This is my airlines story, and it is no better than any of the previous ones on this string.
My family and I were making our third attempt at going on a cruise to Alaska as the first two were cancelled by COVID. The third attempt was scheduled for a May 2022 departure. In every attempt to cruise, I had Norwegian Cruise Lines (NCL) schedule our airlines flights to and from the ship as part of the package; this will become an issue.
Roughly 30 days prior to departure NCL sent an e-mail with the itinerary for our flights through Alaskan Airlines. It was to be a straight through flight with side-by-side seats so I could properly care for my special needs son. I was instructed to log into the Alaskan Airlines web page and confirm my seating along with any other needs such as my sons wheelchair and transport issues. Within that week I accessed the site and completed all the processing. Evidently within a day or two of my confirmation Alaskan cancelled the flight, but did not notify me; instead they notified NCL who booked it. I was unaware of the cancellation until just days prior to departure, when I was logging back into the Alaskan portal to choose our dining selections for the trip. They indicated the flight was cancelled and a refund sent (to NCL) weeks previous. The airlines indicated to me that it is policy to notify the agency or person reserving the flight, not the people flying (?).
WARNING: If the cruise line schedules your flights, they are the one who receives the flight cancellation, not you. This can be compounded when they agree to the refund but do not notify us. They also did not reschedule us on a replacement flight (?).
I just happened to see the problem when I logged into my NCL on-line account. Looking at my flight information 5 days prior to departure, they did not have anything for any departure flight(s)… no flight to the ship,… none. I called NCL and they did not have an answer as to why they asked for a refund but did not reschedule a flight(?) They also could not tell me why I was not notified (?). They then tried to get answers but after two hours on and off hold and numerous systems excuses said they would call me back in an hour or two once they figured out the problem and a solution. They never called me back.
Now being an urgent issue, I called back the next day. After being transferred to several different people I was finally told that they did see a Delta Airlines flight in my plan now with a connector in St. Paul to Seattle. I asked them when it was posted to my plan and why I was not notified?. They indicated it was posted the previous day (after my call), but had no idea how the error occurred or why I was not notified of the new flight arrangements. I expressed my concern over having to rework everything through Delta on a very short notice. I was then instructed to go on-line and confirm the Delta reservation and work with them on my son’s wheelchair and conditional needs. At that time I found that NCL reserved three individual seats, none of them together (which is a necessity for my son). I immediately called Delta to talk to someone to resolve the seating issue. After over an hour wait, they were unable to reassign to joint seating because of the last minute booking done by NCL. In this case Delta gave me the NCL party line speech about no guarantee of side by side seating. Then they told us that we could sit together if we upgraded to first class ($2,000.00 more, which they said was non-refundable since it was an NCL reservation package deal). Since we were fully committed now and had to sit with my special needs son, we were resigned to accept the upgrade (thanks a lot Delta).
WARNING: If you choose to have the cruise line set up your flights, beware! Several things they do not tell you is while you are guaranteed to fly together, that does not mean together, it means on the same plane, but not necessarily side by side together. I suppose that may be the reason why they did not call me back after obtaining a last minute replacement flight (lack of a straight through flight, or lack of seating with my son as needed.)
At this point everything finally appeared to be going good until the airlines sent us a text on the day of departure at 15 minutes after midnight telling us our first flight from Columbus to St. Paul was delayed by 4 hours. This created a crisis as the delay would not let us connect with the next flight from St. Paul to Seattle to get us to the ship. I immediately called the NCL Emergency Line but they could not help find a way to the ship after looking through 6 different airports. After several more phone calls to various NCL POC’s throughout the night nobody was able to assist us (most likely because of the time of night when the problem occurred).
The end result was nobody had a plane flight that could arrive in Seattle prior to the ship’s departure; so we lost out on a cruise again. And don’t even get me started with travel insurance! So far after a great amount of time and persistence, I 've received around 70% of the money back, but I am still in the process of trying to get the rest of my money back from NCL and Delta.
We are D-O-N-E with cruises and now all together DONE with any flying for the near future!
Ben / DRUMS01
