Booked Cruise on RCCL.com, no e-mail confirmation

[southlake]

Hi,

I booked my cruise last night directly on RCCL.com (with the intention of moving it over to Costco Travel).. and never even got an e-mail from Royal Caribbean confirming that I had just booked a very expensive cruise. I double-checked every form of contact in my profile on their site, and my e-mail is correct. No, nothing went to spam.

I called RCCL today to ask if I should have been sent something, and the girl I spoke with said yes and didn't know why I didn't receive anything. She said she'd send it again. I got it the second time, but the e-mail body was addressed to my toddler daughter's name, not mine. (?) The booking confirmation PDF attached to the e-mail had everyone's name correct, though.

Has anyone had this happen? Do you normally receive an e-mail right away upon booking?

Also when I try to fill out the form to transfer my reservation to Costco, it says my reservation number can't be found. It's been 23 hours since I booked the cruise. When I login to RCCL, my cruise is there, but the transfer form is not recognizing my Reservation Number!

 

[cleophus12]

RC's tech department is notoriously slow. I think they generally tell you it may take 24 hours for your reservation to show up in their system. Give it a full day, and then call again if you don't see it.

 

[southlake]

Thanks, the form started working this morning!

 

[kerry1379]

I just booked our first cruise on RCCL through their website and had a similar issue. Not only did I not receive an email confirmation of the cruise and the deposit paid but I did receive an email from Royal Caribbean the next day that basically said "Why didn't you book with us? Come back!" What??? When I logged in, my reservation number showed up fine. When I called they had the correct information and sent the confirmation to me then. The person I talked to also had no idea why I got the weird email (and I have gotten a second weird one too). So it does sound like something is a little off with their website and booking.

 

[southlake]

Thanks, kerry1379, glad to know I'm not the only one. Your experience sounds just like mine..

 

[moericus]

A similar issue happened to us last November. We booked a cruise directly through RCCL.com with an incredible deal. Everything was fine. Deposit went through CC. My Cruises section was updated, etc... Had no idea I didn't get a confirmation email at the time.

Next day I get an email saying why didn't finish your selection? I just deleted it not thinking anything about it. I knew they had already taken my deposit, what could go wrong?

Month or so later we are figuring out the budget and when our next cruise payment would be. I log into RCCL.com and see our cruise but the total price was now several hundreds of dollars more. I forget exactly how much but it was basically rack rates.

I called customer service. And to RCCL's credit the guy on the phone was extremely nice and didn't question what even I considered a wild claim at the time. It took him a while to find the originally negotiated price (maybe an hour on the phone), but he did find it. For what it's worth, he did seem to do some kind of work finding it. I don't think this was some kind BS/stall tactic you get from the Cable company service rep.

He put the original price back on the cruise. I noticed much later I lost the $100 onboard credit that I was also supposed to get, but at that point I didn't want to risk losing reservations we were setting in advance of our sail with a cancel/rebook. The $100 didn't seem worth it to me that much.

So long story short, RCCL's site is still HORRIBLE. Cruise was phenomenal. . I don't believe RCCL purposefully tried to swindle me although it did cross my mind. And from now on I will be printing out the confirmation page they tell you to print out for your records.

 

[bumbershoot]

That price increase thing is a well known glitch. That's why they were able to take care of it. You definitely should have called to get the OBC back!

Now it's never happened to me, but to many on cruisecritic.

And yes Royal sends weird emails. Often. I'm fairly sure that disney's underpaid interns are moonlighting as even more underpaid interns at Royal. A friend of ours once applied for an IT internship at Disney and wasn't accepted. Imo it's because he was too good. That was around 5 years ago; he's now about 26 and is well on his way to management at Amazon in an IT-related field, so he would have been a quality addition to Disney. That's why they didn't want him lol. He would ever ever have gotten into Royal IT. Way too good.

 

[moericus]

A friend of ours once applied for an IT internship at Disney and wasn't accepted. Imo it's because he was too good.

5 years ago was about the time Disney decided to lay off their IT staff and make their severance contingent on training their Indian H1B Visa holders replacements. (And people still wonder "how" Trump won... ugh) I think your friend was lucky not to get involved with that.