Just how user friendly is your Cruise Personaliser?
Branded by the cruise lines as the perfect way to ‘manage your own booking’ the online Cruise Personaliser has been around for a while now, allowing passengers to check in before they arrive at the port, thus saving them time, and also allowing people to book excursions, pre-book drinks packages, order baggage labels and print off their own tickets. It all sounds very efficient doesn’t it? But how user friendly are these systems really? Do we just tolerate them because we have to as this is the way the cruise lines are going?
I still get calls from people on a regular basis, intelligent people I might add, who are having real difficulties with their personaliser.
A major issue seems to be that the flight details never seem to be added, so passengers either have to phone us to find out what they are or wait until their tickets arrive. Tickets are another issue as sometimes even though you have had the email to say they are ready to down load and print off, there is no way of doing so. One of my clients feels that the ticket printing section of the cruise lines websites is like an after thought that they have tagged on!
Holland America will allow you to print off your tickets weeks in advance, but if you have booked a cabin on a Guarantee basis they won’t actually give you a cabin number until 48 hours prior to travel – so, do you reprint your tickets at this point. And, why don’t they tell you that this will be the case so that you don’t have to go through the whole process twice?
The real issue is baggage labels – a real lottery! Will they arrive, won’t they? It seems to be anybodys guess!
I’d be really interested to get some feedback on this one. I would love to know what people think, what the real problems are or indeed the benefits of this online system. Do we all love it, or do we hate it, and do we long for the good old days of lovely leather-bound travel wallets with all those nice little bits of paper inside.
I’d love to hear what you think so please plese please respond to this post 
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I've been a Cruise Consultant for a number of years now and I can honestly say that it is just the best job ever. No two days are the same. I have got to know some fantastic people through the course of my job, both in the industry and clients,…
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Once again Cruise Lines are making economies in areas they hope people will not notice and ‘Cruise Personalisers’ are yet another example of the practice but, this time, the passenger is being coerced into actually doing their work for them usually on poorly designed non intuitive extensions of their websites.
Holland America’s online check in is such an example in which passengers waste hours navigating to find the right area in which to submit their details only to have an email subsequently arrive prompting them to print out the travel documents but, on doing so, these are incomplete because the accomodation has not been assigned and may not be until arrival at the port! At what point, may one ask, will the car parking voucher become available? The Celebrity online check in is equally confusing and time wasting giving no specific airline baggage allowance or departure or arrival Airport Terminal information. Having recently departed from LHR T3 I arrived back home at T5 and nobody said a word and my car was at the wrong terminal. There are two ways of printing out documentation with Celebrity and, if you do choose the wrong one, you waste 27 sheets of A4 paper illustrated with glorious colour images but you do not get a flight ticket.
No Hannah ‘Cruise Personalisers’ are not user friendly and the cruise lines don’t care because, computer literate or not, they have successfully transferred the onus onto the passenger to obtain their tickets and, in the process, also managed to reduce their own staff numbers. I see it as an unacceptable form of passenger abuse.