winodj

A lot of cruisecompete agencies do make mistakes on occasion regarding quotes. When you consider the fact that the big ones are quoting 2000+ requests a week, it does happen. Sometimes the mistakes aren't even the agent's fault. Check out Cruise Critic and look at the Holland America Noordam sailings for 2007. HAL put out fares in error and refused to honor them, even if there was money attached to the booking.

Most of the time, the mistakes are honest ones. It sounds like you had a horrible customer service experience and I'm sorry to hear that. One thing you can do is offer negative feedback so that other buyer's can beware. And the next time you use the service, look at the agency's ratings. Also make your agent reconfirm the price for you.

Also consider this. Most agencies are discounting commission. If one agency has a price hundreds of dollars lower than anyone else - it's worth an investigation but it might be too good to be true. If you think its a legit offer, you can book the cabin with a deposit, get your cruiseline confirmation number and confirm your booking with the cruise line. A price that's ten or twenty dollars less than everyone else is more likely to be a correct price than one which is several hundred dollars less. (Although the super low offer might be worth a phone call.)

Punki

I always check out prices on www.7blueseas.com and then, when the price is what I want to pay, call my travel agent and she can always find the same price, or one within a couple of dollars. I do this because I trust her so much and she has been successful in getting us a couple of pretty nice upgrades.

empedocles

This:
Pretty much tells me all I need to know about CruiseCompete. They obviously only have one customer service person and change the name to make it seem there are more. Makes me kinda leery...

winodj

Cruise Compete is not a travel agency. It's sort of like Lending Tree for cruises. If you put in a bid for a cruise, other agencies contact you blindly and bid their services. You contact the travel agency that you are interested in.

AC110

The refusal to provide an email address tells us all we need to know about cruisecompete.

winodj

Exactly what does it tell you? That cruisecompete is a free service to cruisers and that the agencies are the ones that handle your booking and not cruisecompete?

Just like when you use sidestep or kayak to find a cheap flight, you don't book your cruise with cruise compete. It merely is a service to help you find the best deal with a variety of cruise consolidators, brokers and travel agencies. There are hundreds of agencies to choose from. Some of them are questionable, the vast majority of them aren't. The information specs on many of these cruise agencies even offer links to Better Business Bureau reports on the specific agency.

Delta's website does not have a contact email address either. It has a form that you can use to contact Delta. Cruisecompete has the same thing. So what does that say about Delta?

AC110

Delta is in the phonebook. They're on the stock market and you could find them if you really wanted to. I dare say if I called or IM'd Delta and asked for an email or snail mail address to communicate with the company they would oblige.

Dealing with an unfamiliar company on the Internet, I do a smell test to judge whether I can trust them. Refusal to provide contact information would send me packing in a hurry.

As it happens, I've had good experiences dealing with small, unfamiliar travel companies on the Internet, including one in Norway and one in Morocco. I wouldn't have done business with either if they'd refused such a basic request as contact information.

I stand by my comment and will elaborate slightly; Refusal to provide contact information tells me I shouldn't trust a company I'm thinking of doing business with or through.

Germanfflyer

You do NOT do business with cruisecompete anyway it is only a platform NOT a vendor!

AC110

That's why I said doing business with or through.

It's a semantic argument anyway. They're making the referral and collecting some sort of commission or fee, so they're part of the transaction.

CruiseCompeteCEO

Greetings, all. Bob Levinstein, CEO of CruiseCompete.com here.

Miles, I'm very sorry for what sounds like a very frustrating experience. I have already brought this to the attention of Todd Elliot, President of Cruise Vacation Outlet and asked him to look into it ASAP. CVO is one of our top-producing members and has booked more than 15,000 passengers through CruiseCompete since 2003. While I understand it's not reflective of your experience, their satisfaction rate is extremely high--very few complaints and very good customer reviews on the site. Hopefully Todd can help to address your situation.

I'd like to thank the other folks on this board for providing such accurate, detailed explanations of how CruiseCompete works and what we do. You guys have addressed most of the concerns brought up at least as well as I could have (and probably better), and I really appreciate it. I do have a few points to add:

1. "Contact us." This feature sends e-mails directly to me, and I respond to each one directly including my direct phone number. Posting phone numbers on the site would generate lots of calls from users not trying to reach us, but trying to reach travel agents (whose numbers are in the individual cruise quotes not the "contact" section). We're not trying to hide from anyone, just trying to save everyone time.

And yes, would could post our e-mail address directly on the site instead of using a form, but this method cuts down on SPAM.

2. The "Live Agent Help" feature, as explained on the "Live Help" page goes to one of our agencies and not to CruiseCompete. Again, this is because when customers need help, it almost always involves choosing a cruise and we're not the experts on this--our member-agents are. It just so happens that the agency staffing this featues is the one Miles had the problem with. There's no excuse for the agent not providing CruiseCompete contact information and I apologize for this. I have already addressed it with the agency involved and I know it won't happen again.

