No Upgrade Email Yet for Longer Cruise in October

[mscdivina2016]

18 minutes ago, Hlitner said:

Pretty simple request to allow us to book in Euros rather than in dollars.  The quick answer was that if you live in North America you must book in Dollars (which costs about $2000 more than booking the same cruise in Euros.

 

Hank

Wow.

How is it cheaper in Europe? Was it apple's to apple's?

 

 

[Ljames23]

39 minutes ago, Hlitner said:

Pretty simple request to allow us to book in Euros rather than in dollars.  The quick answer was that if you live in North America you must book in Dollars (which costs about $2000 more than booking the same cruise in Euros.

 

Hank

I've never heard of a cruise line allowing a guest or travel agency from the U. S. to book a vacation in Euros.

[HipHipOnAShip]

1 hour ago, mscdivina2016 said:

Wow.

How is it cheaper in Europe? Was it apple's to apple's?

 

 

Yes, I found the same thing.  Same cabin, same sailing but if you book on the MSC Italian website and were to pay in Euros it would be significantly cheaper (especially with current exchange rates.)  The only thing is that when you go to put in your address it defaults to Italy as home country.  Not sure how to circumvent that.

[mscdivina2016]

38 minutes ago, HipHipOnAShip said:

Yes, I found the same thing.  Same cabin, same sailing but if you book on the MSC Italian website and were to pay in Euros it would be significantly cheaper (especially with current exchange rates.)  The only thing is that when you go to put in your address it defaults to Italy as home country.  Not sure how to circumvent that.

The current exchange rate is equal???? 1 usd = 1 euro as of today.

[Hlitner]

1 hour ago, mscdivina2016 said:

The current exchange rate is equal???? 1 usd = 1 euro as of today.

Yes, the current exchange rate is just about equal (par).  But the prices are nowhere near the same.  So in the case of a cruise that we considered, Booking in US Dollars would cost about $18,000 but that same cruise booked in Euros is 16,000 Euros.  (which is about $16,000 at the current exchange rate.

 

 

[mscdivina2016]

17 hours ago, Hlitner said:

Yes, the current exchange rate is just about equal (par).  But the prices are nowhere near the same.  So in the case of a cruise that we considered, Booking in US Dollars would cost about $18,000 but that same cruise booked in Euros is 16,000 Euros.  (which is about $16,000 at the current exchange rate.

 

 

Use Ipostal1.     They will give you a foreign address and mail forwarding.

In your case it's worth $100 to save $2k or should I say 2000 Euro.🙂.

 

[Hlitner]

14 minutes ago, mscdivina2016 said:

Use Ipostal1.     They will give you a foreign address and mail forwarding.

In your case it's worth $100 to save $2k or should I say 2000 Euro.🙂.

 

Great tip :).  Some of these International pricing issues are quite interesting.  A few years ago we went to book the Tranzalpine Express from ChristChurch to Greymouth (New Zealand).  We discovered they had two completely different price structures.  Booking from anywhere other than NZ or Australia meant paying over $100 per ticket.  But for those booking from within NZ or Australia the cost was significantly less!  So it was simple matter of using a VPN to fool the servers into thinking we were in NZ to get the much lower cost fare.  

 

We have a good friend who lives in Northeastern Australia and is a very frequent cruiser on HAL.  The prices for booking a HAL cruise from Australia are often significantly higher (thousands of dollars for longer cruises) when booked in Australia as opposed to booking in North America.  So this guy has booked dozens of HAL cruises using a Canadian address (which belongs to one of his friends).  If you talk to this guy he would tell you how much he loves HAL but dislikes that they discriminate against Aussies.

 

Hank