By Dave Beers (CruiseReviews Editor) — Let’s begin by saying the frustrated Crown & Anchor member is yours truly.  This article didn’t start out that way.  It was about a reader who had repeated problems with her cruise history vanishing from Royal Caribbean’s website, but her problem magically got fixed two days ago and somehow it now plagued me.  Read on.

All of the cruise line websites have quirks and annoyances, but I get more complaints about the Royal Caribbean website than any other.  Most are little things where the user can’t find something and they have to jump through hoops to locate the information.  A lot of this has to with the seemingly endless penchant to tweak the websites, change how things are accessed, or where things are located.  To be fair, this need to tweak is not the exclusive territory of Royal Caribbean.  They all do it and quite often it doesn’t seem to improve things from a user-friendly point of view.  Carnival recently changed their website for the worse and the Norwegian Cruise Line website is a disaster area.  But regardless, when it comes to gripes Royal Caribbean leads the list.

A major source of angst over the past few years has been the Crown & Anchor portion of the RCI website.  For the longest time, cruise credits either didn’t show up in the user’s account, or were exceedingly slow in appearing.  Sometimes several months would pass between a cruise ending and the credit appearing.  While the cruise credits were indeed in the member’s Crown & Anchor account, they were not transferring to the website.  People like to see their cruise history and thus the frustration sets in when their account is fraught with errors.

Within the past year my experience has been that this cruise credit problem had been fixed.  My account has been promptly updated and I’ve had no problems.  However while checking the Royal Caribbean website to research the reader’s complaint – that her cruise history kept vanishing – I discovered that my account was now screwed up too.  My cruise history was gone and I was getting messages saying my name didn’t match the Crown & Anchor records.

I got error messages such as “The last name or surname you entered does not match the last name or surname that we currently have on file for the Crown & Anchor number you entered. Please contact the Crown & Anchor Loyalty Desk.”

I decided to test Royal Caribbean’s ability to respond to messages sent to them from within their website, so I sent them a note detailing the problem.  I immediately got an e-mail automatic response which said “Thank you for contacting us. This is an automated confirmation that your email has been received. Our representatives will reply to your inquiry in the order in which it was received. Please reply only if you need to provide additional information related to your original email. Follow-up emails regarding the status of your query may further delay your response.  We appreciate your patience and understanding as we work to service your request.”  Providing additional information may delay their response?

Six days elapsed before I received a personal reply, which came in an e-mail which said “Thank you for your e-mail.  We apologize for any delay in our response.  While we would be more than happy to assist you with the error you are receiving, we are unable to troubleshoot issues with the website through an e-mail response.”

Paul recently told me that, these days, too many people have a fear of picking up the phone but it is the fastest way to clear up a problem.  One ten minute call can resolve what days worth of e-mails can’t.  He is absolutely correct on that.  Too bad Royal Caribbean can’t simply say call them if the problem is related to their website.  Instead we accomplished absolutely nothing and it only took six days.   And so I called them and the problem was resolved in less than 10 minutes.

The problem?  My online profile had somehow been changed from “David Beers” to “Mr. David Beers”.  The pulldown menu for “title” went from saying “select one” to “Mr.”  I am not kidding.

For the readers….have you had problems with cruise line websites?  Which ones do you think are best or worst?

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