davidoff2020

Thank you for posting this, this makes it a lot clearer.

Getting back to the original question: How is Princess Cruises actually reacting due to Corona Virus?

Some of you here may find this interesting:

I was booked on that cruise for a nice junior balcony suite  since April 2019. This should have been the trip of my lifetime (celebrating my 60th birthday on ship and other things planned) and so I have been booking also nice Qatar Airways business class flights from Germany to Singapore and back from Shanghai to Germany.

Following the news from China over last week I got more and more uncomfortable with the whole thing.

In fact as a lot of you here stated its not the fear of getting the virus (we have far, far more cases of deaths due to influenza each year here in Germany and still no one wears a sinlge mask on the street). Its the fear of what may happen around the whole trip, ie ports getting cancelled, authorities denying access to ships, passengers held on the ship like in Rome, your flight back from China may be cancelled etc etc. Furthermore all of those cruises in South East Asia have lots of Asian / Chinese guests on board. Can you imagine enjoying your daily cocktail on the bar surrounded by travellers wearing those masks??? Very relaxing atmosphere, hmm?

Over last weekend I came to the conclusion that I did not want to pay more than 5500€ for this unsecure experience and did cancel the cruise this Monday. It was exactly day 80 before 16th of April so I could get away just for the 75€ handling fee.

Just 2 days later Princess announced a complete re-routing, they swapped some ports and cancelled the final port Shanghai and now the cruise ends in Yokohama, even in anther country, Japan. And they are doing this 10 weeks in advance..

Around 3000 passengers or at least those who have flight arrangemants of their own, will have to re-arrange new flights for getting home. Maybe most of them will have to pay a lot of extra money because of this. Besides a lot of other trouble usually coming along with such a serious change of itinerary.

What fascinates me the most, is that they did announce that serious change exactly 2 days after the cancellation deadline 😉

My personal conclusion: I was right in every aspect of my decision to finally cancel this cruise.

PS: The ship was almost sold out until Monday..

On 1/30/2020 at 11:28 AM, leck57 said:

Some people will be aware of this if they are in their cruise Roll Call but Princess have announced by email to passengers that the cruise leaving Singapore on 16 April and due to disembark in Shanghai on 2 May 2020 will now be disembarking in Yokohama and the two prior ports Busan and Nagasaki will be swapped. I assume the cruise that was due to depart Shanghai on 2 May would also be affected but I am not on that cruise and not certain. 

Mods - please move if this shouldn't be in this thread.

Hello,

does anyone know if they offer free cancellation because of this serious change of itinerary? I suppose that most of the passengers have already booked their flights home out of Shanghai and now they will have to arrange new flights from Japan on their own cost?? All this because Princess Cruises changes the final port of the cruise?? For whatever reason??