New website.

[rickip]

I just got off of an Azamara sailing a few weeks ago.  The Loyalty person onboard advised me that I shouldn't expect any of the loyalty issues to be resolved until at least September.  All I wanted to do was change the email address attached to my account, but she said they were unable to make any changes onboard. 
This is the first time I have looked at this thread/forum in and I cannot believe that nothing has changed/improved yet!!

 

[Grandma Cruising]

9 hours ago, rickip said:

I just got off of an Azamara sailing a few weeks ago.  The Loyalty person onboard advised me that I shouldn't expect any of the loyalty issues to be resolved until at least September.  All I wanted to do was change the email address attached to my account, but she said they were unable to make any changes onboard. 
This is the first time I have looked at this thread/forum in and I cannot believe that nothing has changed/improved yet!!

 

It looks like a lot of email addresses got corrupted in the data transfer which is causing problems when people try to get into their account on the website. This applies to my husbands account, but the Azamara agent I spoke to assured me that she could see his correct loyalty information on their information.

[uktog]

So why don’t they put a message explaining the situation on their website to reassure people? 

[uktog]

It is sad that the whole customer support side is still in such a mess and showing no signs of improving.  If it is genuinely improving and things are happening - where is the communication?

 

I have faith in the marine and engineering management aspect of a cruise with Azamara, they successfully migrated to their new system a year ago and I hear nothing but positive comments about it, so from the safety and compliance angle all is well.

 

But there is no point in having safe, compliant half empty ships.

 

This week they lost a significant amount of revenue from me.  I had been emailing, my agent had been emailing, my agent had been calling yet no one could give an appropriate response.  In the absence of an appropriate, consistent and relevant answer on vaccine requirements/exemptions for a voyage that called at ports en route to South Africa, we knew that cruise, and the preceding one as it was b2b was a no go, but had hoped to transfer the deposit to something else.  I believe this should have been possible.  All we got was canned responses that they were working through emails and when we did call we were told to write in, we ran out of time re cancellation deadlines.  

 

Losing the will to live and getting right to the wire on cancellation penalties, the two cruises were cancelled this week (albeit we lost money as a result).  We have made alternative plans with another line, something we would never have done a few years back.  

 

It saddens me to feel this way about Azamara, I have two big cruises for 2024 which I hope we can still take (expensive flights all booked already) and that this debacle will be well past us by then.  But it has hurt us and we share @fruitmachine view - they cannot keep going at reduced capacity and issues with revenue generating activities such as shore excursions.  And even if they can keep going, how many will be lost in the fall out - might our alternative plans convince us to switch our loyalty elsewhere wholesale?  And they are really going to have to incentivise travel agents, certainly here in the UK, where many are proactively highlighting other lines to previous Azamara bookers.

Edited August 10, 2023 by uktog

[Riocca]

9 minutes ago, fruitmachine said:

 Just remember that the same people are in charge of the IT systems responsible for payroll, HR, procurement, logistics, crew scheduling, regulatory compliance and a host of other unseen functions.  The onboard service has managed to keep going despite the booking system problems. 

 

Not actually correct, the on ship services that you mention are run by V Ships a totally different company who provide crew management and logistics for a number of other cruise lines. All onboard staff are actually employed and paid by V Ships this was a very early change after Sycamore purchased Azamara.

Versonix are providing the back office systems and I assume the mythical IT department are also provided by Versonix, looking at some of the problems we’ve encountered I sense that they were caused by someone who didn’t fully understand the effect of the changes they were making.

[fruitmachine]

18 minutes ago, Riocca said:

Not actually correct, the on ship services that you mention are run by V Ships a totally different company who provide crew management and logistics for a number of other cruise lines. All onboard staff are actually employed and paid by V Ships this was a very early change after Sycamore purchased Azamara.

 

That's very reassuring.

 

 

18 minutes ago, Riocca said:

Versonix are providing the back office systems and I assume the mythical IT department are also provided by Versonix, looking at some of the problems we’ve encountered I sense that they were caused by someone who didn’t fully understand the effect of the changes they were making.

Of course Versonix also run the booking & back office systems for a number of other cruise lines.  If successfully, then why are Azamara experiencing so much pain?  

 

Edited August 10, 2023 by fruitmachine

[Riocca]

10 minutes ago, fruitmachine said:

That's very reassuring.

 

Of course Versonix also run the booking & back office systems for a number of other cruise lines.  If successfully, then why are Azamara experiencing so much pain?  

 

Most others are just using what the Seaware system has to offer with mainly cosmetic customisation. My feelings are that Azamara are trying to replicate certain aspects of the RC system such as converting OBC to local currency. 
Our biggest problem was caused by them combining a b2b booking into one booking, apparently this is to help the ships manage b2b passengers more efficiently. However the promotional offers, a hangover from RC , make doing this very complicated.

