Black Friday sales have introduced tremendous savings opportunities on a Royal Caribbean cruise, along with two particularly frustrating bugs.
Since Royal Caribbean kicked off its early Black Friday deals, there has been a coincidental introduction of two issues that have remained problematic.
There's no correlation that the issues have anything to do with the launch of the sale. Rather, the start of the problems coincides with the new promo.
If you've experienced either of these two issues, you are not alone.
Balance due error
The worst of the two problems has been a strange billing discrepancy that warns of a cancelled cruise.
A variety of different cruisers reported this bug, where the person gets an email from Royal Caribbean informing them there is a balances due on an upcoming cruises, with a reminder that failure to pay in full would result in a cancellation.
The issue is this is happening for cruises that have already been paid off in full. The first report was posted on November 12.
Skeet100 shared an example of the bug, "I canceled and rebooked a few things through cruise planner when the early Black Friday sales came up. "
"As each of those refunds post to my credit card, they are also being subtracted by Royal from my booking. So suddenly my paid in full booking now shows hundreds due."
The result has been cruisers spending hours on the phone in order to try to resolve the issue. " I have spent over 7 hours on the phone with various representatives trying to get this resolved. They actually charged my credit card over $1,000 without my permission to try to fix their mistakes. I'm extremely frustrated with this issue and it is still not resolved," wrote LuvsCruising.
The working theory among cruise fans is this bug occurs when someone tries to cancel and rebook a pre-cruise add-on via the Cruise Planner website.
bobbydx wrote, "I think this is validation that they have some sort of mix up when refunding and actually are refunding what you paid for your cruise instead of what you paid for planner items. That is why it turns around and says you owe money for the cruise."
To be clear, not everyone that has cancelled and re-booked something in Royal Caribbean's Cruise Planner site has experienced this issue.
Similar issues were reported on a Reddit thread.
As a result of going through this exercise, Southern Dan warned others not to bother re-pricing things to avoid this potential issue, "I got my issue straightened out. I will no longer be repricing anything during Black Friday sales, I will just wait to purchase everything then."
If you receive an email with money owed on a cruise you know you've paid off, you'll want to reach out to your travel agent immediately to resolve it.
I would recommend getting the issue addressed as soon as possible, as some reported their entire cruise being cancelled if action isn't taken quick enough.
PRMLVM shared their experience, "Our travel agent got a balance due warning on our upcoming cruise. She showed them that the cruise was actually completely paid off. This was after the final payment date, even."
"But then at the end of October, we got a slew of emails canceling all of our pre-booked packages (drinks, dining, key) etc since our cruise was canceled."
Luckily their travel agent was able to confirm the cruise wasn't cancelled, but they had rebook all their add-ons at prevailing prices, re-reserve all dining venues, and lost their original check-in time.
"Many phone calls and tons of lost time fixing a problem they created. We did get onboard credit to apply to the higher package prices, but the stress of all of it."
"And we still have not gotten our refund from their cancellations. They said to give them a month. Meantime, it's all on our card still."
Spanish language change
The other notable issue with Royal Caribbean's site lately is not nearly as dire, but still annoying to users.
Some have run into inexplicable changes in the site language to Spanish.
Once again, the issue is primarily limited to the Cruise Planner site where users can purchase drink packages, shore excursions, and other extras.
The main menu and other aspects of the site change to Spanish without the user selecting that language.
"I've been having this issue for a while now. The whole website isn't in Spanish but some of the "headers" in the Cruise Planner are," wrote WAAAYTOOO.
Tracy F added, "Same thing is happening with my app and the website all of a sudden certain things are in Spanish."
So far there does not appear to be a fix or way around it that anyone has reported.
