Disappointed

We just returned from a thirty four day cruise on the Legend. As always, the experience on board was great. The disappointment was based on the ridiculous fiasco from the Seattle headquarters concerning their directions on the need for visas on this itinerary. As a result of the Windstar instructions, we secured visas for five countries at a total cost of over $1300. As we arrived at four of these five countries it turned out that we did not need visas, $800 of the $1300 wasted.

The answer from Windstar....sorry but no compensation.

CAUTION...WHEN WINDSTAR TELLS YOU SOMETHING, CHECK, CHECK, AND THEN CHECK AGAIN, because if they are wrong, and they often are, you pay the price for their mistake

When we asked for Visas for our cruise, Windstar reps were pretty clueless. We ended up doing our own checking with the consulate of each country visited.

I have to agree with camoeto - we check with the government web sites of the countries we want to visit and since we are US citizens with the US State Department. We would never trust the information provided by cruise lines. We are sure they mean well and are trying to help, but they are not official sources of information.

I agree, their visa information can be incorrect. On a recent Greece cruise with a port stop in Turkey, we were instructed we needed a visa for Turkey.

I knew this wasn’t true, but it’s so inexpensive, we just got one.

If I had to pay what you did, I’d be very unhappy.

We did what Altria suggested by checking the State Department web site before we spent our $1300 on visas. In all cases the web site said that we needed visas for the five countries so we went ahead. However when we arrived at the four ports in question,it became clear that visas, for whatever reason were not necessary for passengers arriving at those ports. My complaint is that as a cruise line, Windstar should have known that despite what the State Department site said, visas were not necessary for passengers arriving in those ports. We did our due diligence, Windstar did not.

So sorry to hear this.

Keith

The same thing happened to us (at a much lower cost) on a Paul Gaugin cruise from Fiji to Bali earlier this year. We stopped at Tuesday Island (Australia) and all the info said we needed a Aussie visa which you can buy online. Most of the passengers did but it turned out to be unnecessary. Also there was similar confusion re Bali (Indonesia) but it was resolved a month or so before we departed so we didn't get stuck with that cost also. FWIW: Jack in cool Reno