JYDCruise

I was looking at a cruise a few days ago, and after "1 free night" and "3 free nights" and "quarter loyalty" discounts it would have been ~$5600 for two all-in, with $600 OBC. Now it would be ~$5500, with $1k OBC. Sweet, right? Oh, wait - the first price was for a Club Continent Suite, the second is a Veranda cabin. Best sale ever??? And I have to drag my TA kicking and screaming to look at anything Azamara right now.

The fact that this thread exists (and is more than a handful of posts) gives the answer to that question.

If there's one common thread to the entire clown show of the transition from RCCL, it's Azamara management's utter lack of preparation. They should have had a serious effort going starting in January 2021. Yes, they had to deal with the pandemic as well, but at the C-level you need to be able to juggle more than one ball at at time, even if that means appointing a designated transition ball-juggler. By May 1, 2021 (or June, or whenever), someone - anyone - should have met with every operational manager (maritime operations, purchasing, IT, HR . . . ) in Azamara and had in place a comprehensive project plan with a target completion date of, say, December 31, 2022.

On FlyerTalk (airline/frequent flyer forum), this is referred to as HUCA (hang up, call again). 😄

Heh, I just noticed that I live ~15 minutes away from the Versonix HQ. Maybe I should swing by and ask what's going on . . .😈

The OP is correct that the showers are small. A half-foot (15cm) or so more in either or both dimensions would be a noticeable improvement, but has been mentioned, there's really no place to get that extra space. You can't fit 10 pounds of shower in a 5 pound space. That said, we went into our first Azamara cruise forewarned about the overall cabin size and the reality (Veranda cabin) turned out to be certainly acceptable. The weighted average of our experience was more than satisfactory enough that we've already taken a second Azamara cruise, also in a Veranda, and wouldn't hesitate to do so again (once the IT issues get resolved).

The only one I've had is Chateau Musar, exported to the United States, and it was very good. Oh, and that Arabic Chef's Table menu looked delicious!

No, but we (and KevintheIrishDJ, presumably) used our remaining OBC to splurge on a bottle of champagne at dinner on the cruise's final night. Azamara's by-the-bottle wine list is limited but priced exceptionally well - in fact, a quick check at local shops shows that the Dom Perignon and Taittinger were both below retail on Azamara.

Same here, though they were out of Taittinger so we had to go with Dom Perignon. It was a far better purchase than anything we saw in the shops, and our OBC was about to turn into a pumpkin so we made the sacrifice. 😁

Different cruises, different experiences, I guess. We only have 2 Azamara cruises under our belts, both post "Larry", but have been overall very happy with the onboard experience. The entertainment was generally fine, singers/dancers all decent-to-quite talented, all seemed personable in random encounters, and the house band was really quite good. A couple of the guest entertainers were meh, but most were interesting. "Abysmal" is certainly far from our experience, and our group consists of multiple people with serious musical training and experience, some performing professionally, so we tend to be pretty picky but that said, you may have experienced something quite different. Our limited forays with trivia were fine as well, with humorous and engaging hosts. (We under-performed at musical theater trivia this last trip, only getting 38/40 points . . . second place was 26 😁 /humblebrag). The crew was excellent and friendly, top to bottom, and any negatives are all very minor (except for issues nailing down how much OBC I had, and from where). Even signing up for excursions was fast, efficient and painless. As for the main topic at hand, I am somewhat surprised that there hasn't been any shakeup in Azamara's executive staff, at least not as seen here: Azamara executive team. Given the magnitude and duration of the problems in IT, customer support and marketing communications/PR, I'd expect to see at least some of the team "pursuing other opportunities" or opting to "spend more time with their families".

Even the top-line people at Azamara have been dropping the ball, though. When I finally got a call, weeks after an agreed and confirmed time with "CR", she mentioned that first-line customer support wasn't her usual job, typically she handled high-level escalations - things directly from Carol Cabezas's desk. While she was helpful during the call, there were a couple of unresolved items that she promised to take care of, with a "and if you don't hear from me by Wednesday at 10AM, please contact me at my direct email". Wednesday at 10AM came and went with nothing from CR, and I never got a response to multiple emails to her direct address. It's pretty damning when someone in her position is ghosting customers.

Woodbridge?? That retails for $9/bottle. Oh, yeah . . . that's a 1.5L bottle. Sadly, the wine offerings in the Ultimate package are far from ultimate. On the flip side, the corkage charge isn't usurious and the by-the-bottle offerings on the (short) wine list are, near as I can tell, priced pretty close to retail. If your cruise is to a wine-producing country, pick up a bottle or two in port. We got the Ultimate package as part of the Experience More. I would not get it for the wines, not at all, but if you get a name-brand water or two at lunch/dinner, and a cocktail when it's 5 o'clock somewhere, it's worth it. As an aside, I thought the "Atlas Bar" cocktails were all well-conceived and some were quite good.