[uktog]

Honestly, I think the problem is bigger than replicating systems - some of this might be some of the cause but they are not functioning effectively in terms of providing customer support.  Whether there is insufficient resource, wrong skill sets, wrong focus, too much self belief, who knows - probably its a combination of all these.   Their communications strategy is also shot, you can have IT disasters but can still manage the comms - some financial services organisations showed they could do that very well in the past such that few customers actually remember previous meltdowns, but the difference was they got on top of the comms, they did not immediately fix the issue but they kept talking.....

 

And if something was complicated, why was it not tested first????

Edited August 10, 2023 by uktog

[Riocca]

11 minutes ago, uktog said:

Honestly, I think the problem is bigger than replicating systems - some of this might be some of the cause but they are not functioning effectively in terms of providing customer support.  Whether there is insufficient resource, wrong skill sets, wrong focus, too much self belief, who knows - probably its a combination of all these.   Their communications strategy is also shot, you can have IT disasters but can still manage the comms - some financial services organisations showed they could do that very well in the past such that few customers actually remember previous meltdowns, but the difference was they got on top of the comms, they did not immediately fix the issue but they kept talking.....

 

And if something was complicated, why was it not tested first????

Once this is sorted I’m sure the senior management team are going to have to answer some tricky questions from the investors. Talking last year to one of the experienced customer service staff they were being assured that the transition would be smooth and seamless, I don’t think either of us actually believed that. Azamara have taken on a lot of new staff to try and alleviate the problems but they have no experience of how cruise bookings work, they are all super helpful and are trying their best but Azamara are still relying on just a few of the original experienced staff in Wichita to resolve problems. 
Our own experience with the change until recently was not that bad with only one piece of information not being transferred from RC. But if as reported there’s a lot of missing or corrupted information transferred then it’s a difficult situation and keeping customers informed could alleviate many of the concerns. Unless of course this is headed towards litigation in which case it’s possible that the legal people are advising what can and cannot be said, only a thought.

 

[Grandma Cruising]

 

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2 hours ago, fruitmachine said:

Computers only operate on logic, so if any email addresses were corrupted then every email address would have been corrupted. I don't believe what they've told you.  There's another reason.

 

Actually it’s my supposition that email addresses were corrupted. During my conversation with the agent she asked me for my husbands email address then told me what they had was nearly the same but with one digit different. Can’t see how that could have happened other than a data transfer issue.

She tried to amend the email address at her end but was unable to so ‘escalated it to IT’.

[fruitmachine]

20 minutes ago, Grandma Cruising said:

what they had was nearly the same but with one digit different.

Assuming it was correct on the old system, that smacks of something being manually rekeyed rather than transferred electronically.  That's a scary thought, pointing at a complete meltdown in the transfer process, but might explain some of the issues.

[uktog]

1 minute ago, fruitmachine said:

Assuming it was correct on the old system, that smacks of something being manually rekeyed rather than transferred electronically.  That's a scary thought, pointing at a complete meltdown in the transfer process, but might explain some of the issues.

That was my thought as well.  And manual rekeying will introduce errors that were not there before!!

I appreciate litigation might limit what they can say but I have never heard of litigation meaning customers are told nothing at all for over a month

[Riocca]

25 minutes ago, fruitmachine said:

Assuming it was correct on the old system, that smacks of something being manually rekeyed rather than transferred electronically.  That's a scary thought, pointing at a complete meltdown in the transfer process, but might explain some of the issues.

Interesting, I’d not thought of that possibility before and could be why the transfer was delayed as it would be a much more laborious process. Possibility is RC didn’t want to transfer the linked Celebrity information, but whatever the reason it would explain a lot as once you introduce a human element the likelihood of errors increases.

 

 

[uktog]

8 minutes ago, Riocca said:

Interesting, I’d not thought of that possibility before and could be why the transfer was delayed as it would be a much more laborious process. Possibility is RC didn’t want to transfer the linked Celebrity information, but whatever the reason it would explain a lot as once you introduce a human element the likelihood of errors increases.

 

 

and it looks like the risk of that was not fully appreciated - and possibly the attention to detail/sample checking/interim testing when doing the work was lacking.  Sad but they really got a lot of collateral reputation damage from this

[Riocca]

1 hour ago, uktog said:

and it looks like the risk of that was not fully appreciated - and possibly the attention to detail/sample checking/interim testing when doing the work was lacking.  Sad but they really got a lot of collateral reputation damage from this

Especially as we all know how “good” the Royal Caribbean IT department is.

[ghstudio]

I have been wondering how Azamara could continue to run excellent cruises, given their continuing web site/marketing disaster.  Just yesterday, I stumbled on the answer (which apparently many others already knew):

 

https://cruiseindustrynews.com/cruise-news/2022/06/azamara-expands-v-group-deal-for-guest-and-corporate-travel/

 

[blag]

2 hours ago, Grandma Cruising said:

Can’t see how that could have happened other than a data transfer issue.

