Saturday afternoon, all of our paperwork came in for the cruise which was a lot faster than I had expected. Going through the paperwork, the flight arrangements were perfect. It got us into Florida with more than enough time to get to the boat. Sweet! Just for my information, I began reading through the cruise brochure which lists things to bring, rules on the ship, restrictions etc. just to make sure we had all of our ducks in a row. Well low and behold I come across this clause:

My heart sank. How could this be? I didn’t see anything when booking the cruise that said anything about pregnancy restrictions. In fact, when I was going through the shore excursion list, most of them had clauses that pregnant women could not participate. I also talked to customer service rep’s at Orbitz multiple times making it very clear that my wife was pregnant. Not once did they say, “sir, please realize that there are restrictions regarding pregnancy and cruising.” If the rep that I spoke to after I booked the cruise would have said that, this would have never happened.

At this point we had no choice but to call Orbitz and cancel the trip. Not even a note from the doctor would get us past this one. And besides, Lindsey would be in her 31st week of pregnancy when we would leave. I know it’s not likely but if she were to go into preterm labor in Mexico, I would probably have a corinary.

I get Orbitz on the phone and explain the situation. They explained to me that if I cancel, I would lose my deposit which was as follows:

I about threw up when he told me this. I then remembered that I had purchased travellers insurance for stuff like this and he said that since this is a medical condition, they should cover it, but the more I thought about it, I shouldn’t have to pay any of this. I had no idea of this restriction. I called Orbitz 3 times mentioning that Lindsey was pregnant and not once did they mention any restrictions. The rep told me that it was out of Orbitz’ hands at this point and any further negotiations had to go through Carnival because that is where the money is and they are the ones that charge the fees. Since I thought that was totally unfair since Orbitz were the ones that screwed up, I continued to argue over the phone until he finally said, “normally there is nothing we can do in a situation like this simply because all we did was sell you the trip. The money went to Carnival; not to us. However, we do realize that there was a mistake on our end in customer service in that we should have said something about the pregnancy restrictions so let’s see what we can do.” At this point, the only way that they were even going to consider giving us all of our money back was if they could find the phone call I made right after I placed the order. This meant talking with their database administrators and manually going through their database to find the call. After 3 days of waiting, they found it! Our odds looked pretty good at this point. The rep that I had been dealing with for the past few days told me that it would take a day or two to research and get this through management because Orbitz would be the one that would have to give us back the money we were about to lose; not Carnival. Carnival could care less about the situation. To them this happens all of the time and I’m sure that if I called them to fight this they would be like, “what? sucks to be you!”

So after I get home from work yesterday I called Orbitz to see where we were at with this dispute. I tried to get the guy I had been dealing with and apparently the phone systems were down in the building that he was in. Great. Now I have to pretty much explain everything I have explained all over again to another rep because there was no way they could contact him. In talking with this woman, she pretty much said “well, it did mention the restri
ctions on the web site before you placed the order. I guess you just didn’t read them.” I about threw the phone across the room. So after arguing over the phone yet again, I asked to speak to a supervisor. So she put me on hold for about 5 minutes or so. She finally came back and said that they could give all money back but $390 which consisted of the fees and I think one deposit. I immediately recanted with “no. this is unacceptable. It’s either all or none.” So, she said yet again, “ok, let me get back with the help desk and explain that to you this is not acceptable.” After about another 5 minutes she came back and said that they were going to give us all of our money back! After a week of fighting this it all paid off. Literally. We got an email this morning with the details of the refund and as it turns out, Carnival is going to get their money, just not from us. Carnival is going to refund us all of the money minues the deposit and the fees I explained above. Orbitz is going to cut us a check for the rest taking it out of their pocket.

Yes, in some ways this was a total disaster. We were so excited about this cruise and it all came crashing down with just the reading of one simple paragraph. Now we just need to decide where we want to go now.

P.S. The travellers insurance would not have covered this particular case because to them, this is something we knew about and should have taken into consideration when booking the trip.

Tags: pregnancy, vacation