“Very rough start with little help from Princess reps, wonderful once on the boat”
When traveling to Alaska in July, we were informed the night before departure that the few days of land options we had booked prior to getting on the boat had been cancelled. This email came after offices were closed and there was no way to get in touch with anyone from Princess, but our flights were less than 12 hours away. We went to sleep and got to the airport as normal, although we were continuing to try to get in touch with Princess to ask what we should do. We had already taken our 1st flight and were boarding our 2nd before we got off hold and to a person, but that person could not tell us what would happen once our plane landed, what the cruise had planned for everyone that would now be stuck for a few days. They did say to continue flying though, because the land portion of the trip was cancelled because of wildfire. If we didn't board the plane as expected, the cruise could consider this event an act of God, and we may possibly get no money back. We continued our flight to Alaska, and after traveling all day met the Princess team at the airport for our transfer to hotel. They had no answers for us except to get on the bus. At the hotel we talk to the Princess desk. We've traveled all day, tried to get in touch with Princess anytime we weren't in the air, and had no answers. The workers at the desk had no answers to things like, do we have a hotel tomorrow, or the few days before we get on the cruise? When will our money towards those excursions be returned to our credit card? How much will we be reimbursed for hotel rooms we now need to book for the nights until we embark? They tell us to head to bed, and they will have answers in the morning. As you can imagine, Alaska doesn't have endless hotel rooms, we were in Anchorage. The few hotel options available were quickly booked, but hotels seemed to catch drift quickly too, and those that were normally $200 or so a night quickly went to $1000 per night. For the days prior to embarking the boat, we got very little information from Princess at the desk at our first hotel, through customer service on the phone, nothing really. Once we finally got to the boat, it was wonderful and the crew there really was at expectation as far as housekeeping, meals, shows, etc. You can imagine that customer service on the boat had a line any time they were open because so many people had questions about their changed itinerary, when they'd be refunded for things they didn't get to do, or reimbursed for things they had to do in order to have a place to stay. While on ship credits were offered to many, there is only so much crap you want that says Princess cruises on it. I really would have thought that there would have been some sort of contingency plan for events like this so that passengers could know more about the steps of getting them back into their trip, to the boat, etc. If that did exist, it was never obvious to us.
