A man books a Panama Canal cruise through a travel agent for $2,369, pays his bill on time, but then watches his booking disappear two days later.
I paid $2,369 for a Panama Canal cruise with Princess Cruises through a travel agent last year. My wife Norma and I made a deposit and then paid the final balance one day before the due date.
When our travel agent called Princess, a customer service representative told her we were in default for nonpayment and owed approximately $2,000 more. Where was this new $2,000 charge coming from? Nobody at Princess could tell us. After weeks of calls and emails to various Princess representatives, including their director of customer relations and VP of guest services, the mystery finally unraveled.
Apparently, we were being charged for a “Princess Plus” upgrade that cost $1,440 — a 62% price increase we never authorized and didn’t even know about. It turns out my wife tried to upgrade to Princess Plus, an optional add-on package that bundles several onboard amenities into a single daily price, through the website.
The system returned an error message saying the purchase didn’t go through and instructed her to either contact the travel agent or pay for the upgrade onboard. We followed the system’s advice and planned to handle it on the ship. Yet somehow, Princess was now treating us as if we’d purchased this upgrade and never paid for it. They canceled our reservation and kept $1,298 of our money as a cancellation fee.
This feels less like a billing problem and more like a system failure that the company is exploiting. I’m a retired accountant. I know how computer systems work. When someone’s account shows “no balance due” and their travel agent can’t see a pending charge either, something is catastrophically wrong with Princess’s infrastructure.
The company is hiding behind system failures they should have fixed. — Robert Battaglia, Oro Valley, Ariz. When your final payment went through, your account should have been settled. If the system later discovered a phantom charge that nobody could document or explain, Princess needed to contact you before taking action.
Not after — before. Instead, Princess relied on a billing system that gave conflicting information to different employees. Your travel agent couldn’t see the charge. The Princess customer service representative couldn’t explain what you supposedly owed.
The company’s own portal told your wife the upgrade purchase failed. Yet somehow, all of this added up to a cancellation and a fee. When a customer makes a payment by the due date and the company’s own statement shows “no balance due,” the burden is on the cruise line to explain any subsequent charges, before taking punitive action. You did a great job of keeping records.
A paper trail is essential when you’re dealing with any billing dispute.. A brief, firm email to a manager is the next step. When my advocacy team and I contacted Princess on your behalf, the company directed us to your travel agent. That’s a common deflection in the cruise industry — many cruise lines prefer to have travel agents handle disputes rather than dealing with customers directly.
The agency declined to comment, saying the matter was between you and Princess. Ultimately, Princess agreed. A full three months after your cancellation, the cruise line refunded $1,298 to your credit card. Princess should tell its IT department to fix the billing software.
This probably isn’t the first time the cruise line has canceled a reservation because of a system problem — and it surely won’t be the last.
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