But, on the other hand, I don't see how a data transfer could manage to corrupt just one digit.

In the way that databases work, the email address would be contained within a field in a record, and the transfer protocol is likely to be such that all the entries in that field would have been imported verbatim. Unless the ascii coding (or some such) was very different and needed 'translating', the entries in that field would/should be transferred automatically. But manually re-entering the data would be, and is, much more error-prone.

But... if the data was sabotaged before transfer...

And, being Machiavellian, maybe the staff have been trained to say that the information was wrong by one digit/character.

Either way, it's all speculation and I doubt that we will ever know the truth. 

[rickip]

On 8/9/2023 at 11:51 PM, Grandma Cruising said:

It looks like a lot of email addresses got corrupted in the data transfer which is causing problems when people try to get into their account on the website. This applies to my husbands account, but the Azamara agent I spoke to assured me that she could see his correct loyalty information on their information.

Mine was not corrupted.  All was fine with it.  I simply want to use a different one than before for personal reasons.

 

[rickip]

On 8/10/2023 at 6:48 AM, blag said:

But, on the other hand, I don't see how a data transfer could manage to corrupt just one digit.

In the way that databases work, the email address would be contained within a field in a record, and the transfer protocol is likely to be such that all the entries in that field would have been imported verbatim. Unless the ascii coding (or some such) was very different and needed 'translating', the entries in that field would/should be transferred automatically. But manually re-entering the data would be, and is, much more error-prone.

But... if the data was sabotaged before transfer...

And, being Machiavellian, maybe the staff have been trained to say that the information was wrong by one digit/character.

Either way, it's all speculation and I doubt that we will ever know the truth. 

As far as I can tell, the staff is being kept in the dark about what is really going on.  They are given scripts to follow and are not supposed to speculate or deviate from those.  Having been a computer programmer in a previous life, I can well envision some of the things that appear to have gone wrong.  But, it is beyond me why they have not yet been able to fix things.  I mean, 5 months... seriously?

[JYDCruise]

20 minutes ago, rickip said:

But, it is beyond me why they have not yet been able to fix things.  I mean, 5 months... seriously?

Heh, I just noticed that I live ~15 minutes away from the Versonix HQ. Maybe I should swing by and ask what's going on . . .😈

[Grandma Cruising]

As I posted earlier, I rang the UK Weybridge number a while ago and booked a number of excursions for our Feb 24 cruise. Although I have lots of OBC (some from the booking promotion and some from the Experience More package we bought through our TA) I was told that none of it could, as yet, be applied to the excursions, but that I didn’t need to pay upfront for them as the excursions would stay on the booking until the OBC could be applied.  I went into my account today and found that the amount owing had reduced by an amount equal to the promotions OBC, so clearly this has been applied to the excursions automatically as soon as it was available to do so.

It seems that something is working properly!

[lexdisic]

22 minutes ago, Grandma Cruising said:

As I posted earlier, I rang the UK Weybridge number a while ago and booked a number of excursions for our Feb 24 cruise. Although I have lots of OBC (some from the booking promotion and some from the Experience More package we bought through our TA) I was told that none of it could, as yet, be applied to the excursions, but that I didn’t need to pay upfront for them as the excursions would stay on the booking until the OBC could be applied.  I went into my account today and found that the amount owing had reduced by an amount equal to the promotions OBC, so clearly this has been applied to the excursions automatically as soon as it was available to do so.

It seems that something is working properly!

On the advice of my TA, I rang Weybridge the other day and booked the experience more package (Nov 20 cruise), and was told after being put on hold for 10mins, that the OBC the package gives towards excursions, can only be used once onboard and the booking OBC I already had could only be used for excursions 30 days before departure.

 

Another case of depends who you talk to. 

 

I paid for the package with a CC but it is still showing "to pay" on my account  - I wonder if my package will come out of the OBC as well. 

 

[uktog]

The problems continue, love the reference to attention to detail 

Edited August 14, 2023 by uktog

[babykay]

On 8/10/2023 at 9:21 AM, ghstudio said:

I have been wondering how Azamara could continue to run excellent cruises, given their continuing web site/marketing disaster.  Just yesterday, I stumbled on the answer (which apparently many others already knew):

 

https://cruiseindustrynews.com/cruise-news/2022/06/azamara-expands-v-group-deal-for-guest-and-corporate-travel/

 

I have used Global Marine Travel and they have always been excellent.  

[JaneStarr]

5 hours ago, uktog said:

The problems continue, love the reference to attention to detail 

This post has apparently been removed from the Azamara FB page.

Honestly, I’m surprised that they don’t moderate comments before they post.

 

I am not comfortable inputting my full passport & demographic info into their Seaware site that is only secured by my booking number, name and sail date (all of which are on open email messages to me)

Perhaps the comment to that effect is why they removed the entire post instead of just the negative comments.

Jane

Edited August 14, 2023 by JaneStarr
Fix typos