I want a refund, not a Royal Caribbean credit
A: Like most other cruise lines, Royal Caribbean offered a full refund or a 125% cruise credit after the pandemic. You chose the 125% cruise credit. Now, in a perfect world, Royal Caribbean would have allowed you to change your mind and get a full refund. But once you decided to take the credit, the usual terms would have applied. The most important of the terms is the expiration: You have two years to use the cruise credit. Here are the other rules: www.royalcaribbean.com/faq/topics/ onboard-cruise-credit-offer.
Royal Caribbean should have offered you the full 125% cruise credit quickly. But in the chaos of the
Q: In 2019, my wife Sandy and I booked a Royal Caribbean cruise to New England and Canada. This plan was to celebrate a special occasion, our upcoming 50th wedding anniversary. We were scheduled to leave in May, but Royal Caribbean canceled the cruise and offered us either a refund or a 125% cruise credit. We asked for the credit.
In May, Royal Caribbean issued a cruise credit for just $1,260 — $841 less than the $2,101 the cruise line had promised. I called and spoke to representatives on three different days to request a refund and obtain an explanation for how our cruise credit had been miscalculated. Shortly after ending the phone conversation with the last representative, I received an email notification from Royal Caribbean showing a new credit of $1,681 (that’s a 100% cruise credit).
Royal Caribbean refuses to explain the miscalculation of the cruise credit and will not refund our cruise. We feel that a refund from Royal Caribbean is justified. Can you help us get a refund? — Rich Kanuchok, Baltimore
mass cancellations, it did not. You asked your travel adviser, the cruise line and finally the cruise line’s executives to give you the full 125%. But the results were the same.
Should you be able to change your mind on a refund if Royal Caribbean can’t do what it promised? I think that’s debatable. One thing is for certain, though. The cruise line needs to either give you the full 125% cruise credit or a refund.
I like the way you handled your case. You started with your travel adviser but then escalated directly to the cruise line and then contacted the executives. I list the names, numbers and email addresses of Royal Carib
bean’s managers on my consumer advocacy site at www.elliott.org/companycontacts/royal-caribbean/. You also kept almost everything in writing, which allowed you to have a paper trail of the correspondence between you and the cruise line.
In the end, granting you a refund was up to Royal Caribbean. I contacted the cruise line on your behalf. It sent you the $2,101 cruise credit it promised via your travel agent.