Oceania Cruises
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Stole money from us and also was not helpful in the rebooking process
- I apologize for this long review, but before booking Oceania, I highly encourage you to read through it so what happened to us doesn't happen to you. Through all my years of traveling, I have never paid so much to receive so little. Due to the special occasion of my sister and I both graduating (one from high school and one from college), we had purchased first-class round-trip tickets on our flights out of the United States and our flights returning to the US. Since we are all so busy, we paid additional fees to have Oceania "Cruise Specialists" and travel agents through Oceania book our flights; meaning we would pay our airfares with the cost of the cruise directly to Oceania. Aboard the ship, the staff were amazing, with precise attention to detail and always offering a helping hand. The problem with Oceania cruises arose on our journey home. We were to leave from Istanbul to board a flight that would land in Montreal, then take us to our final destination of Minneapolis. Due to the Canadian wildfires, our flight from Istanbul to Montreal had been cancelled, which was completely out of the hands of Oceania. We tried our best to work with Oceania to rebook flights, but they told us that they had emailed their main office and we would have to wait until the following day to hear anything back (which would've been 5 hours before we needed to disembark the ship). Taking matters into our own hands, we hopped on the phone with Air Canada to try and rebook our flights, which turned into hours long waiting times to be connected to an agent, ultimately causing us to have to cancel our plans for the last day on the ship. When we finally connected with an agent, they were able to rebook us on flights home, but would have to downgrade us to economy cabin. We had absolutely no problem with downgrading as we were trying to just return to the US at this point. Keep in mind that flights back into the US in business class were thousands and thousands of dollars (and there were 7 of us in our party). Once arriving back at the US, we got in contact with Oceania to attempt to retrieve the thousands of dollars lost from downgrading. It took Oceania a whole month to even reply to our inquest. Dozens of phone calls and emails went unanswered for a whole month and when a representative finally got in contact with us, she told us she would need our boarding passes from the flight that had gotten cancelled and the flight that we had been rebooked to. We gave them the appropriate documentation of receipts where we had paid for business class and showed them our the reservation number and tickets from when we had been rebooked, as who saves boarding passes from 2 months prior, and we were unable to look them up online. Another month of no reply, when we finally hear back on August 17th with the email just saying "Thank you for your recent communication. Following a thorough review by our Air Department, it has been determined that there is no refund eligible in this case." Our flight back into the US landed on June 11, and our first attempts at correspondence with Oceania occurred June 15. Between two emails back and forth Oceania determined we were not eligible for refund and kept thousands and thousands of dollars and wasted our time. - End point, Oceania is great for the actual cruise and will be there to collect your money, but you better pray to the gods that nothing happens, because if it does Oceania is silent. Safe to say we will never ever be using them again, and I will continue to fight to get our money back.