July 1 - Currently onboard / Loyalty and Events Officer duties???

[cr8tiv1]

@ldtr , Yes, that was my understanding too.  They “needed” access to loyalty information to be more helpful.  

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38 minutes ago, ldtr said:

If they are to be simple order takers they could have replaced the department with a terminal, a set of instructions and a stack of brochures.

The Go Princess person my group interacted with on the Majestic Princess last month (he was NOT the department head) was knowledgeable about all of this.  He gave is us pricing and explained to us for "x" amount more, you can have a refundable deposit.  He even bought out the enlarged ship deck plans to choose cabins before he knew we were booking guarantee cabins.  Our Captain's Circle status was never mentioned once in our interaction.  At end and after making our bookings, the Princess Promotions packages were brought up, but after saying we were aware of them and were not interested, we were let go with no hard feeling or pressure to listen to the spiel about them any further.

 

Maybe it's an old school vs. new school mentality, but self service is the way of travel reservations.  You can make a booking on the Princess website without ever having to talk to a person. Cruise lines have been behind in the trend in that passengers can't make significant changes to their reservations without human interaction with an agent.  I'd certainly be open having kiosks onboard to make future cruise reservations so long as it would honor the discounted pricing offered onboard.  In all honesty, all the Go Princess reps (and Future Cruise reps in the past) do is lift your data from the current booking into the new booking.  The airlines have fully adopted self service, and if you're savvy with their apps you can be rebooked without having to wait in line for an agent during delays.  It saves money and can save the passenger time if they know what they are doing.

 

My personal preference but, I research itineraries on the Princess website and turn to social media and travel review websites to learn about the destinations before going to the Go Princess on board.  Don't really need to be spoon fed too many details, just want to know the price.  If the price isn't to my liking I walk away.  Simple.  Not sure what more people want with the Go Princess reps.  It's their jobs to offer the Princess Promotions packages.  You can't fault them for that; Princess is allowing them to by partnering with ONE.  It would be different if they started to pressure people into buying these packages, but they aren't.  

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40 minutes ago, cr8tiv1 said:

@ldtr , Yes, that was my understanding too.  They “needed” access to loyalty information to be more helpful.  

 

There's a misunderstanding here.  All they need is your cabin number.  What does your loyalty level have to do with anything?  All that tells them is an approximation of how many cruises you've taken with Princess.  Doesn't affect anything.  Remember at Elite, you can't move any higher.

 

I think that there is some confounding with the Princess Promotions reps that were making cold calls to customers earlier this year.  That's not how Go Princess rolls.  Of course they would love to sell you a promo package, but there is no obligation to purchase one of these and they're going to bring it up, it's part of their job.

 

[HaveDogWillTravel]

On 7/1/2023 at 3:44 PM, cr8tiv1 said:

Here's the gray area:  She mentioned something about suites on the Grand Class ships.  There will NOT be any lounge, but there will be a concierge to assist suite guests.  

I asked Lisa Honeyball the guest services currently on the Emerald at our meet & greet yesterday, she said the suite concierge for this ship is still in transition. She said there will be one but did not give an exact date. I asked what the concierge’s hours woukd be and thus was unknown. I asked about the free waters and beers you get on Royal class and the officers’ laughed and I did not get an answer. 

Edited July 4, 2023 by HaveDogWillTravel

[Cruise Raider]

I only have comments about the new role of the future cruise planners and nothing to add to the comments by @HaveDogWillTravel about the role of the loyalty and events manager.  She covered that well.  
But, I can tell you that the future cruise office on the Emerald are staffed with 4 of the most competent and helpful planners we’ve ever encountered!  I’ve gone four different times because of 4 different reasons and have been extremely satisfied with the results of my encounters with each of those visits.  One of the future cruise planners (instead of the former captain’s circle host) was working up at the elite lounge last night.  I was also so glad to see it didn’t close as early as we’ve seen in the past.  I liked it was open until 7 PM as we got some very nice nibbles instead of having dinner in the MDR.

 

I also love the fact that Princess has rolled out having more cruise planners involved in assisting us with booking our cruises.  Even with several planners, there is a slight wait to see one of them.  Amongst the reasons of going back four times was that my requests weren’t small ones so I didn’t want to keep others waiting for a really long time.  
I got three new sailings booked and three refared!  So fabulous!  Job well done ladies!  
shout out to Heather, Cathia, Simone and KoKo.  They are all just cream of the crop and I will be including that in my survey!