Yesterday, we saw something happen with our flight reservations that we did not expect, the price actually went down for our flight to Rome. It was not quite as low as when we had first started looking at this trip, but was within $60 per ticket. The price went down to $366 for our one way airfare. I had been looking at the flight prices each day, but they had continuously gone up from what we had purchased, so we did not have much hope they would go back down, especially since there were not many seats left on the connecting plane from Philadelphia to Rome. We had gotten the last two remaining side by side seats, but they were in the middle of the plane and just a few rows from the very back of the aircraft.
I got on the phone with Princess Cruises, and they did confirm the fare had gone down. Unfortunately, if we made a reservation change to the lower fare, we would not be able to maintain our currently assigned seats. This was different from what we had been told when we initially made our cruise and flight reservation with Princess. The representative had told us to make sure we called in to their reservations desk because we could just be refunded the difference in airfare. This was not the same tune I as getting from the reservation representative today. If we made the change, they would have to cancel the first reservation and make a new one, and unfortunately, the seats are not instantly put back into the system so that we could select them again. No one with the Princess airfare reservations could tell us when the seats would be back on the available list. Making things worse was that we could not go online with American to select them if and when they showed up again since we were not ticketed yet, only on a reservation.
I decided to go ahead and make the change, we had always thought about making preferred seat changes anyway, for a $82 per person fee, to get seats closer to the front of the plane and on the side of the plane, where the seats are just two wide, side by side. We would still save money with the cheaper airfare, even with the preferred seat cost, which we had been contemplating getting anyway. We would just have to wait to get these seats assignments until the tickets were actually issued, which is 45 days out from our flight
After Princess made the changes, I even called into American Airlines to speak with a representative there about the seats. The lady was very helpful, and called in to their specialists to check on the seats. Unfortunately, even they could not reassign the original seats to us, and they did not know when they would be released back into the system. It was a little frustrating.
While I was waiting, I decided to check and see what the new round trip airfare was with Princess. Initially, it had been more expensive than renting a car to drive home, and the connections had been terrible, the earliest flight out of Ft. Lauderdale was about 2:00 PM, getting us home at around 10:00 PM. Since the ship arrives at 5:00 AM, that was a long time to wait to get a flight, so we had opted to rent the car. Initially, we had seen some favorable car rental prices, but when we actually made the reservation, the one way rental was about $150.00 with all of the taxes and fees.
I was once again surprised to find that the round trip airfare was even lower than before, when we had made our first reservation, and there were even some morning departure times available. Since the cost to fly was now at least the same as renting a car, and we could be home by 3:00 PM, I once again called Princess to make another reservation change. This is the beauty of their “Flexible” airfare, you can make changes up until 45 days before the first flight, without any monetary penalty.
This time, I was connected with a reservation specialist that was much more versed in the intricacies of the Princess Airfare system, and was able to make the flight changes for the round trip. We even made a change to connect through Charlotte instead of Philadelphia on the flight to Rome. I had looked at the seat availability through the American Airlines website and there were more preferred seats available closer to the front of the airplane on the Charlotte to Rome flight than for the Philadelphia to Rome flight. Of course, there were hardly any seats left if you did not pay for a preferred seat on the new connection, just six total, and none were side by side or even close together.
For the flight home after the cruise, we are now departing Ft. Lauderdale at 10:45 AM, landing back home at 2:53 PM, and connecting through Atlanta, on Delta Airlines. It appears that Delta may have added another flight from Ft. Lauderdale, since the seat selection for this flight was very good, not many seats had been reserved yet. It might be because it is an early flight, and harder to get to if you have a scheduled departure time from the cruise ship. Since the ship is scheduled to arrive at 5:00 AM, a little earlier than a normal arrival, we should be fine making it to the airport for our flight. Normally, cruise lines do not want you to have a flight out before around noon, especially if they are taking you to the airport, and you have a normal departure where the cruise line handles your luggage. However, we always do the walk off disembarkation, where we carry our own bags, and I expect it will be available starting at around 6:00 AM, plenty of time to make it to the airport for our flight home.
In the end, with the price reduction on the airfare, our round trip flight, including the preferred seat upgrade, was $12.00 less for both of us than our original one way airfare to Rome had been. Not bad.
We actually sent in a special request form to Princess authorizing them to go ahead and purchase our tickets for the flights early, and by last night, our reservations showed up on both the American Airlines website for the flight to Rome, and the Delta website for our flight home from Ft. Lauderdale. This enabled us to go ahead and make any seat changes, so we were able to get two preferred seats in row 18 on the flight to Rome. In the end, we were still way ahead of the game on the cost of transportation we had been looking at for the initial one way flight and car rental home, plus we now avoid the ten hour drive.
I now think we are totally versed in the pros and cons for booking the Flexible airfare through Princess, but this time, our lessons saves us some money instead of the hard and costly airfare lesson we had learned initially for this trip.
Now if Princess will just run the free all inclusive drink special promotion for a balcony cabin like we had on the last cruise, we would be set!!! We continue to check with Princess daily for that to occur. The total number of balcony cabins available is still about 160, but has dropped down from around 190 in early August. We believe Princess is playing some promotional games because one day there were 74 open Inside cabins and the next day they were “sold out”, only to reappear a few days later as being available once again. There is no way all 74 were sold in one day. That means that Princess is pushing people to purchase the balconies by showing zero availability on the inside cabins. Since this ship has no “oceanview” cabins, the next category above the interior cabin is a balcony cabin.
We will continue to monitor the Princess website, but will be happy with our interior cabin if they do not run any specials before the cruise to sell out the remaining balcony cabins.