Princess Cruises
View company profile →
Incredibly Disappointing
Over the course of the last 3 days I have spent 7 + hours on the phone with Princess Cruises. I am traveling on the Princess Majestic to from Vancouver to Anchorage (Whittier) departing on Saturday June 10th. We chose this cruise specifically because of our stop in Skagway. We are traveling in a group of 13 people and 2 months ago we all booked the "Yukon Expedition and White Pass Scenic Railway” (SGY-180) excursion so we could do one trip that was all together as a group. Now that we are less than 50 days out from the cruise, we all went on to look at the other stops/excursions and two people from our group found out that their excursion was not actually booked. They went on the website and the tour is sold out. I called and they said that there is no waiting list and that tour is sold out and that couple cannot get on the excursion. It is a special trip that we are all going on for this couple so my husband and I decided to give our excursion that we booked to them. I called Princess Cruises today and spoke with someone (did not get his name) and asked him if it was possible to give our excursion to our friends - I explained I was very worried about changing anything because there is no availability and I would rather just keep the excursion and sort it on the ship if it was not possible to give our two slots on the excursion to our two friends. The person on the phone guaranteed me twice that he could absolutely do that and it would be no problem. I asked if I could give a credit card so we could make sure he could directly transfer it and he said he did not need it at this time. He put me on hold for 30 minutes and at that time we got disconnected and he did not call back ever. I however immediately called back Princess to make sure we were getting everything handled. I had been checking both our booking and our friends booking to see what was going on. I constantly refreshed the excursion page in case for some reason the slots opened up and it no longer showed sold out on the website. As I am waiting on hold to speak with another representative, I see that our excursion that we booked two months ago is no longer on our booking. At this time, I get transferred to a representative. Her name was Nia. Nia was the most unhelpful and inconsiderate person I have ever come across in customer service. I have worked in customer service for 11 years so I was very patient because I know how difficult it can be. Nia told me that I had chosen to remove that excursion from my itinerary to give to my friend and that it was my own fault that I lost our two slots on the excursion. I told her that I did not ever give permission to remove the excursion from our booking unless it was to go directly onto our friends reservation. She told me that there was no record of me ever having the excursion at which point I told her that I have documented proof showing it on our booking and I have an excursion payment summary for $479.90 on February 26th. She finally acknowledged that I did have the excursion on my booking but now it was no longer on our booking. I told her that since we did book the excursion two months ago and someone took the excursion off of my booking without my permission that if she was not able to put it the excursion directly on our friends booking, I understood but to please just leave the excursion we booked on our booking. She went on to tell me that the excursion is sold out and she will not put it on our booking. We went round and round for 90 minutes when I finally asked her to transfer me to a supervisor. At that time Nia told me that Princess Cruises does not have supervisors and she will not transfer me. I asked her to please transfer me to another person, even if it was the same customer service level as her and she said that she refused to transfer. We went round and round again and she finally said you need a good reason to be transferred. I said my reason is that I am very unhappy with the customer service I was receiving and that I would really appreciate speaking to someone else. She said OK and then the phone went silent for 5 minutes. After 5 minutes I said “Hello” and she said “Can I help you with something?” In which I answered that I thought she was transferring me to speak to someone else and she said no I will not transfer you. Essentially I left the conversation very upset with nothing resolved and even more, I lost the one excursion we were going on the trip for. To say the least, I have never been more unhappy with a cruise company.