As an additional scary thought - they refunded you 50% of what you paid Azamara. That may well represent the entire price that they paid the tour operator. For example (using made up numbers; I don't know what Az's margin in on shorex): you pay Azamara $100 for the excursion, they pay the tour operator $50. Tour operator refunds the entire $50 they received, which Az passes on to you while holding on to the remaining $50.

If the data handover was not fully specified in the purchase agreement, then Azamara/Sycamore's attorneys should be out chasing ambulances. If such transfers was fully specified and RCCL is actively sabotaging the process, then Azamara/Sycarmore's attorneys should be, and likely are, pursuing this with vigor. As you say, we the customer have no visibility into which of these, if either, is true. This could be a simple case of Hanlon's razor, "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

You didn't contract with the tour company (if you had, the tour would doubtlessly cost much less), but with Azamara. If there is a problem, it's Azamara's issue to fix and make you as whole as possible. That the tour company only refunded 50% is not your problem. It's like doing a home remodel and working with a general contractor. If one of their subcontractors messes up, it's the GC's problem to resolve, not yours. That's one of the reasons you hire a GC instead of directly hiring plumbers, electricians, etc.

"Grandfathered" in this case means that the old points and status would carry over despite a change in club number. In general, it means that an existing customer/member/client/etc. can choose to continue to operate under old rules or policies, even when such are no longer offered to new clients.

More than anything else, they should set up their website to make it simple to do one thing: give them money. If booking an Azamara cruise was one of his 12 labors, Hercules would shrug his shoulders and start looking at the Oceania website. 😄

Quest as of June 2023: Captain: Johannes Tysse Hotel Director: Tatiana Morello CD: Darren Lynton ACD: Justin Schneyer (didn't see much of him at all) Executive Chef: Joao Lounge Piano: Jose Marie De Guzman Band leader: not listed 😠 (the band was excellent!)

We were on the ship just before you (Istanbul - Athens) and feel exactly the same. What a great trip! Are there 4 singers (+ 2 dancers) onboard? On ours, something happened with one of them a couple of days in, and the remaining 3 had to cover - probably most of it by the remaining man (Jimmy). They covered it extremely well, and you couldn't tell it was supposed to be 4 singers, not 3.

Just as a follow up, we finished our cruise (Istanbul - Athens on the Quest) last week. We had all of the usual issues pre-cruise, including multiple ball-drops by Customer Support. That said . . . once we got to the port in Istanbul, it was a completely different experience, and really just what you would hope for from Azamara. Seamless check-in and boarding, and just an outstanding experience. We had to sign up for a few excursions onboard (see CS ball-drop above), and it only took a few minutes. The crew was truly excellent from the Captain on down (though oddly the ACD seemed pretty invisible to us during the trip), I thought the food was better than last year (and that was already pretty good), excursions were interesting, the entertainment was fine (1 of the singers disappeared after day 2, no idea why, but the others were able to cover it without any gaps), even the weather was virtually perfect, though I'm not sure that Azamara can get credit for that part. 😄 The only glitch was in accounting. I asked Guest Relations for a billing update a couple of times during the trip and there were some odd OBC credits that neither they nor I could identify, and nothing that was clearly identifiable as our TA OBC (nor did any amounts match what I would have expected). We made it to the last day with what looked like a few hundred dollars left of OBC (I hope) and wound up popping the cork on a very nice bottle of champagne with our last dinner. Bottom line: yes, the IT migration has been a complete cluster . . ., customer service not much better, PR updates late, sporadic and frequently just wrong, and I still feel there needs to be some housecleaning among Azamara's executive staff. But once you're on the ship, ahhhhhhhhhhhh - what a great time!

Just got off the Quest last week (Istanbul - Athens) and the White Night was a lot of fun. We loved the atmosphere, the food was varied and good, and the entertainment fine (and not excessively loud). Watching the sunset over Santorini certainly didn't hurt! The event might lend itself better to a warmer environment?

When we dined in Prime C the night after the Azamazing Evening, our server said the venue was a ghost town during the event - like 1 table occupied.

Perhaps the wine buyer was sampling the product a bit that day, but listing a Marlborough wine as from Australia? Yikes! That's going to get some words from any Kiwis on board!

Hi, neighbor! Sunnyvale here also. If you have any issues regarding the BA flight from SJC, you should ask to change you to one of the SFO-LHR flights. A bit longer drive, yes, but that would be preferable to them changing you to an AA flight connecting in LAX/ORD/DFW.

This is one of my (few) remaining concerns as we get ready to sail next week. I was actually able to speak to someone at Azamara (!!!) who helped us to buy the package we wanted, and book most of the excursions. However, they could not see our TA OBC and we could wind up in a situation like yours - every day that passes onboard with the OBC in limbo, it turns more and more into a pumpkin. For example, say on cruise day 5 we take an excursion for $200, paid for out of pocket since we've already used all the Azamara OBC. If on day 6 they are able to fix the TA OBC (call it $200), what are the odds that in such a case Azamara would allow us to retroactively use that OBC and refund the out of pocket excursion cost?