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Refund Roll Call


JPH814
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16 minutes ago, wyattsaunt said:

When (if?) people on the spreadsheet start getting refunds, it would be interesting to know whether they had asked for a charge back on their credit cards. If you’d rather not include this on the spreadsheet, jph814, I understand. I know you want to keep things simple. Perhaps any individual who did file a dispute with his or her credit card company could post this fact when they get the refund.
 

My sister and I are still debating whether to file a dispute wit our credit card issuers or wait 60 calendar days before doing so.  In researching the pros and cons of this, I read an article at www.Elliott.org, a consumer advocacy website, which recommends using a credit card charge back as a last resort, saying it can cause additional roadblocks to receiving a refund.  It did not elaborate what those roadblocks might be. 

Can someone explain what is meant by a credit card charge back?

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4 minutes ago, JPH814 said:

Can someone explain what is meant by a credit card charge back?

Called a dispute in the US where you contact the issuer and dispute the charge because the merchant did not deliver what was promised.  Works for anytime the merchant, in this case Seabourn does something other than delivering the correct product, service, refund, etc.

 

The merchant then files the dispute with the merchant and gives you a temporary credit on your credit card and if you are paying interest, this stops the interest on this portion of of your balance.  The merchant has a set amount of time depending on the agreement between the merchant and the credit care issuer.  If no response the credit becomes permanent no matter what.  If the merchant sends the credit, that ends the dispute and if the merchant denies they owe the credit the credit card company reverses the credit.  This doesn't necessarily end the dispute.  You have the right to dispute the denial for the merchant and everything the cycle starts again with the credit to your account.  This can continue and I remember one time when it finally ended when the credit card company and I agreed on a partial credit while the merchant kept, as far as I know all of the bad charge.

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I'm still doing research on whether or not to file a dispute with the credit card company now or wait until the 60 days expire which Seabourn has specified as the length of time they need to process our refund.

 

My traveling buddy (sister) called our TA today and asked her advice on whether or not to file a credit card dispute.  The TA said she didn't think we should yet.  We're only 24 days out from the date of our refund request.  She said it would "complicate things and could negatively impact the TA".  She advised patience and wait the 60 days.

 

FWIW, the TA told my sister that Seabourn is "refunding chronologically based on sail date".  She said her agency is monitoring the financial health of the cruise lines and believes Carnival will survive.  

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1 hour ago, wyattsaunt said:

When (if?) people on the spreadsheet start getting refunds, it would be interesting to know whether they had asked for a charge back on their credit cards. If you’d rather not include this on the spreadsheet, jph814, I understand. I know you want to keep things simple. Perhaps any individual who did file a dispute with his or her credit card company could post this fact when they get the refund.

Or perhaps just add (CC) after the refund date?

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14 minutes ago, wyattsaunt said:

I'm still doing research on whether or not to file a dispute with the credit card company now or wait until the 60 days expire which Seabourn has specified as the length of time they need to process our refund.

 

My traveling buddy (sister) called our TA today and asked her advice on whether or not to file a credit card dispute.  The TA said she didn't think we should yet.  We're only 24 days out from the date of our refund request.  She said it would "complicate things and could negatively impact the TA".  She advised patience and wait the 60 days.

 

FWIW, the TA told my sister that Seabourn is "refunding chronologically based on sail date".  She said her agency is monitoring the financial health of the cruise lines and believes Carnival will survive.  

At this point I simply cannot believe anything in regards to the refund process at any of the cruise lines.  I regularly monitor different cruise lines on cruise critic and the complaints are identical on all of them. 

 

As to Seabourn, am at about 50 days and have had many different promises as well as different in writing promises on the Seabourn website.  In any case simply would not believe in any case the refunds are being done by sail date especially since all of my promises as well as promises others have reported have been fairly consistent with no indication of it being by sailing date which IMHO would be extremely poor form as people with who cancelled before the latest 4 month cancellation would be now behind people who only recently had their cruises cancelled.

 

All in all the cruise lines have made their bed as the saying goes and will now have to lie in it as people have long memories of being constantly being lied to. 

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53 minutes ago, rallydave said:

At this point I simply cannot be

All in all the cruise lines have made their bed as the saying goes and will now have to lie in it as people have long memories of being constantly being lied to. 


