Once in a while during the greatest trip of your life, a few parts of the voyage just don’t go as planned. With time, you tend to forget what happened that day because good experiences outweigh the bad of course, or a new better travel rant will exceed the other!
It’s no secret that COVID-19 has had a severe impact on the world’s travel industry, especially cruise ship companies. As luck would have it, we scheduled our first ever cruise in December of 2019 to celebrate a friend’s 40th birthday with Carnival Cruise Line. We were to take a glorious week-long cruise through the Eastern Caribbean which would have taken place during our spring break April 5th to the 12th. We would have departed out of Baltimore, Maryland and cruised to ports including Turks and Caicos, Freeport, Bahamas and Carnival’s private island dubbed Half Moon Cay.
Carnival Cruise Refund
Once all of the ships started to be affected with coronavirus, we knew that it was just a matter of time until our trip would be canceled. And, truth be told, there was no way we would feel comfortable getting on a ship during this crisis. Thankfully, Carnival Cruise Line made the right choice and began canceling all cruises in April, May and now throughout June. At first, the company was only giving cruise credits, but after they began canceling cruises, they agreed to give people their money back. We immediately let them know that we would be taking the cash refund. This was over a month ago since the cruise has been canceled and still no clear answers. After they agreed to a refund, we were told that we would first get the taxes refunded, which was around $300. Our total cruise cost for two people was over $2K. After two weeks, we still haven’t received the first refund and there are no clear answers as to when the full refund will be made. We’ve been told 90 days, but after several calls, those 90 days keep getting pushed around.
What You Can Do About Refunds?
We started to see if other people were having similar experiences so we went to Twitter and a slew of angry customers have tweeted out issues about not receiving their refunds or clear answers. One Twitter user said, “It’s been A WHOLE MONTH since Carnival canceled my cruise and “issued a refund”…. yet I haven’t received it. If Carnival Cruise can take my money within 3 seconds of me giving them my debit card #, they certainly don’t need 3 months to return my money!@CarnivalCruise!”
Dispute the Charge With Your Credit Card Company
So what can you do to get your refund faster? Another Twitter user suggested disputing the charge with your credit card company. He made a great point that we are all paying interest on these expensive cruises and if Carnival Cruise is taking over 90 days to pay refunds or longer, why should we pay interest on a cruise we didn’t get to go on? So many airline companies have made refunds to clients within the standard 5 to 7 days. So that’s what we did. We called our credit cards to dispute the charges. We charged the cruise on two different credit cards. We charged the bulk of the trip to our Apple Card. We called them up, opened a dispute and had the money back in our accounts within minutes. Next, we called Chase Sapphire and there was a little more red tape, but mainly because so many people calling in, which is understandable. Once we contacted the claims department, we submitted the dispute and were refunded our money. If you’re owed money and looking for your Carnival Cruise refund, we suggest you dispute the charge.
