Royal Caribbean Cause Chaos !

Royal Caribbean has announced out of the blue last week that they were pulling Independence Of The Seas from Southampton for the season of 2020.

The reason behind Royal Caribbean decision was due to the very high demand for guests visiting their brand new private island CocoCay in the Bahamas.

This news came as a shock to all agents and also so many guests that had booked their forthcoming cruises for 2020. These sailings have been on sale since late last year so you can just imagine how many guests were affected.

To be honest, personally I only had a few guests that were affected by this change, which thankfully they have now been rebooked on other sailings with Royal Caribbean but I know so many of my colleagues that had lots of guests that had been booked on the Independence and had to find alternative cruises.

For the chaos caused, Royal Caribbean have offered passengers who had already booked a 25% future cruise deposit, based on the cruise fare that they could use on another Royal Caribbean sailing, which for families who had booked for the school holidays will already be so tricky to find more availability even at this stage family cabins sell up so quickly!

The Independence Of The Seas is a firm favourite for UK guests wanting a good family ship, with lots to do and most of all sailing from Southampton.

I personally think is a shame that Royal Caribbean has come to this decision, they have so many other ships I don’t understand why they couldn’t have deployed one of those rather than just leaving one ship in the UK.

I suppose on the plus side, there is still availability for the Anthem of the Seas and another good thing is that Royal has also decided to bring back the drinks packages.