Grumblebelle

Can you get a taxi from the ship in Funchal to the cable car station at Monte and just get the cable car back down into Funchal? Thought this way you would miss the queues at the bottom. How much would a taxi charge?

Have received an email this morning advising they are removing the daily service charge from May 2019 starting with A911, B912, E911/A, J903, N910, R907, X907 and all thereafter. Makes me wonder what percentage of passengers have been cancelling these charges to bring about such a change.

Thanks Jean - that seems a very disappointing amount. I think my expectations of P&O have been suitably lowered so nothing will come as too much of a shock now!

Thanks Jean, yes I can now appreciate that these things could happen but it would seem very unfair of P&O not to offer some sort of compensation. I’m beginning to see that they always have their deck stacked to win!

Oh dear - just learnt something else - cruises get cancelled? I hadn’t appreciated that ever happens......that certainly sounds infuriating enough without then being disadvantaged re the price. I haven’t checked prices in the past after booking for exactly the reason of not wanting to be disappointed but I don’t believe anybody likes to feel ripped off.

Thanks Jules - very interesting to learn that Americans get a different deal to us Brits, guess they have been more vocal at being exploited and of course there is a lot more choice over there. Not knowing that this was how things worked I just felt I would be rather foolish to pay £5000 more for something P&O valued it at today. I know for the future and many thanks to all contributors for your input. I can see that this rule could have equally worked in my favour if the price had increased from point of booking rather than fall.

We weren’t given a price when we booked the balcony since none were available but simply placed on a waitlist. However it is strange that our balcony is now slightly more expensive than when we booked but the suite £5000.00 less. I’m sure somebody will shortly snap it up at this competitive rate.

Our reaction was that we will use Cunard next trip but it sounds like they all use this method. I appreciate businesses need to turn in profits but I don’t like the feeling of being exploited for as much as they can get out of you. When I’ve upgraded flights I am sure that it has been at the prevailing rate on the day of change and to be fair, BA have always managed to make us feel like valued customers. I believe customer loyalty for P&O isn’t a problem since the huge upsurge of interest in cruises means that there are plenty of new cruisers following on.

Thank you, we are still quite new to cruising but being recently retired we don’t now need to plan far ahead. I guess if we leave it until we feel like it’s time for a break and something is available at a price we are happy with then that is the time to jump in. We actually booked a long time in advance to secure a cabin in a position on the ship that we thought we would like. Getting older and wiser each cruise!!

Thank you for highlighting the clause regarding “significant alteration to the package” which I was unaware of. However in this instance the cost of our balcony is less than £100 difference in price to what it was on the day we booked it last November. We’re simply going to enjoy the balcony cabin we booked and enjoy the cruise and learn from the experience.

I believe that you must be right and P&O have used the last price that a suite had sold for before I made our balcony booking when no suites were available. We would be happy to pay the upgrade cost at today’s price plus £50.00 admin fee but they wanted the upgrade cost at today’s price plus £5000.00....ha ha!

Thank you Stephen for taking the time to respond to my very first post. To clarify, this upgrade request was from one Select Fare to another and if it wasn’t for the fact that final payment had already been made we most certainly would have been better off cancelling the balcony and re-booking the suite. It’s rather annoying that they are basing the price to upgrade on a date when no suites were available which I can’t equate to. It’s certainly a steep learning curve getting to know all the intricacies of how things work!

When we initially booked our cruise no suites were available but we immediately requested our TA to put us on the list, which they confirmed that they had done. Over the weekend whilst browsing I noticed that our forthcoming cruise in October was now showing suites available. I investigated further and found that indeed there were some available. We selected one and emailed our TA to say we were disappointed that they hadn’t brought this fact to our attention but please go ahead and upgrade us and that we would pay the difference by return. You can imagine my shock when they responded that we could upgrade to the suite but not at today’s price but at th price that was being charged at the time that we made our original booking, another £5000 on top of the current advertised price! Since none were available when we made our original booking I’m not sure a) where this price came from and b) is this a permissible practice under Contract law? We were obviously happy to pay the price difference of the upgrade as it stands today but not this additional amount. Is this standard?