Buyer Beware! Only Experienced Cruisers should use them if anybody.
Written: Aug 21 '07
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Using Vacations To Go turned out to be a nightmare for my family.
The website creates urgency by putting "Fast Deal" call right away with your credit card or you may lose the deal when in fact (in the case of Royal Caribbean anyway, I didn't investigate any others) the price they quoted and rushed you to buy is the exact same price that is available on the Royal Caribbean website, and the price that remained there for quite some time after we rushed and purchased our trip.
We are inexperienced cruisers and the reason we were taking the trip is because my mom has had Ovarian Cancer which is extremely serious and she was past her last bout of chemo and feeling great. She wanted very badly that everyone in the family go on a cruise together.
We have a family of 6 and that is very expensive for us, but if she wanted that, we were going to do it for her. Because of my mom's illness I asked about cruise insurance at the time that I booked my trip. The person I was speaking to quoted me a price for it but told me I didn't have to worry about it for up to 48 hours before I left on the trip. This was a relief because that was going to be an additional 300 dollars or so, and I was glad that I could pay for it in a different month.
Then the following month, for business reasons, it was looking like my husband wasn't going to be able to go. I contacted my "travel agent". (I use that term lightly because I got very little service from him and he dropped the friendly attitude after the trip was paid for.) I wanted to go ahead and buy the insurance due to my husband's situation. He said business reasons aren't covered. I said, well, my mom isn't feeling very well lately, I think we want to go ahead and buy the insurance anyway. He said "That would be insurance fraud!" I was dumbfounded and angry because I would never commit insurance fraud and he knew from the beginning I was interested in the insurance, but gave no guidance. He said "pre-existing isn't covered. He was not empathetic in the least. His attitude was basically "tough luck". We were very upset, because this was a special trip for my mom and an expensive trip for us and we wanted everyone there. He had no empathy, flat out told us that it was too late to get any of our money back except $91.00 (I think for tax - and this turned out to be untrue) and offfered two solutions. Either we could change his name on the reservation to someone else for a $50.00 fee, or he could try to fly in to one of the ports and meet us if he were unable to go when we departed.
After I got off the phone with him and his attitude I researched cruise insurance and found that if I had purchased cruise insurance within 15 days of booking pre existing would have been covered. Also, with Royal Caribbean there is a program called "Cruise Care" where you can cancel for business reasons and pre-existing conditions and they will give you cruise credits of up to 75% of your investment toward another cruise. My "travel agent" told me nothing about that and even put down on the booking that we "refused" Cruise care, which we never did as we knew absolutely nothing about it.
So I called him back and asked him why he didn't tell me about the 15 day thing, etc., and he said the insurance that he sells doesn't cover pre-existing and if he told us about any other insurances he could lose his job.
We decided that since we had invested so much money that we couldn't get back we were going to substitute my aunt for my husband (a free trip for her since she doesn't have much money and we were misled to believe that we couldn't get any of our money back).
Then my mom's situation became much worse. Her doctor scheduled her for chemo the day after he looked at the CT scan so that she would have enough time to recover from it and feel well enough to take the trip. On the Friday a week before we were to leave on the trip, she had so much fluid around her abdomen that it inhibited her breathing and became very serious. They put her into the hospital and drained the fluid. Still we were hoping to get her well enough to make the trip. By the following Monday she had to be re-hospitalized to drain more fluid. Her doctor told us it would be extremely risky to take the trip at this point because if this fluid kept building up like this it could become life threatening on the trip and they would have to put her off at some port and medivac her to some foreign hospital.
I called my "travel agent" and said, "We are going to have to cancel our trip". He said, "Hold on" and put me on hold. He then came back on and said, "Your trip has been cancelled. You will receive $91.00 back for each of your staterooms." He was cold and haughty. We were very upset and he could not have cared less. Anybody with a heart would have at least shown some empathy that we were having to go through this, etc. He didn't care, didn't ask any questions. That was it.
Since we cancelled inside 8 days, we couldn't get our money back. When he sent the cancellation confirmation via email we learned that if we had cancelled at least 8 days out we could have recieved half our our money back. Buyer beware!
Recommended:
No
What product did you purchase or try to purchase? Cruise
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Epinions.com ID:
chillylester
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Reviews written: 1
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