phvt32

High-spirited passengers of 19 staterooms went through the check-in lines at Barcelona port Boarding Celebrity Eclipse for Bueno Aires were refused boarding yesterday. Additionally, a number of passengers in the check-in lines had also faced close calls when their granted Brazilian Visa were not found on the physical passport pages, and were also invited to stand aside to wait for the cruise terminal staff to sort through the bureaucracy to confirm the existence of approved Brazilian Visa.

Those fully-paid passengers who do not have Visas for each ports of call were given a letter of refused boarding and sat in the secure area waiting for luggage to be pull out of the ship. When the ship left at about 5pm with their horn blaring, there were two of the 19 frustrated parties still waiting in the cruise terminal with one of their luggage sailed out to the next port.

The crux of the issue boils down to the Cruise line's position that "the passengers are solely responsible for required travel documents". When I saw that in the Cruise document sent to me a little over a week before embarkation, and two ports of calls in Brazil, I did try to google various forums for experiences of others. But my incomplete research did not give definitive answers to the question of "travel documents" for each and every ports of calls or destination.

Also, given the short span of not much more than a week; the logistic issues (nomad-ing to different non-home cities each week), sending in my passport to the fickle Consulate office is clearly infeasible. So I had been hoping rational enforcement of government regulation of ship-side transits could parallel air-side transits?

Unfortunately, that became an expensive lesson for me. One other lady of a couple, being US citizen, had applied for Brazilian Visa more the 4 weeks ago with no result that's acceptable to the cruise port staff.

I also had the charm of seeing one of my luggage set sail to the next port, after 6 hours waiting in the secure area, coming out to the cold and learned taxis had all gone away for business elsewhere.

I wondered if the cruise line or port staff could/would help alleviate the terse terminology "travel documents" with "each ports of calls", both in sales lit and cruise document. But my suggestions were stone-rejected by the cruise terminal staffs. And they acknowledge week-in, week-out, every sailing had her share of refused boarding, fully-paid passengers.
And I don't get the sense that either the cruise line (I would guess Celebrity isn't the only one) or the out-sourced cruise-port staff are very interested in clarifying the gap between "Travel as From A to B" versus "Travel as each ports of calls", the anguish of customers seeing thousands of dollars went puff.