Originally posted by bemily
HI!
Has anyone ever booked with just a guarantee? We are on the 12/26 Wonder, which was virtually sold out at the time I booked, i was told, and was given a Cat 6 or higher guarantee??
Just wondering if by chance if we will end up with the Walt Disney Suite
???
THANKS!
I booked in a GTY category and was upgraded, but that was in early 2000. We received an excellent cabin, but it wasn't a suite.
Keep in mind that there are 140 Cat 6, 116 Cat 5, and 80 Cat 4 cabins. There are 18 cat 3, 2 Cat 2, and 2 Cat 1 suites, so the statistics don't look that promising for an upgrade that jumps that many levels.
Here's my understanding of how the Guaranty status works:
Suppose there is a total of 100 cabins available in a category.
DCL takes reservations for that category until it gets to a predetermined level, for instance, 95. If they still get booking requests for that category, they place them in a GTY status, up until another predetermined upper level, for instance, 110.
From many past booking experiences, they know that there will be several people that have to cancel their reservations just before the final payment date at 60 days before the cruise date. Let's suppose they have seen an average of about 10% cancellations in the past. So they can figure that they can accept up to 110 bookings for the original count of 100 cabins. If they have those 110 reservations with the first 95 being assigned cabin numbers, the remaining 15 will be in GTY status. After the final payment date, lets say that 10% of the 110 bookings did cancel (11 cancels), so now there are 99 bookings left, with the last 15 needing to be assigned cabins, so no upgrades are needed.
Now let's suppose that the numbers are all the same except cancellations were closer to 5%, so only 6 people cancelled. Now we have 104 bookings with 100 cabins with the last 15 needing cabin assignments. This means that 4 people will have to be upgraded to a higher category.
I'm sure there are cut off levels where they would know that if they took additional GTY bookings for a category, it would almost certainly mean that an upgrade would have to be given, so they wouldn't accept more bookings above that level, which I'm estimating to be 110 cabins.
There are lots of other factors involved that I didn't account for, but that's my understanding of how it works.
I'm sure you'll enjoy your 'at least cat 6' cruise.
hope that helps
)
