Cruise line complaint - Royal Caribbean

Cruise line complaint - Royal Caribbean’s Rhapsody of the Seas seven-day cruise out of Galveston

October 13, 2005

We are booked on Royal Caribbean’s Rhapsody of the Seas seven-day cruise out of Galveston on December 11, 2005. It will be the 4th cruise for my husband and me, and we purchased six tickets to bring our children along for our 40th anniversary celebration. I booked this cruise in May based on the itinerary – Galveston, Montego Bay, Georgetown, Cozumel, Galveston. There were many other choices with various cruise lines, but we wanted to go to Montego Bay, Jamaica. Last week I went online to pre-register and found that Montego Bay had been changed to Key West. What was the reason? Royal Caribbean had docking conflicts in Montego Bay. Shouldn’t that have been worked out before posting the itinerary? Had the change been made for safety reasons, I would have been disappointed, but would have understood. Changing the itinerary due to the cruise line’s lack of planning is something else entirely. There were a number of cruises offering Key West that we could have chosen originally, but did not because we have been there. I spoke directly with a Royal Caribbean representative about the change. She put me on hold for 15 minutes, and returned to read from a legal document that basically said the cruise line could change the itinerary for any reason at any time, and the passengers had no recourse. This person did nothing to make me feel better. What if I bought an airline ticket to Phoenix, but that airline had too many flights to that airport, so they dropped me off in Colorado Springs? That is ludicrous for airlines, but apparently permissible for cruise lines. However, RC is the first I’ve heard of who changed the purchased itinerary for other than safety reasons. What is there to prevent cruise lines from listing itineraries they never intend to fulfill? Does anyone keep statistics on how often cruise lines change itineries for other than safety reasons? I feel duped and cheated. Click this link to e-mail the message author: Email User

Comment On This

Do you want to take a vacation and have an awful time? Do you want to spend a lot of money for a vacation only to find out you would have rather flushed that money down the toilet? If your answer is yes to the above questions then I suggest that you take a cruise on Royal Caribbean.

8 of us from work decided a year ago to save our money and take a nice cruise to Bermuda on Royal Caribbean......WRONG!!!!!!!!!! When we docked in Bermuda we spent the first day on the beaches. On the way back we were in a bus accident, thank God none of us were hurt badly, we basically just got a few cuts.

To make a very long story short.........The police came onboard that night to take our statements about the accident. It was when we were at dinner when they showed up. They went to the main desk asking for us and instead of paging us or looking up what dinner seating we had they basically did nothing other than left a message on our phone telling us the police were onboard for our statements and that they would be back the next day at 10:00 A.M.

We knew that 10:00 would be too late since we wanted to take the Ferry and go over to Hamilton for some sightseeing and shopping. We asked the desk to please call the police dept. and tell them to come onboard at 9:00. The following day we find out that they NEVER called them and we ended up waiting until 11:30 when we finally said, "Forget this the ship is leaving here at 4:00 P.M. and we haven't even seen Hamilton yet so we went back to our cabins, got ready and left the ship.

We had 1 1/2 hours to see Hamilton before we had to get back on the Ferry in order to make it back to the ship on time before it departed. As we got back on some of our names were being paged, when we answered the page we were told that the police are onboard to take our statements.

The communication between the Royal Caribbean employees to us and the police were awful. I spoke to a woman from Royal Caribbean and the bottom line was this..........The staff are NOT obligated to page or find you onboard, they do though have to leave a message on your phone in the cabin.

Now, like I said to the women on the phone, "if we had committed a crime and the police were onboard looking for us DON'T TELL ME that the staff wouldn't have done everything in their power to find us". Also why is it that they didn't page us the first night that the police came but they surely paged us the next day an hour before the ship was to leave.

I am SO disappointed in Royal Caribbean and their unprofessional staff not to mention that we lost an entire day because of their lack of communication. We all saved up all year long for this trip only to have it ruined by them.

I have heard a few bad things about Royal Caribbean but I decided to go anyway (MY MISTAKE). I have been online reading not so good things about them I had only wished that I would have read all of these articles before wasting my money.

Royal Caribbean you got us this time but it will NEVER happen again, thanks for a cruise that none of us will EVER forget!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! People before booking with them PLEASE go online and research the things that I have read about them AFTER I got home.

And also, I am not on here to get a free cruise from Royal Caribbean nor do I want a discount because using them again will never happen and I told the representative this on the phone.

Posted by Karen at 4:16 PM