likeadisguise

OP ended up on the wrong g side of someone else's unwanted upgrade. Without knowing what happened with the people who originally had the cabin, it's hard to know exactly what went wrong where.

I agree that people who request no upgrade shouldn't be moved except in extreme circumstances, but I don't think OP's situation is an example of a no upgrade request just being ignored.

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Well, it's only am accurate analogy if your tailor had to sell over 20,000 suits each week to stay in business. If it turned out that most people wanted gray suits, they might not buy as much blue because there isn't as much of a demand.

A cruise ship cabin isn't a "custom" product that's been altered to your specifications, and without using yield management to keep their ships full, a cruise line would soon be out of business.

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That's close, but not quite how it works.

Princess divides the ship into "zones" from front to back -- forward, mid-forward, midship, mid-aft, and aft -- and "groupings" from top to bottom -- upper public, non-public, and lower public. Non-public refers to decks that have only passenger cabins and no public spaces on them (Aloha, Caribe, Dolphin, etc)

If you picture the ship from the side, the "A" category is smack dab in the middle -- midship, on a non-public deck. Go up, down, left, or right one step, and that's B (mid-aft and mid-forward on non-public decks, and midship on public decks). C is mid-forward and mid-aft on public decks, and D is aft on non-public decks. E is aft on public decks or forward on non-public decks, and finally F is forward on public decks.

That's confusing, I know. It's kind of like this:

E C B C F

D B A B E

E C B C F

If you choose flexible air you do not have to pay until the full payment due date for the cruise. However, your air fare is subject to change until it is paid. If you choose flexible and want to lock in your price by paying for it, then you must pay your full cruise fare as well.

No, that's not true anymore. It used to be the way it worked, but now your flexible air price is locked in once you've booked it, and you still don't have to pay it until final payment for your cruise.

They're sometimes referred to as "metas" -- that's the type of stateroom. In order, lowest to highest, they're:

I - Interior

O - Oceanview

B - Balcony

M - Mini Suite

S - Suite

(Royal and Regal have "D", Deluxe Balcony, between B and M, and no O, as there are no oceanview cabins without balconies on those ships.)

The first letter of the category tells you what kind of cabin it is. The second letter of the category indicates where it is on the ship, if it's obstructed, etc.

An "O" is always higher than an "I", regardless of what the second letter is, and regardless of what the pricing is. That goes down the whole list. So a BZ (obstructed balcony) to an OA (midship oceanview) would never be considered an "upgrade", even though the latter is considered to be in a more preferred location on the ship.

There has to be a deposit on the booking in order to add EZ Air. You can't add air to a booking with no money at all on it, but it shouldn't have to be paid in full.

If you choose restricted air you have to pay the AIRFARE in full when you book it, but I don't believe the whole cruise needs to paid before final payment. If you add flexible air, then that's not due until cruise final payment.

Well, I don't know that "we booked our cabins so we could plan to break your rules and put our children in a cabin alone since you won't allow us to make our booking that way" would be a terribly persuasive argument, really....

I've never booked separate cabins so I don't know if each cabin had its own booking number...if so, did they link both booking numbers.

Each cabin gets its own booking number. However, linking booking together is primarily for dining purposes, it has no affect on cabin assignments. This seems to be a big misconception on the board.

Here's an important distinction. Marking your cabin Do Not Upgrade is considered a REQUEST not a command. The idea behind it was to figure out who wanted upgrades versus those who preferred to keep their cabins to keep the number of upgrade communications down.

 

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In short, if the yield system says they need to upgrade or they need to do so for other operational reasons the system will go to cabins that don't have DNU selected first, but if there are not enough of those, it will select others.

I think you're right that it was a TA screw up -- likely the person who originally had that cabin wasn't informed by their TA when they received the upgrade, and when they realized it had happened, they raised hell to try and get their original cabin back. (Generally the people posting on this board with unwanted upgrades are encouraged to fight to the death until Princess gives them their cabin back, so it's interesting to see the other side of that!)

It's possible that whomever made the change on Princess's side saw that you were originally a Guarantee booking and made the incorrect assumption that was the cabin you'd been randomly assigned, so it didn't matter if they moved you. Once they'd switched everyone because the first person complained, it was pretty unlikely they'd move everyone AGAIN.

Although you keep saying that you paid final payment before the other passenger, I've never seen anything from Princess to indicate that receiving final payment affects cabin assignments -- if you pay it the day you book or you pay it the day it's due, everything is still refundable up to 75 days out, so it doesn't really make a difference to them. I understand your point, but it seems they operate based on when the cabin was BOOKED.

They'd also have to call it "Crew Member or Officer of the Month," as not everyone aboard is a crew member. That's kind of a mouthful!

