A Message from our President email

[Mrs Miggins]

Message received late last night.  Any thoughts on its content ?

[Grandma Cruising]

For those who don’t get Azamara emails here are screen shots of it

 

 

 

 

Edited August 19, 2022 by Grandma Cruising

[Riocca]

Phoned Azamara this morning to apply a FCC to an existing booking, all done in 10 minutes. There’s a new on hold message that’s up to date and references the 4 ships, Atlas Bar and Onwards World cruise.

 

As regards the email it obviously addresses customers concerns on contacting Azamara and that things will improve slowly. Sounds like some functions are being outsourced hopefully that will work better than the time RCCL did it and moved everything to Guatemala. The 9 -12 months timeframe for IT implementation sounds like it may be a little longer than the previously quoted first quarter 2023 to fully unplug from Royal Caribbean, hopefully that helps get things right first time.

[royallondon]

55 minutes ago, Mrs Miggins said:

Message received late last night.  Any thoughts on its content ?

In as much as acknowledging you have a problem is a good starting point in addressing the problem, quietly encouraged.

 

 

[uktog]

1 minute ago, royallondon said:

In as much as acknowledging you have a problem is a good starting point in addressing the problem, quietly encouraged.

 

 

I agree and any temporary outsourcing has to be better than the current shambles.

 

They can also drastically reduce call volumes by sorting out their written communication and have content written that’s clear, accurate, not ambiguous and consistent across every place it appears.  That’s a quick win, it’s an obligation regulated industries have to achieve, I hope in some of the help brought in there’s expertise from backgrounds where “one unambiguous version of the truth” was a given. 
 

Fingers crossed but it’s such a mountain to climb from where they are - good luck Azamara! 

[blag]

What took them so long?

[suec12]

Can we hope for online payment anytime soon? Crazy to want to make final payment and have to wait on hold.

[lisiamc]

12 hours ago, Grandma Cruising said:

For those who don’t get Azamara emails here are screen shots of it

Thank you so much for this! I’m on my latest of many attempts to get Captain’s Circle emails and other important emails like this, and I hope that’s another thing they can fix in the new system. We’re Explorer Plus, but aside from a rare marketing email once every couple of years, and some (but not all) updates concerning booked cruises, we never get anything else.

[Pizzasteve]

13 hours ago, Riocca said:

Phoned Azamara this morning to apply a FCC to an existing booking, all done in 10 minutes. There’s a new on hold message that’s up to date and references the 4 ships, Atlas Bar and Onwards World cruise.

 

As regards the email it obviously addresses customers concerns on contacting Azamara and that things will improve slowly. Sounds like some functions are being outsourced hopefully that will work better than the time RCCL did it and moved everything to Guatemala. The 9 -12 months timeframe for IT implementation sounds like it may be a little longer than the previously quoted first quarter 2023 to fully unplug from Royal Caribbean, hopefully that helps get things right first time.

I called the other day and very prompt response, unlike tries earlier this summer, so things seem improved dramatically recently, at least for me in one try.

[Travels with Lisa]

On 8/19/2022 at 12:53 PM, lisiamc said:

Thank you so much for this! I’m on my latest of many attempts to get Captain’s Circle emails and other important emails like this, and I hope that’s another thing they can fix in the new system. We’re Explorer Plus, but aside from a rare marketing email once every couple of years, and some (but not all) updates concerning booked cruises, we never get anything else.

We have the same issue.  We spoke with them last week and supposedly it is sorted, but we never received the latest communication.  It's absolutely ridiculous.

 

[lisiamc]

11 minutes ago, Travels with Lisa said:

We have the same issue.  We spoke with them last week and supposedly it is sorted, but we never received the latest communication.  It's absolutely ridiculous.

 

Having read Carole Cabezas’s rather nice letter, there may be hope for those of us on the no-email list, once Azamara has separated themselves from Royal Caribbean’s IT department. I live in hope, and give thanks to Cruise Critic in the meantime.

[Host Jazzbeau]

I was working at a major university when they decided to replace their homegrown business management software with Oracle.  The transition was a disaster – so much so that several of us suggested they would have been better off spending the money on fellowships to sponsor COBOL programming students!  But that system was far more complex than a cruise line's, and apparently Azamara is going with a vendor that specializes in exactly this type of application – as long as they don't demand too much customization [that was our downfall] if should go much smoother.

[uktog]

41 minutes ago, Host Jazzbeau said:

I was working at a major university when they decided to replace their homegrown business management software with Oracle.  The transition was a disaster – so much so that several of us suggested they would have been better off spending the money on fellowships to sponsor COBOL programming students!  But that system was far more complex than a cruise line's, and apparently Azamara is going with a vendor that specializes in exactly this type of application – as long as they don't demand too much customization [that was our downfall] if should go much smoother.

My guess is the migration will be painful because they will be coming from a system which probably has patches on patches and a lot will not migrate as they planned.  There is the risk which they will be worrying about I am sure that they lose data in the migration and cannot recover

[Riocca]

28 minutes ago, uktog said:

My guess is the migration will be painful because they will be coming from a system which probably has patches on patches and a lot will not migrate as they planned.  There is the risk which they will be worrying about I am sure that they lose data in the migration and cannot recover

They were having real problems on Onward transferring information from the RC system to Azamara’s new onboard system, they established a work round at the end of the cruise but that caused even more problems.

 

[tango9]

Hmmm.  I have three sailing booked to take place soon, but never received this email....

[Host Jazzbeau]

19 minutes ago, tango9 said:

Hmmm.  I have three sailing booked to take place soon, but never received this email....

Aren't you glad you're here?  

 

I earned enough points from the Celebrity Captain's Club Power Up activities over the last few months that my next Azamara cruise will take me to Explorer Plus – and I was only notified of them about half the time, the rest I found out about on the Cruise Critic Power Up thread.  Celebrity's IT system is just as messed up as Azamara's [well, duh – they're the same system!]

[Benthayer Gonbak]

On 8/21/2022 at 4:50 PM, Riocca said:

They were having real problems on Onward transferring information from the RC system to Azamara’s new onboard system, they established a work round at the end of the cruise but that caused even more problems.

 

 

In 2019 Azamara had a new system for I believe the internet benefits.  They brought one of the company representatives on board for at least the first few days of the cruise.  He could fix most anything, manually, and then repair it later.  

[uktog]

4 hours ago, Benthayer Gonbak said:

 

In 2019 Azamara had a new system for I believe the internet benefits.  They brought one of the company representatives on board for at least the first few days of the cruise.  He could fix most anything, manually, and then repair it later.  

And that’s exactly the problem with the systems they are migrating from, legacy patches to give quick fixes. 

[Riocca]

1 hour ago, uktog said:

And that’s exactly the problem with the systems they are migrating from, legacy patches to give quick fixes. 

Not forgetting the system was developed to run 3 very different brands which is possibly core to the many problems encountered, the fact it requires the same login details for each brand portal is indicative of how poor the system is.

As Versonix Seaware who are producing the new software have experience with a large number of other cruise lines the new system will be better all round 🤞

[Benthayer Gonbak]

9 hours ago, uktog said:

And that’s exactly the problem with the systems they are migrating from, legacy patches to give quick fixes. 

I worked on legacy systems for Y2K!  I remember a couple of junior staff asking why some code looked like it did.  They were clearly system down on the fly patches.  I knew one of the coders who had written a lot of the code and although I wasn’t always impressed with his approach even he didn’t write that crappy of code except as a quick patch.    I was impressed with the care being given to just fixing the data for the cruise and then fixing the code where needed.  Some of the problems occurred for B2Bers, others because of club status.