The longest cruise that never was

Happy New Year!

We are still down here in South Florida celebrating the holidays with my family.

Our 180-day around the world cruise was cancelled. We have had a couple of long cruises cancelled on us in the past. 28 days in 2003. 32 days in 2001. You'd think we'd get used to it. It no longer really shocks us, but this one has certainly knocked the wind from our sails. So, even though it was not completely unexpected given the crippling fire, it still was a big setback. This should hold our record of longest cruise ever cancelled on us. It will most assuredly also hold the record at 18 months booked as the longest anticipated cruise that never happened for us. Remember that Downsides post I published months ago, that was just borrowed trouble. Pasted below is the cancellation notification we received on December 23, 2014.

Important Update for Insignia

 

Dear Insignia Guests,

We finished our initial repair assessment for Insignia and expect the ship will remain in San Juan for an estimated nine weeks to complete the required work.  Because the time needed is longer than we anticipated, we regrettably must modify our Around the World cruise and cancel the first three segments of the voyage. 

 Three Grand Voyages aboard Insignia, the 126-day Miami to Sydney cruise on January 10, along with the 90-day Cape Town to Sydney and 128-day Cape Town to Los Angeles sailings on February 15, have also been altered.  The modified Grand Voyages and Around the World cruise will now start in Singapore on March 22, 2015, with the ship scheduled to sail the remainder of the original itinerary.

 We understand how disappointing this news must be and sincerely apologize for this unfortunate situation.  We appreciate your understanding, and as our valued guests we would like to provide you with the following options for your consideration.

• Continue with your booking and join the ship in Singapore.  A pro-rata refund will be provided for the cancelled cruise days, along with an additional 25% of the refunded amount in the form of a future cruise credit.  To assist with your travel to the ship, Oceania Cruises will provide complimentary business class airfare to Singapore and a one-night pre-cruise hotel stay. 
• Cancel your booking and receive a full refund and a 25% future cruise credit associated with the pro-rata cruise fare on the three canceled segments. 

 Please contact us with your selection by Friday, January 16, 2015.  After this date, standard cancellation penalties will apply.  The future cruise credit is valid for bookings made before June 30, 2015 with a sail date prior to December 31, 2016.   

You may use a portion of your refund or future cruise credit towards a selection of Oceania Cruises voyages departing in January, February and March.  We have special pricing on select cruises, many of which are timed so you could enjoy an Oceania Cruises vacation before the revised March 22, 2015 start date for the Around the World cruise and three Grand Voyages. 

To discuss available options, we kindly ask that you to call the Insignia Guest Assistance Hotline at 1-866-765-3622 or 786-322-7990. 

Once again, our deepest apologies and we hope to welcome you aboard an Oceania Cruises ship soon.

 Sincerely,

Crane Gladding
Senior Vice President, Passenger Services

 

So, we cancelled the remaining back half of the around the world cruise on December 23, 2014 and we are still waiting to see a cancellation invoice. We expect to be refunded the entire amount of our final invoice but that remains to be seen at this point since Oceania seems to be unable to produce invoices or do the math required are the excuses we've had to date. We have each spent about one full day cancelling side trips, day trips, overnight trips, overland trips, safaris, rental cars, etc. I can report that it takes a lot less time to book these things than it does to cancel them, even with Christmas in the mix. We have been able to recover quite a bit of our financial outlay for these extras we booked for our time circling the globe but we will lose thousands that cannot be recovered. Our largest affiliated outlay that remains up in the air is the trip insurance policy we bought last July. At about $8800 it was the riskiest expense we had. If the cruise line cancels you have insured nothing, yet the insurance company scores a win because you have now insured nothing. You cannot cancel the policy and get your premium refunded. Clay did call because although the fine print did not say so, I believed that you could transfer the policy to another trip within certain rules. Allianz did confirm that they have a 770 rule that allows a transfer within 770 days of the policy's purchase. Given the 25% promised future cruise credit and the potential complete loss of the insurance premium we both spent some time looking for another trip of some kind at some time next year. On Christmas Day, I found a 41-day cruise from New York to Stockholm via Montreal on Oceania's Marina. (This is not an R-class ship like Insignia, so I felt a little more secure about it.) By the day after Christmas I woke up feeling happier than I had felt in a couple of days. Mom noticed and asked what was up. I told her and Clay about the trip I had found. Clay quickly pointed out the downside of flying home from Stockholm. I agreed and he found another Marina cruise about 3 weeks later that sails from Stockholm to London that had a few new ports. I can tolerate the direct Heathrow to RDU AA flight, and we figured we could find lots to do and see during that interval between Oceania cruises, so we decided to get a quote. And there all our plans came to another screeching halt. There were lost emails, miscommunications and misunderstandings, an Oceania inability to produce invoices or perform math. Don't ask me to explain because I am overwhelmed and baffled. I hate to accuse of Oceania of acting in bad faith after holding our money for the past year and a half but that is really all I am left with. They are either incompetent or bad dealing and neither is a happy situation with our sizeable financial commitment to them right now. So, we are being told to wait. We are being told that for some reason that final payment on the NY-Stockholm cruise is this week. We have already missed an important for us AA deadline on booking flights since we have no information from Oceania. Now even though they can't produce a cancellation invoice or a final and accurate new invoice (only brochure prices) we are being told that if we don't make final payment this week we will lose our booking. OK. We absolutely will not pay Oceania any new money until we have our old money back since evidently the math required to just deduct the new money from the owed refund is beyond expectations. So, our bookings for our replacement cruises will expire and we'll have to take our chances later. We cannot book any time sensitive airline tickets or affiliated excursions or a Norweigian fjords cruise during the interval between. Time will tell whether we'll be able to put this trip together as to when Oceania completes the math and produces invoices.

 

I expect I'll post further news as it breaks, but for all intents and purposes this is now a dead blog. Sorry for the disappointment. I may delete the entire blog at some point, but for now I'll leave it up as a object lesson to anyone searching the Internet about world cruises on how wrong things can go.