In TIL today, (which could be common knowledge for my NCL peeps but this was a first time for me
): When booking NCL shore excursions where multiple people will be taking the same excursion, all people on the excursion have to be booked the same way - either prepaid or held for onboard payment; can't prepay one and then try to reserve to pay on board, at least according to the rep I just had. She did seem knowledgeable and explained it was a problem with a check mark in the system that applies to everyone on the reservation and can't be separated out individually if it's the same tour number. Apparently us booking at different times doesn't matter.
This is a bizarre system limitation, especially since they've had this Shore Excursion promotion for a few years now. (she said they're still working on a coupon code type idea so they can book it as prepaid. I question the dedication of the IT team to this concept if it's been 3-4 years and can't get a coupon code out, but I digress)
Here's what we were doing. Couple months back with the AmEx offer for NCL to spend $500 get $150 I booked a few excursions for myself to get me over the threshold. I held off booking some for hubby since we chose the $50 per port shore excursion credit and that's only applied onboard. You can prepay for the excursion but you'd pay full price upfront and then they give you a $50 OBC to compensate. I wasn't interested in having OBC to use, I just want to pay less now
They give you an option to call in to redeem the credit so I assumed they were able to apply the promo in some manual way that the online shopping cart couldn't.
NOPE
Apparently how they worked it was to allow phone reps to reserve the tour without payment and the $50 OBC is applied on board as normal.
Fortunately I had a tour not booked at all that we both want to do so it'll work out for us in the end where $50 OBC for the one port I prepaid will cancel out the $50 "extra" I'll be paying onboard that I didn't plan to. But this lowers the amount of spend towards the CIP MSR I calculated.
It's not much of a problem, it's less than $100, but it would have been so much cleaner to have it all prepaid before we arrived so I could use it for the bonus. So the thing I actually have the money in place to pay right now, I have to wait to give it to them!
Although maybe I'll buy some OBC to cover the remaining charge and I can put that on the CIP. Gah, something else to think about. (totally firstworldproblems but I was trying to check something off the list not replace it
) But I keep telling myself it's worth it to save $300 on tours.
and Welcome....this thread does move fast...lol
)