While I think Seabourn could have done a number of things better, I am not sure you can say they "have made their bed". This situation is unprecedented. No company could have anticipated the impact and no industry was more severely impacted than the cruise industry. The bed was largely made for them.  Cut them some slack.  

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7 hours ago, JPH814 said:

I am a "glass half full" kind of guy:  This email is encouraging because it shows they want to be an ongoing business and are not about to declare bankruptcy and prohibit us from getting our money back

 

I got one of these maybe 3 weeks ago … and promptly deleted it.  In fact I get them on a fairly frequent basis which is ironic since I never book with a PCC to begin with.  IMHO it in no WAY indicates that they won't declare bankruptcy.  And of course they want to be an ongoing business but trolling for new business when they owe all of us a boatload of cash is not the way to do it win votes.

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7 hours ago, MightyQuinn said:

 

You have the concept correct ... but it's actually called a Future Cruise Deposit (FCD) and not a Future Cruise Certificate. Using FCD avoids any double FCC confusion!  Thanks so much for doing this.

 

Ditto.  Waiting for FCD's here too.

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3 hours ago, wyattsaunt said:

I'm still doing research on whether or not to file a dispute with the credit card company now or wait until the 60 days expire which Seabourn has specified as the length of time they need to process our refund.

 

My traveling buddy (sister) called our TA today and asked her advice on whether or not to file a credit card dispute.  The TA said she didn't think we should yet.  We're only 24 days out from the date of our refund request.  She said it would "complicate things and could negatively impact the TA".  She advised patience and wait the 60 days.

 

I would discuss starting a dispute with your credit card company, not your TA or Seabourn.  Based on how nobody seemed to be getting refunds from Seabourn or HAL, I went ahead and called Chase about 3 weeks after we were notified that our Seabourn cruise had been cancelled, explained that it had only been about 3 weeks but that we didn't want to wait 30, 60, 90 or maybe even 120 days for a refund of this size.  I asked if it was too soon to start the dispute, and they told me no, it was not too soon. 

 

The original deposit was less than $3K so that showed up immediately on our credit card as a conditional credit and reduced our balance due (we now owe nothing for our next statement due to this credit).  The remainder of our payment in full was over $28K so I had to submit a copy of the cancelled booking on a statement we got from our TA on 4-15 that showed a direct refund due from the vendor (Seabourn) dated 4-15-20 for the full amount including air and also fill out and submit their form that asked all the same questions I was asked over the phone to confirm what was discussed on the phone. 

 

Now it's all documented on our Chase account online and it states that Seabourn has up to 2 billing cycles to dispute it (which of course they haven't got a leg to stand on to dispute it) and then it's all ours.  No way to know if it will save us any time in the scheme of things, but at least we now feel fairly confident that we won't lose that money since it's impossible for Seabourn to dispute that they owe us a refund.  

 

So that's our experience in starting our first-ever dispute through a credit card company.  YMMV.

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Zelker, thank you SO much for your detailed explanation of your experience with filing a dispute with Chase.  I called Chase last night to ask the same questions you did.  I was on hold for an hour and 10 minutes before I gave up. Your post was so helpful to me, and probably many others.  Thank you!

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I should have added in my original post on May 10 reference my contact with SB about ten days ago:

Their reply suggested that the Encore cancellations which were made separately by email on 9 March were in fact part of the general "pause" which was announced on 13 March. Therefore the 60 day ticker started on 14 March. This is of course incorrect, not least because the 9 March cancellations offered different terms to the general pause, and I told them so. But if they are lumping the pre-pause individual cancellations together with all the voyages cancelled on 13 March, this makes the admin task significantly greater, and is completely at odds with the repeated statement that all refunds would be dealt with in strict date order.

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1 hour ago, wyattsaunt said:

Zelker, thank you SO much for your detailed explanation of your experience with filing a dispute with Chase.  I called Chase last night to ask the same questions you did.  I was on hold for an hour and 10 minutes before I gave up. Your post was so helpful to me, and probably many others.  Thank you!

