I've always booked cruises with on-line agencies, or in the last instance directly with the cruise line. I'm ready to book for next year - Norwegian Epic in May and decided to try CruiseCompete.com. here's what I got back:
Jun 25 at 9:11 PM
Greetings, BamaVol! Quote requests for Norwegian Cruise Lines operate differently than requests for all other cruise lines on CruiseCompete, here's some important info.:
1. Norwegian does not allow multiple custom quotes to be displayed on our site (sorry: their choice, not ours). Instead, you can click through to get live pricing from our Norwegian Cruise Lines top-producing travel agencies:
Crown Cruise Vacations, Cruise Vacation Outlet, and Cruises-N-More.
2. Please take the time to read and select the special offers on the first screens of each of the agency web sites, as these greatly impact the value of the offers. Please know that we are working with these agencies and their web technology vendor to improve the online experience on these sites.
3. In some cases, you may get better results through contacting the agencies directly for a custom quote. We've tried to make this as easy as possible. Just send an e-mail to:
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
So, it looks like I'm limited to 3 agencies and that seems a little fishy to me. I went to the "live pricing" and all 3 were hard to compare. All showed the same cabin charge per person. I think it was identical to the NCL website. One listed port charges, the other 2 did not. One had me select an OBC of $125, but that seemed to exclude the NCL promo offer. The third offered a 10% OBC; that's more than double the $125 offered by the other TA. I'm going the suggested route and will submit to each via email. I have a few other questions to ask like are there additional booking fees, will my payment be made direct to the cruise line, will they monitor pricing and petition the cruise line for OBC or ??? when the price drops. I'm not sure what else to ask.
I guess my question here is does anyone have recent experience with any of the 3 TA's I'm limited to?
Thanks.