MSC showing fewer available cabins than TAs

[Eglesbrech]

This is just idle curiosity and no one will have a definitive answer.
 

At the moment MSC are showing far fewer cabins available than TAs are showing for sale. As an example MSC has 3 YC cabins and a well known TA is showing 13.

 

Any theory as to why this might be the case?

[killsport]

Just a guess. Perhaps the TA has a group hold on 10 cabins. Then MSC has 3 available. 10+3=13 available for the TA; only 3 remain for the cruise line. Generally the groups release unsold space back to the cruise line (I thought it was 3-6 months before sailing, but this is A GUESS) so if the cruise you're looking at is in the distant future rather than close in, this could be what is going on. If it is a close in sailing, I've no idea...

[showingdiva]

3 hours ago, Eglesbrech said:

This is just idle curiosity and no one will have a definitive answer.
 

At the moment MSC are showing far fewer cabins available than TAs are showing for sale. As an example MSC has 3 YC cabins and a well known TA is showing 13.

 

Any theory as to why this might be the case?

 

I think it's just another MSC website gremlin.   The above thought about TA  holding being perfectly plausible, with any unsold then allocated to Bella.    However, my favourite extended balcony cabin on Virtuosa never appears anywhere.   It's like a door to Narnia.   I've twice had to phone and ask for it.

[Heartgrove]

If you are looking at MSC European cruises that embark passengers at more than one port, each port is allocated different groupings of category staterooms on a deck.

[RC Dancers]

Something similar happened to us on Royal Caribbean. We wanted a certain cabin category and nothing showed up on Royal's website. We checked on Priceline and there was a cabin in that category so we booked it. 

[peder]

OMG, I was in the process of switching cabins around, but booking one cabin caused another cabin to disappear from availability. This happened 2x to me today!

 

MSC had not published availability for the Grand Suites Aurea on the Euribia for Summer 2024 until 2-3 days ago (which is super weird... I think they simply didn't notice that they had scheduling issues until a couple days ago). I quickly moved one of our bookings to one of the 2 cabins available. The moment we booked 1 of the rooms, the other disappeared! Not an issue for us, but very bizarre that it would go away like that.

 

Next, I was in the process of moving two of our cabins around so that 2 of our families could have adjoining rooms. The second I booked one, the connecting cabin disappeared! Meaning our families could not be next door to each other.

 

And of course, customer service says there's nothing they can do. I'm assuming they accidentally took a hold on both of these cabins while getting pricing info for me, but now they say they're booked. lol.

 

And all the while, the Premium Suites Aurea with Terrace and Whirlpool have NEVER shown as available for any of the Euribia Summer 2024 sailings, even though they're consistently available on travel sites. Ridiculous!

 

MSC, fix your damn website issues! And stop putting in these asinine scheduling rules!

Edited September 26, 2023 by peder

[peder]

And just to add to the nonsense. It looks like some sort of batch processing job has now run and a different set of adjoining cabins on the same deck is now showing that had never previously appeared at all!