Azamara Club Cruises
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Horribly deceptive practices
Took a cruise with Azamara in 2022 and had a lovely time, so when I got an email with early booking specials in Sept. of 2023, I checked it out. A few really good deals were on the website, so we selected a Sept. 2024 cruise in Greece. We paid in full at the time, but only chose that one because it was a good deal and we liked the cities it included. We otherwise would not have selected it because we have been to Athens before, and my husband teaches so he would have to get special permission to take a vacation in Sept (as opposed to the summer) and find someone to cover his classes. Eight months later, on Easter Sunday, we get a random invoice for over $5,000 with no explanation. Customer Service wasn't even open that day. After a week of trying, Azamara won't honor its original rate. They say they can change the price at any time, even after payment in full, and the price we got was a glitch (even though a few other prices at the time were similar, and as of yesterday, another cruise is listed at just a couple hundred more per person than we paid, plus that one has $1,000 in onboard or airline credits being offered). If they would have just contacted us right away, we could have avoided the thousands we spent on non-refundable flights to get to Greece for the cruise, but they didn't. Here we are, less than 5 months out, and they won't even offer us a discount on the current price, even though it was cheaper at other times (and we were deprived of a chance to book at those lower rates because we thought we were already booked). They said pay the new full price or get a refund, period. I never would have booked this cruise at the "full price" they have now - which is double what I paid for the 2022 cruise I took, by the way. Anyway, I have never left a bad review in my life, but I feel like I need to post this everywhere I can to warn people. We started researching and saw this has happened to others, too. If this has happened to you, I would encourage you to also file a report with the FTC at reportfraud.ftc.gov. At least maybe those of us who have been treated this way can save others from the same fate.