Experience on Infinity:Double check your air arrangements-don't leave it to others.

[rickhurley]

Before I wrote this thread, I checked with three different travel agents to determine whether when you book a cruise with Celebrity to include air arrangement, the cruise line staff makes the arrangmements and reservations. The answer was yes, with the proviso that they will listen to any concerns you might have. In the last analysis, YOU will suffer if the arrangements cause you to miss a flight or be without your luggage. In our group of 9 travelers, we almost missed our flight home because they had us booked on an 11 am flight from fort lauderdale--why I didn't realize at once that this was impossible, I'll never know but I have to accept a lot of responsibility, especially when the night before departure, we were told we could not exit the ship till 9:15. Another couple in our group, along with 4 other couples from Las Vegas, were scheduled to arrive in LAX domestic at 11:00Am, where their bags had to be transferred to the Lan Chile airlines in the International terminal. Their bags did not arrive on time and reached them on their cruise three days later! CAVEAT EMPTOR:confused:

[Susan-M]

Hi Rick,

 

Your cruise shouldn't start or end with the stress of an almost impossible flight schedule .... it's great that you've alerted others to the need to be on top of the situation.

 

Since our first cruise (when we had the cruiseline do our air arrangements along with resulting problems) we have been doing our own air. Even with booking on our own, I find that it's necessary to be extremely careful with connecting times on international flights. The airlines often offer flights with very close connecting times and as tempting as that one hour layover looks, I would rather sit for an extra hour in the airport than go through the hassle of missing a flight or not having our luggage catch up with us.

 

A lot of people enjoy the security of knowing that if they book their air with the cruise line, they will be guaranteed arrival at the ship (at some point). But more and more problems with cruise air are being reported and the trade-off for that security seems to be a lot of worry and mix-ups, either flying to or home from your cruise, or both.

 

Problems still happen when you make your own arrangements, but at least you know that you've done the best you can with your scheduling rather than leaving it up to someone else.

[greeneg]

Good post, Rick, and with the Summer Travel Season approaching, a timely one.

 

What I would like to add is that if you are going to be travelling ( not just cruising) you want to be aware of your travel arrangements essentially all of the time. Several years ago, we had booked a trip to Spain and Portugal that essentially started us out in Lisbon and finished in Barcelona. Our original flight schedule was Charlotte, Boston, Geneva, Lisbon; returning via Barcelona, Geneva, Boston, Charlotte. Unfortunately, our orginating flight from Charlotte to Boston was delayed out of Savannah and we knew that we were not going to make the Boston connection. USAir changed our itinerary from the above to Philadelphia, Madrid, Lisbon, which is how we went. What we did NOT know ( and USAir did not tell us, the ticket agent may actually not have known herself...) was that changing the original itinerary also cancelled the return itinerary. You can imagine the panic when we got to Barcelona, at the end of 18 days in Iberia, and found that we had tickets but no reservations......

 

All ended well after some scrambling, but the point is always try and stay aware of all of your travel arrangements.

 

Happy Cruising....

[DC2OC]

Never knew that changing the originating flight could cancel return flight.Thanks for the tip.Its something to ask the agent about if something like this happens.Thanks for the heads up.We are now learning to fly in a day early as insurance for flight delays,but after reading some of the threads we may start flying in 2 days early.................Frank

[EGG]

Something else that happened to us once. When we checked our bags at the curb, they did not check us through to our connecting flight. We heard our names being paged in Houston as we approached our gate. The airline was minutes away from giving away our seats.