Princess Cruise Lines review: Financial compensation

To Whom it May Concern,

Per your call on Nov 22, 2023, I am writing to you today to discuss a recent trip my husband and I took with Princess Cruise Line. This trip should have been the trip of a lifetime, however, it turned into one of great stress and anxiety. As you’ll see in the details following, we have post-traumatic stress from the events that took place as we began our trip. To this day, I am tearful when discussing the events of our trip and hope by sending this letter we can get some closure, and assurance that this will never happen to another customer.

To set out for our princess cruise, my husband and I (both 74 years of age), set foot at five airports before arriving at our port destination. We left our home at 1:30pm on September 28, 2023 and traveled through the night, changing flights at 9:30pm and 1230am in two of the busiest airports in the US. We arrived at our final port destination at 1:30 pm on September 29, 2023. We flew from Kansas City, MO to Chicago IL, then west to Denver CO, then back east to New Jersey, then finally landing in Quebec. We had no food, with the exception of the tiny airline wafer, from 4:30pm on Sept 28th until 7:00 am on Sept 29th. The lack of food, while very uncomfortable, was the least of our concerns.

My husband and I have been on other cruises and enjoyed them. But this cruise, when asked about it, our reply has been “the cruise was good but the travel to Quebec, Canada was pure hell”. It started at the beginning of January, 2023 when we, along with three other couples, signed up for the cruise leaving from Quebec Canada. We began working with agent Jeff Stanley to get the eight individuals (four couples) with outer rooms, with a deck, and adjoining. Our flight schedules at original planning had all four couples traveling together, we booked our travel and paid for the trip. Then shortly after our booking, I began receiving e-mails every week or so to tell me of flight changes. This occurred until the end of August. Jeff told us, “don’t worry because flights can change until the day you fly out”. So the four couples watched monthly as our flight schedules with United Airlines were set at different days, different times, and all different cities enroute to Quebec Canada. I received over 14 emails changing our flight times (and schedules) in all. Our schedule, unlike the other couples, was one from hell. The schedule had us leaving Kansas City, MO at 6:08pm, traveling to Chicago, IL and arriving at 9:30pm, then to Denver at 1230am to arrive at New Jersey at 5:30am, to leave New Jersey at 9:30am to fly to Quebec, Canada. From there we were bussed to the ship. While this schedule is horrendous, it’s even worse when we were allowed only 10 minutes to get to the next flight (from Chicago to Denver) in two huge airports and were assigned seats in the back of the planes. We were told leaving our flight in Chicago that our terminal was C3 only to learn upon leaving our plane and racing to terminal C3 that terminal C3 was going to Philadelphia, NOT Denver and our flight had completely changed terminals a half a mile away. We barely made our connecting flight. The connecting flights to our other destinations were just as bad, with mere minutes to make our flights. With God’s help and the goodness of three guardian angel fellow passengers, we made our flights. But because of the flights, we missed eating, and literally ran from flight to flight. We received one small chocolate wafer and a glass of juice even though we flew from Kansas City to Chicago, to Denver, to New Jersey and then to Quebec, on four flights in total.

About 33 days prior to our departure, when we realized our friends were not going to be on the same flight, that we had to leave a day earlier and fly all night long, and make four different flight changes in major airports, I began calling Princess Cruise line asking for suitable alternatives. I received a different person each and every time I called, each reading from a card that the same thing about being unable to change the flights unless you paid an additional $1,200. I was on the phone with Princess for many hours, with the same request to try and condense our flights to a more manageable schedule. I even inquired about cancelling the trip because of the flight schedule, but was told there was no option to cancel unless we were willing to lose all monies paid. I was told I could call United, but when I called United they would only change the schedule after another $2,000 was paid. Long story short, I was not paying additional money and we finally made it to the ship.

The worst of this travel was that my husband, two months prior, was diagnosed with the beginning of Alzheimer’s disease. He is struggling to follow directions, getting lost easily and couldn’t, at times, tell you where he was or where he was going. I do not consider myself a weak person, actually quite the contrary, but I still weep when telling this nightmare for fear that when racing between our flights that I was going to look back and not be able to find my husband. My biggest fear throughout this entire fiasco of trying to get to our connecting flights was that I would lose track of my husband and him not be able to decipher where to go or what to do. While my husband was independent, but he had difficulty in keeping up as we literally ran through each very busy airport, throughout the night, in order to get to our connecting flight.

I cry every time I think of our trip and think of what I did to my husband, who only wanted us to enjoy one good trip before his memory completely left him. With this disease, it robs you of your memory but there are a few things that can help individuals with the highest quality of life possible. Those things include getting plenty of quality sleep, eating nutritious foods, taking necessary supplements, drinking plenty of water and reducing all stress. But horribly, my husband experienced a disruption in every one of these in the very first night of our dream trip. Subsequently, the first night when we finally arrived on our ship, my husband had a breakdown and didn’t realize he was on the ship, and when told so, he worried he was being held captive there. He had many questions and concerns that night and displayed behavior that I have never yet seen in our 53 years of marriage. It took many hours to convince him we were finally at our destination and no more running was required, just to get him to calm and be willing to go on the rest of our vacation. That night we held each other close and cried, making a promise that we would never do this to each other again.

I share our story in hopes that you can do better by us. We should never have been put in a situation such as this where we were traveling for 24 hours in five airports (with very little time to transition between them). No one should experience the travel situation we did, but especially not as two 74-year-olds who were booking the trip with friends. Our friends had the ideal travel experience we should have had. While the cruise itself was beautiful, I will forever consider this trip a nightmare and share our experience with all who ask.

Sincerely,

Steven and Elaine Hoff

Email [protected]@iland.net Cell [protected]

Booking number 4GCPWL

Steven Hoff - member #691407878A

Elaine Hoff - member #691407878B