 

@wyattsaunt - You probably hung up about 20 minutes too soon.  😔  I've called Chase twice (once to start the dispute but first time a week or so before that to let them know that our credit card # had a fraudulent charge so they could close the account and issue new cards).  Both times I was on hold for 90 or so minutes. 

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Oboy oboy, have a refund to report.   After 50 days received the first message from Seabourn that a refund of $0.00 has been processed for cancelation of our Thomas Keller Grill Reservations.  Could this mean my refund and FCC's are now in work???

 

Hope so but, only time will tell but, nice to at least see that they have gotten to at least part of our cancellation..

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3 minutes ago, Foyt said:

Oboy oboy, have a refund to report.   After 50 days received the first message from Seabourn that a refund of $0.00 has been processed for cancelation of our Thomas Keller Grill Reservations.  Could this mean my refund and FCC's are now in work???

 

Hope so but, only time will tell but, nice to at least see that they have gotten to at least part of our cancellation..

 

Hate to disappoint but getting a cancellation for TKG reservations that have no charge associated with them in no way correlates to your refund being processed.  

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2 minutes ago, zelker said:

 

Hate to disappoint but getting a cancellation for TKG reservations that have no charge associated with them in no way correlates to your refund being processed.  

A guy could dream??   Guess I wasn't sarcastic enough in my post.  It is though the first indication that my cancellation is actually in their records.

 

And while you are probably correct, it is always possible that I am at least moving up in the que.  

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2 minutes ago, Foyt said:

A guy could dream??   Guess I wasn't sarcastic enough in my post.  It is though the first indication that my cancellation is actually in their records.

 

And while you are probably correct, it is always possible that I am at least moving up in the que.  

 

I hate to rain on your parade, but here is our timeline:

 

Cruise departure date 4-22-20 (Med)

Excursions refunded by SB 3-19-20

SB cancelled cruise 3-30-20

We cancelled 4-2-20 and requested a refund

 

So, SB refunded our excursions and TK Grill before they officially canceled the cruise and before we requested the refund.  

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1 hour ago, zelker said:

 

Hate to disappoint but getting a cancellation for TKG reservations that have no charge associated with them in no way correlates to your refund being processed.  

It is also probably being processed by a different department.

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On 5/10/2020 at 8:24 AM, whystayhome said:

I also have a bunch. My travel agent was told they wouldn’t refund the FCD

 

Linda

Hey Linda,

 

Long time no see! Hope all is well!

 

IIRC, FCD supposedly get auto-refunded if not used within four years of purchase.

 

 

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Great News!

 

This morning, my £ 19,000 arrived on my Credit Cards, with a processing date of 8th May, which was Day 59 from when Seabourn Officially cancelled our Cruise.

 

Coincidentally (?), Seabourn agreed our Change Fee Claim on the 6th May, even though we only submitted it on the 11th April. We took the enhanced FCC for this, as, even though they said + 25%, it was + 28% & 2 x $ 250 On Board Credit.

 

So, it looks like they are sticking to their targets.

 

Good Luck to everyone!

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Congratulations Rambo Trout. Hopefully this gives some people on here a shred of hope. I would be optimistic - since we are also in the UK and only 2 days behind you in cancellation - however we chased via the UK office yesterday and got the brush off since we had booked under a Family & Friends deal. Having told us over 60 days ago that our refund was being processed they have now told us to deal with the Seattle office since they say they are the ones who book the F&F rates. Not sure why they couldn't have told us this 2 months ago. This is just all so frustrating 😒

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1 hour ago, Rambo_Trout said:

Great News!

 

This morning, my £ 19,000 arrived on my Credit Cards, with a processing date of 8th May, which was Day 59 from when Seabourn Officially cancelled our Cruise.

 

Coincidentally (?), Seabourn agreed our Change Fee Claim on the 6th May, even though we only submitted it on the 11th April. We took the enhanced FCC for this, as, even though they said + 25%, it was + 28% & 2 x $ 250 On Board Credit.

 

So, it looks like they are sticking to their targets.

 

Good Luck to everyone!

Brilliant news. So that was around 75 days as opposed to 60 quoted by Seabourn. Even so it gives us all some confidence that we will eventually receive something.  
Was this through your UK travel agent or direct from Seabourn?  Can I ask what your ‘Change Fee Claim’ was for? 

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