I wrote both an email and a detailed complaint letter (USPS) to Carnival Cruise Lines back in early May. The postal letter was sent by my travel agent with her cover letter. To date, May 22th, I have not received even an acknowledgment from Carnival. Accordingly, I will go public with it.
My wife and I had booked an 8 day Caribbean cruise on the Carnival legend sailing from Ft. Lauderdale on 3/27. We also booked the round trip airplane flights between Ft. Lauderdale and our local airport (Santa Ana Airport, CA). The flight to Ft. Lauderdale was on 3/25 and the homebound flight was on 4/5. Finally, we also booked hotel rooms in Ft. Lauderdale for the nights of 3/25,3/26 and 4/4. The Carnival booking office handled all of this plus the transfers between airport, hotel, and ship. This vacation was booked in June at Liberty Travel in Saratoga Springs, NY. We did this in coordination with 5 other family members who lived in the Saratoga Springs area. For this, we fully paid Carnival more than $4,200 in January two months before the sailing date.
The first hint of impending trouble was two weeks before the vacation start when Carnival failed to deliver our travel document package as promised by our travel agent. My wife and I then grew frantic as day after day passed without the travel document package delivery. We, of course, kept our travel agent informed of this problem with phone calls. Finally, our travel agent informed us that the delay of the travel document package was happening because Carnival had not booked the airplane flights yet! This was astounding as everything had been paid two months ago. Only days before vacation start our travel agent said the airplane flights had been booked but Carnival would not deliver our travel document package due to some unspecified problem! As a substitute Carnival did fax two pages of Guest Confirmation notes (but no vouchers). Our travel agent then over nighted these to us just days before our airplane flight. When my wife and I read the two faxed pages we again were astounded to read that our return flight to Santa Ana Airport was not leaving from Ft. Lauderdale but from Miami 20-30 miles from our hotel! Thinking about this whole situation, it now appears that Carnival was trying to increase their profit at our expense by waiting to the last minute to book airplane flights even though we had paid a goodly sum for the flights in advance! THIS FAILURE TO DELIVER OUR TRAVEL DOCUMENTATION PACKAGE RESULTED IN ALL THE AGONY WE ENCOUNTERED.
I will now provide a detailed summary of these unfortunate events. We arrived at the Santa Ana Airport early for our flight to Ft. Lauderdale on March 25th. We went to the Continental Airline ticket counter and almost fainted when the agent there told us that we had no assigned seats but were on standby! Since we had paid for our vacation more than 2 months earlier, this was negligence of the worse type. Finally, after hearing our sad story, the sympathetic agent found us two assigned seats from some type of secretive block of seats they keep for emergencies. Fortunately, the flight from Santa Ana to Houston was uneventful. Unfortunately, however, the connecting flight to Ft. Lauderdale took off two hours late resulting in a late arrival at Ft. Lauderdale Airport. It was 10pm by the time we picked up our luggage in the baggage claim area. There was NO Carnival representative to meet us as we had been told by our travel agent. There were no messages left for us so basically Carnival just dumped us at the airport without any transport to our hotel. We had to call our hotel, the Marriott Marina in Ft. Lauderdale, for assistance and advice. They told us to use a taxicab which we did. It cost us $15 (with tip).
Our troubles had just begun. When we arrived at the hotel, the registration clerk asked us for our Carnival vouchers. Of course, we had none as Carnival had screwed up as described before. After a half-hour of negotiations with the hotel registration clerk and her manager we convinced them that we were really Carnival guests. The hotel stay for the next two days was very enjoyable. On March 27th (sailing day), my wife and I, plus the other Hoenig family members and a Carnival representative, waited in the hotel lobby for the Carnival bus to transfer us to the Carnival Legend. We waited and waited. Finally, an hour after the scheduled pickup, the bus arrived. Again, we had to negotiate with the bus driver as we had no vouchers! The bus then took us to the Carnival terminal building. Being late, there was a huge, huge line of people waiting to be processed for boarding. The processing actually moved quite well. Of course, we encountered another problem when an official wanted our vouchers! Again, we explained how Carnival had screwed up and we had never received our travel document package. He was satisfied to take our booking number and we boarded the Legend.
The cruise itself was very nice. My wife and I enjoyed the service and amenities. After the cruise ended we got off the ship at the Port Everglades terminal and found a place amid the chaos to board the Carnival bus to take our party of 7 Hoenig family members back to the Marriott Marina hotel. Again, we had to negotiate with the bus driver as we had no vouchers! At the Marriott Marina hotel, fortunately, we were not hassled any more as they knew of our previous problems. The next morning was flight day back to our home in California. My wife and I were so worried by the combination of the previous unreliability of Carnival buses and the 20-30 mile distance to the Miami Airport that we decided to take no chance of missing our airplane and took a taxi instead. This cost us $72.75 (with tip). By the way, my other 5 Hoenig family members were also worried and also decided to take a taxi to Ft. Lauderdale Airport for their flight back to upstate NY. When we arrived at the Miami Airport, we were told that our American Airlines connecting flight from Miami to Nashville was cancelled due to mechanical problems! The AA agent rebooked us on other flights taking us to Dallas and then Santa Ana Airport. However, we did arrive 3 hours later than originally expected. We were so glad to be home!
Robert
Huntington Beach, California
U.S.A.
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