Data point on a long drawn out refund process of canceled cruise booking

Cruise line finally released refund to Loyalty Travel (Connexions) payment card on May 29 after it went into 60 days of suspension of operation effective Mar 12, and our cruise would sail on Apr 11.

No points refunded as of June 10. Connexions reps said the accounting dept had to work on lines on the credit card and our "line" has not been worked on by accounting dept yet as evidenced by nothing shown from accounting dept on our booking despite on a June 4th call a Connexions rep had talked to Princess to verify the refund and was told exactly as what Princess told us - the refund was released on May 29, and the Connexions rep documented such info.

Yesterday's rep said she could not contact accounting dept which does not take calls, and she could not escalate the case until 30 days after travel provider has refunded the $. Since May 29 was the date cruise line released the refund, we have to wait till June 30 the earliest to request an escalation should the points still not coming back, FWIW, those people whose refunds are released on the same May 29 date, have seen their refunds showing up on their cards even they used multiple cards to pay, all showing up on June 3rd, per their posts on Cruise Critic, the equivalent of FT in the cruise world.

Meanwhile because in preparation of the new Pay Yourself Back feature, Chase IT messed up some accounts reward activity display - our account is one of those being affected, that all 2019 activities were erased from online viewing, and all 2020 travel reservation activities also being erased without a trace from customer's access end. Chase SM finally admitted this glitch and claimed it was fixed. It wasn't, We have been back and forth with the SM folks requesting they listed out all the activities of past 12 months so we could have a record. From their end, they showed all canceled travel reservations that have been refunded were only showing one line each booking with point value being 0 - that is the way UR handles the refunds - the refunded points erase the previously deducted points, so the total point balance would reflect the refund, but there is no ledger entry to reflect the refund, just the previous negative point deduction changed to 0 value.

For the cruise booking though, they showed 2 lines - one line was the deduction of the points, the other line showed the reservation was canceled and the point value is 0. The big thing is the point deduction line is still in their side's system as a negative though we could not see anything online. We pointed this out to them last week as how the disappearance of entries makes it difficult for us to keep track of point movements despite they kept saying they had very limited ability to deal with Travel Service related issues. Finally yesterday one SM replied that even with the limitation, he went ahead to escalate this to Travel Service Center and someone from that dept would contact us either by email or by phone in 7 to 10 business days.

This evening when I looked at the account - the UR balance of CSR has a big increase - still no way to see any details but a manual calculation of running total, indicate the cruise booking points are finally refunded to the account. We dont know whether Connexions accounting dept finally got to work on our "line" today, as yesterday when we called around 3pm, we were told nothing has shown in the account and to wait till June 30 to call back if still no points refunded, or the "escalation" did by Chase SM rep yesterday finally got someone at Connexions to look at our account today, and found the cruise line's refund already hit the Connexions payment card, therefore points are refunded to our UR account.

My take is, even though SM option no longer gives Reward as topic choice, the Account Inquiry can still be used on reward-related issue. And if you are persistent, may be someone would go above and beyond to escalate the issue to the appropriate dept where issue can be resolved.

At this point, all the Pandemic related cancellations booked thru UR have received 100% refund - the most surprising one is the refund of LX canceled intra-Europe flights. I seriously doubt Chase / Expedia has gotten $ refunded from LX as it has been steadfastly refusing to refund other than giving fight credits. Days after the points back to account we received another email from UR talking about LX informed them we were due flight credits, and then UR is waiting for the restrictions on how to use such credit and the expiration of such credits, before writing to us again... So I went to check if Chase has crawled back the previously refunded points - it hasn't, for now, But then I found out all travel reservaiton activities disappeared as they never exist... I believe we just luck out on this.

Good luck to others who are still fighting / waiting for their rightful refunds, especially those who booked international airlines flights that do not touch US soil, or flights operated by certain international airlines - LH Groups, TAP, and a few others, are absolutely obnoxious to deal with. They will pay a price in their future bookings for their extremely poor customer service during this crisis.