Princess POLAR booking glitch

PRINCESS Cruises has apologised to travel agents after its key trade booking portal went down for several hours amid strong demand for the 2023 World Cruise, which went on sale for top-tier past passengers yesterday.

A number of Cruise Weekly readers expressed their frustration at the issues, which appear to reemerge every time a highly anticipated itinerary is released for bookings.

“It is one of the very rare sales opportunities for trade and the day has been a disaster,” one top selling agent told CW.

Princess Cruises Director of Sales & Marketing, Nick Ferguson, attributed the strong interest in the voyage to the “amazing job our trade partners have done in pre-registering their clients,” confirming the cruise line had experienced “intermittent technical issues impacting bookings made via Polar Online, the contact centre and to our website”.

Ferguson apologised for the problems, adding that as a goodwill gesture, Princess would retrospectively add a $50 per booking bonus commission “given the extra administration caused by these technical issues”.

He also noted that if an agents’ clients booked directly with Princess outside of office hours or at some other point yesterday “we’ll transfer those bookings back across in the coming days as requested”.

The early release of the 2023 World Cruise as well as a yearlong program of four local ships

(CW 18 Feb) had generated unprecedented demand, Ferguson said.