I should not continue to whine – but seriously – the RCCL home office doesn’t do customer service well or happily. OTOT – both my travel agent and the Concierge on this ship are amazing.
Let me review – various cruise lines have different processes for selling cabins on ships. All of them, as far as I know, let you book a specific cabin if someone else hasn’t grabbed it first. There is also the category of what is called Guarantee on most lines. It means that you book s specific “type” of cabin – inside, outside, balcony, etc without a specific cabin assignment. The cruise line then assigns you a specific cabin closer to sail date- sometimes you don’t know till. you actually gete to the port where you will be located on the ship. Why, you most sensibly ask, would anyone take that kind of chance/pot luck? The answer is money. You know you are going to get one of the less desirable cabins, but you are paying somewhere between 10-25% less that you otherwise would. You obviously are still on the ship. And, depending on your preferences, you may be a person who spends a LOT of time in your cabin or almost none.
Royal has this system. I booked an inside GTY (hoping that I didn’t wind up attempting to sleep in a cabin between the theater like I have experienced before. When I received my room assigment – they had placed me on Deck 10 – not a problem. In a SOLO cabin. Several problems with that 1) I had booked an inside. not a solo – different category. I had paid the single traveler supplemental charge [note – ships are mostly like hotels – you are paying for the ROOM. the rest of it comes along for the ride. They may save money on food but otherwise, they make more money on more people on the ship.] 2) I am looking at the list. Solo’s are NOT the same category as insides. I figure this happenend because I am sailing alone and they might be able to sell an inside cabin to two or other passenger. I might have let it go …
Except that the next day I got an offer to bid on an UPGRADE to an inside cabin. Ok, this means that even Royal doesn’t consider a solo cabin as in the same category as an inside. pluck on that! My wonderful travel agent spent almost a week, off and on with different home office people – nope – they considered it the bottom of the inside category but an inside (it is not numbered that way on their website) and NO obviously, they wouldn’t have made this assignment to a pair of people booking that inside GTY. Got nowhere. Just saying if they are willing to treat one of their senior loyalty (x12 years) like this what are they otherwise doing? Money must be ruling everything over customer service.
I will leave you with these pictures of the cabin – the positive – the bathroom is a regular cabin bathroom with a lovely walk-in shower on one end that you can actually turn around in, a long counter and a toilet on the other end.
The SOLO? Standing with my back to the bathroom door –
Bed with small cupboard overhead and door righ there to leave the cabin
Standing with my back to that entry door – you can see the end of the bed on the right, the mini desk area on the left.
and the entire storage area at the foot of the bed between it and the bathroom. T
That is it – oh yes, and a footstool type thing which might pass for a chair somewhere to use at the desk. Phone is on the wall as there is essentially only enough deskspace for my 14″ laptop and nothing else.
To say I wasn’t a really happy bunny would be an understatement. These solo’s are a lot smaller than those on Norwegian, have about 1/3 the storage space, and don’t have a dedicated lounge in the same are complete with coffee machine. The last obviously isn’t an issue as I can use the loyalty & suite lounge but that wouldn’t happen for an new/average traveler.
On better news –
This is my long haul cruise piece – Travel Together by Jeanette Douglas. I have been stitching a panel on each longer cruise. I have now have the ship, as far as I can go – as I don’t have enough DMC 838 to stitch the “Cruise” and “Adventure that goe in the square. The three previous ones are from Panama Canal Crossings (NCL Encore, NCL Joy, Celebrity Summit, not sure about the first. This just leaves me one to go plus a bit of finishing.
If you have gotten this far – the ship people are great and I will give you the cabin resolution tomorrow…
