items it borders on useless. But that is not the show-stopper. This is: One of the searches I did was for an LCD TV since I am very familiar with that market. A 55" curved screen TV by LG came up among the results. It was $7,000 with a rebate of something in the neighborhood of $4,400. A decent rebate. You could book a cruise just by buying that TV. However, I copied the model number and went to Amazon. I found the same model TV for $2,500. (!) I did the same for another TV and it was FAR more expensive on the "privileges" site than Amazon. The sales person assured us that 1) We could call customer service and tell them we saw the same TV on Amazon and they would match the price. 2) Even if they lowered the price to $2,500 we would still get the $4,400 cruise credit as shown on their site. Well, that is a sweet deal! I could buy a bunch of TVs and go on a bunch of cruises. 3) They would be adjusting their prices. They weren't quite finished with the site yet. ok.

 

But then we asked the hard question. Can we see that promise of price matching and cruise credit preservation in writing? She got ahold of a contract and read through it. She made a phone call to her boss to see where in the contract it said such a thing. When she hung up with her boss she said one of the most nonsensical excuses I have ever heard. She told us the price matching idea was not in the contract because it would have made the contract too long. Uh-huh. But not to worry. She said they would be putting it in the contract soon (Ok, so it won't be too long, then?) and anyway you can trust us. We promise.

 

So let me get this straight. You will match the price. But if you don't and I pay $4,000 too much for a TV I can get a free cruise?

 

At that point my wife said thanks but no thanks. We got our free gift; a selfie stick :-) and left.

 

Some of the red flags are: the necessity of a seminar to explain the complicated program, paying a large sum up front, sales people promising attractive things that are not spelled out in the contract, and making the program ONLY available to customers DURING their cruise. You can't think about it and sign up after the cruise. Unless you have purchased the Wi-Fi package, there is no good way to do research on the program while you are at sea. And since we attended the seminar two days before the end of the cruise, there is pressure to make a decision quickly. The sales people were not pushy nor particularly high-pressure in their delivery. But the circumstances set up a time limit making the opportunity scarce and perceived by many as possibly missing the boat (so to speak) on something. That is a classic technique of high-pressure sales. Act now before it's too late!

 

Like many of you, I think this program stinks. It doesn't pass the smell test and I find it unseemly that a cruise line would engage in such a thing. I have been to time share pitches and car lots. It was not as bad as those, to be sure. But I think it shows little respect for their customers. I feel like they see us as marks that they can try to get over on. I think it is a blemish against Holland America and Carnival on an otherwise fine cruise.

[Cruiser Andi]

Thanks for all the information!

 

 

Sent from my iPad using Forums

[DaveOKC]

Thanks for posting the details of this program. It sure sounds like a newer version of the old "buying clubs" from years ago. They were a ripoff and this sounds like the same.

 

When a company says "trust us", I run the other way.

Edited August 7, 2016 by DaveOKC

[SoCal Cruiser78]

Thanks for the review! It sounds like a cross between an onboard art auction and a timeshare sales pitch. I think I'll pass...

[Pickleodeon]

Thanks for the review! On my recent cruise we went and picked up the free gift at the Privileges desk. We asked how much the program cost but they told us we had to go to their wine an cheese night. I went as DH had other plans and they still didn't tell us the cost in the presentation. I asked after and they said I needed to book an appointment as the cost depended on our lifestyle. I didn't make my appointment as I got held up and went by the Privileges desk several times to apologize and rebook, however they were busy with other appointments. After seeing this review, I'm glad we didn't waste anymore time on it. If it sounds too good to be true...

 

 

Sent from my iPad using Forums

[RocketMan275]

I'd like to know the name of the organization behind this opportunity. Is it ICE?

[Scrapnana]

I wonder if many people got caught in this "deal".:rolleyes: They would have lost me when they said there was a $2000 buy-in.

 

Thanks for your post, PsyberDave.

[Heartgrove]

Amazing how the pitch has become more refined since our presentation in May. The Visa card and resort stay wasn't even part of the program then. And yet it still is not "finished." There must be more pushback than they expected!

[JJPacer]

WOW! Thanks so much for doing all that research and taking the time to share the info with the rest of us. That'll be a pass for us as well. We have great credit cards that give us points to use on our travel expenses, and I don't see a need to enter into that convoluted mess!