"free" optional tour

As a heads up -

As part of our booking package/pricing on our upcoming river cruise, we were given a "free" optional tour. I had one picked out months ago, and figured I would just tell them when we boarded the ship. We just received our sailing docs and much to my surprise - we had a voucher for a specific tour. One that I did not want to take. After discussing it with our T.A., who had nothing to do with that choice, I contacted the cruise company directly. This happens to be Emerald Waterways; I do not know if other river cruiselines would have this same potential issue.

After much discussion with Scenic customer service (Emerald's parent company), they "unfroze" our account, so they could switch our "free" tour to the one I wanted. So in the end, the issue was resolved. However, this issue should not have come up in the first place. Nowhere in any docs or communications from the cruiseline or from our T.A. was it explained that we needed to choose that "free" tour a certain amount of time before sailing. I did not see anything on the Emerald site that explained this, nor was there any indication that they had chosen that tour for us. The lack of communication is distressing to me, and I don't know who was responsible, but now I know - even with a T.A., and even tho I have researched the heck out of our upcoming cruise, surprises can still happen. :eek: Hopefully the rest of this trip will be be smooth sailing (pun intended), and hopefully this type of bad surprise doesn't happen to others.

I'm happy for you that everything worked out in the end & you got the tour you wanted.

Thanks dogs4fun. Live and learn, right? If this post can help at least one other person - I've done my job. :)

We are booked with Scenic and we received an email from our travel agent including our access link to our trip account stating that we had to pre-select some of the free excursions. She suggested we do it ASAP. This was 5 months prior to the trip date. I think your agent fell down on the job and may not want to admit it. Hope it all works out.

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