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I still don't think I understand how OP got the cabin yo begin with? Did you see it was available and call Princess and ask to be assigned into it? Or was it just the random cabin you were assigned to, and you liked it?

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They used to list them on the Princess website... here's an old page, you can click through for a little bio for each person: http://www.princess.com/why_princess/cruise/index_cruise_november.html

100 shares - http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=140690&p=irol-sharebenefit

Generally Princess is good about letting you refare your cabin if the price goes down. If you're past final payment, and the offer is only for new bookings then you may not be able to.

If the lower rate is part of a different promotion, you will lose whatever perks came with the original promotion (photo, wine, OBC for shorex) when you refare, though.

It can be combined with a FCD and the OBC that you get from it.

It can also be combined with shareholder and military OBCs.

Princess opens at 6 a.m. PST on Saturday, so you should be able to get someone there now.

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If you call Princess and let them know you're bringing a CPAP, they'll note on your booking to have extension cords provided by the ship, and also for distilled water if you need it.

I copied and pasted the T&C into a Word document on Oct. 14 when I booked our Nov. 1 cruise. The Customer Relations rep I spoke with today asked me to email her a copy of that. Supposedly, upper management looked at it when considering their decision today. Their reasoning for refusing to apply the FCC to a second cruise is that the wording of the offer is that the FCC will be applied to a future "sailing," not "sailings."

I think the key points to hit are:

1) If the original terms and conditions had been clear in the first place, they wouldn't have had to modify them. Clearly, the original wording left ambiguity.

2) Because the t&c weren't clear, you called Princess for clarification. The reps you spoke to assured you that the FCC could be split. You shouldn't be harmed (financially) because you were given incorrect information by Princess and then relied on it.

Good luck!

The 3 for Free wasn't around when you originally booked... As someone else suggested, maybe your TA had your cabin refared to take advantage of the new offer?

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Thanks for the clarification and time line, Frugalist. Hopefully you'll get someone at Princess who can make it right. Let us know how it works out -- good luck!

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Tonight, I called to book a 7-night cruise for this Spring at $819 per person. When the Princess rep. went into our accounts, she said she saw the $750 balances but they were marked "used." She couldn't apply the balance to the new booking. She put me on hold while she called up the chain and came back and told me she was told that the FCC I earned had been used up on our Dec. 7 cruise. She was told that the FCC had to be used in a single cruise. I told her that was incorrect. That the promotion did not have the restriction that the current promotion has. She tried to contact a supervisor in Customer Relations, but they had all gone home. I have no choice but to wait until tomorrow morning and call back and go over the story all over again. Right now I'm livid, and trying to calm down. I was told repeatedly that the FCC earned on the Nov. 1 cruise could be applied to multiple qualifying future cruises. We would never have taken the Golden cruise if we had even the slightest chance of not being able to use the FCC on multiple cruises. Right now, our $1500 has disappeared from our Captains Savings accounts.

The change from the previous 100% FCC sale seems to be that this time they're specifying the credit has to be used on a cruise that hasn't yet been paid in full, not that the last sale let people split the credit between multiple cruises.

In fact, someone on the board quoted the promotion's terms back in October in this post, and "The FCC must be applied to a single future sailing departing before December 31, 2014" is clearly in there.

You can use as many future cruise deposits (FCDs) as you want at a time, but each passenger will only get OBCs for the first one, and you only need one each to meet the deposit, so there isn't really a point to using more than one per person per cruise.

The future cruise credits (FCCs) from this promotion can be stacked together (so if you do a $399 cruise and then a $499 cruise, you can use them both for a 7 day $1299 cruise, for example), and can also be used with a FCD for the deposit and OBC.

Friends of mine have the 12/18 Ruby booked and did not know/get the free cruise deal. What do they have to do to get it?

It was the December 14 sailing of Ruby Princess, not December 18:

https://book.princess.com/html/global/cruisedeals/100getaways/

Everyone on the ship who booked before 12/31 will get the future cruise credit, they don't have to "do" anything to get it.

The system won't let you request a queen bed if there are more than two people in the cabin, but you can ask your stateroom steward to reconfigure the beds once you're on board.

Every now and then, and it's rare, the computer will upgrade someone who has opted out of an upgrade or their booking is linked to someone else's. That's what you're referring to when you say it's an issue. This is not common.

Having a cabin marked no upgrade and having the cabin linked to other ones are two separate things. Having cabins linked together doesn't affect the possibility of an upgrade; frequently people link cabins together so they will be seated together at dinner, but don't care whether they're in different categories and staying on different parts of the ship.

There aren't any connecting cabins on Caribbean Princess at all.

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