3. Misquotes never happen on purpose. They just annoy customers, and annoying customers doesn't sell cruises. We're not a car dealership you have to drive to. We're a comparison shopping site where if you don't like the price, you hang up and call one of the other five agencies that quoted you. The likely reason for the persistent mis-quotes on the same ship/sail date is complicated and has to do with situations where the agent and the quoter aren't a) the same person and b) are using different interfaces into the cruiseline computer system. It's a long involved story & only occurs very rarely, but it has happened a few times in the past. Take my word for it--as there's no advantage to misquoting, all of the agents using our service do their very, very best to be accuarate as they crank out 3,000+ quotes/day.


Finally, I would like to say that yes, I want to hear about any problems you have as soon as you have them. While the member-agencies are technically our customers and not out employees, I can't tell them what to do. But what I can do is make sure that the highest level of management of the agency in questions is made aware of the problem. What may surprise you is that the CEO's of these agents want to hear about these problems too, and they're usually very aggressive in getting them solved.


Thanks to you all for giving me the opportunity to respond--I really appreciate it. Again, you've done my job for me in some very clear, articulate posts about who we are and how we work. If any of you would like to contact me directly (Miles, I would like to hear from you), please use:

http://www.cruisecompete.com/contact.php

These messages do go directly to my inbox.

Cheers!

Bob Levinstein
CEO
CruiseCompete.com

Tenerife

^ Welcome to FT and thanks for the great explanation. We really do enjoy using cruisecompete and have had only good experience in our dealings. Problems can and do arise, but it's nice knowing that there's someone in charge to do something about them, if possible.

Germanfflyer

Thanks for taking the time to come over here and explain things,well done!!!

So far I have had good service from cruisecompete AND cruise vacation outlet, hope that stays that way.....


PS: As a customer of CVO I would be interested in hearing their point of view too, maybe you could send them over

Cholula

My crystal ball says we may hear from the President of CVO before too long.

CruiseVacationOutlet-President

Hi All, I just found out about all the details in regards to the reservation 'Nobbi' had with our agency via an email from Bob Levinstein at Cruise Compete today. Let me start by saying we have errored Nobbi on their cruise for Sep 2007 and I wish to apologize for the lack of service they recieved in regards to thier cruise. As of today I have left a voice mail for Nobbi to discuss further and will be emailing them as well. I have already discussed the reservation with Bob Levinstein at Cruise Compete to go over what occured. Here is the facts from my perspective on this cruise. Nobbi requested a quote via Cruise Compete on Sep 7th and that same day Jameson sold them a Minisuite AC and took the credit card deposit. He processed the payment electronically via Amadeus Cruise and an invoice was sent to Nobbi via email. It seems the approval of the credit card deposit was not completed for some reason, and it was not discovered until three weeks later. On Oct 11th we cancelled the cruise based on paperwork turned in by Jameson. In fairness, he is not in today and I won't have an opportunity to discuss this with him until Monday to make sure I hear his side of the events. But, from reading the details already listed it seems obvious that the service should have been far better. We can always supply the name, address, email address and contact phone number to Mr Levinstein at Cruise Compete for those interesed in reaching him to further discuss the good or bad with the use of his website. An email to my staff is being sent out again with all the details for their contact log to pass on when requested. We do pride ourselves on keeping an excellent rating with the BBB - 3 complaints in the last twelve months out of thousands of reservations, and I personally am aware of each of those BBB complaints and can assure you each was resolved to the customers satisfaction. Cruise Vacation Outlet also has a 99% ranking within Cruise Compete, and I'm sure part of the 1% is due to situations like what occured with Nobbi. We obviously made a mistake and it seems the agent made things worse by trying to downplay the issue rather than escalate the complaint to management to try and resolve. We do make mistakes, but we do try to learn from them as well to improve the customer service for all future reservations. In this case, some standard procedures are being readdressed with the staff, some new procedures will also be implemented to help eliminate a duplication of the same mistake. The website will be updated with more contact information for our company as well. I can see some of you out there have also used Cruise Compete and Cruise Vacation Outlet and have had a good experience with pricing and service - thank you. And again I apologize for the errors that occured to the Nobbi and look forward to discussing it further with them soon to try and resolve thier issue.

Thanks for listening,

Todd Elliott
President
Cruise Vacation Outlet
5575 S Semoran Blvd #4
Orlando, FL 32822
[email protected]
800-797-4635 x121

SRQ Guy

Does the crystal ball work on horse races? 2 minutes of warning is just enough time to place a few good bets.

Seriously, though, FT truly amazes me sometimes.