One Fax to Seattle Recovered $435 From My Cruise

Forty-five knots of wind and no island. May 23, 7:20 in the morning, and I stood on the balcony of cabin 7048 with my sister Dana, both of us holding coffee, staring at gray chop where the green hills of Ketchikan were printed on every itinerary we had studied since January. The captain finished talking at 7:05. Fifteen minutes of quiet followed, the bad kind.

The Nieuw Amsterdam sailed from Seattle on May 17, seven days, Inside Passage, and the cruise booking ran $2,618 for the two of us with taxes and fees at $289.24 a head. Ketchikan was the reason. Two prepaid excursions sat on that day: $276 for the lighthouse and totem park, $64 for the lumberjack show. Winds forecast at 45 knots shut the pier, and $340 of prepaid afternoon went with it.

The excursions refunded themselves by June 2, no forms, no calls. The port fees were a different animal: $95 of the fare was charges tied to a dock we never touched, and page 14, section 9(b) of the ticket contract said unvisited-port fees come back. Gettin' that $95 took two phone calls, two scripts, and one faxed page to Seattle. Remember section 9(b).

the captain's voice at 7:05

The announcement ran ninety seconds: gale warning, winds 45 knots with higher gusts in the strait, concerns about safe navigation and berth availability, Ketchikan canceled, sea day inserted. The master's decision. No exceptions, and no harbor pilot willing to argue with a gale. Dana re-read the daily program twice and set it down without a word, and I refilled both coffees from the carafe because my hands needed something to do.

$276 of lighthouse and $64 of lumberjacks

Both excursions were prepaid in January when the cruise booking was made: "Guard Island Lighthouse and Totems" at $138 each, "Great Alaskan Lumberjack Show" at $32 each, $340 total before the first wake was ever sailed. Dana kept a paper map of Guard Island taped inside her closet door at home, which I did not learn til June. $340, gone by breakfast. The ship turned south into open water and sold the afternoon back to us as bingo.

the refund that fixed itself

June 2, both excursion charges reappeared on my card, $340 total, eleven days after the skip, with no forms filed by anyone, which is how it should work everywhere. The email used the phrase "automatic processing," and for once the automation did exactly what it promised. Good. That was the easy $340, and it landed before I had made a single phone call about anything at all.

page 14, section 9(b)

The passenger ticket contract is 46 pages that nobody reads until a port disappears. June 10, at my kitchen table with the booking confirmation open, I dug into the fare breakdown and read the contract three times. Section 9(b): government fees and taxes "collected for ports not visited will be refunded or credited without further action." The fare breakdown named Alaska passenger fees and per-port charges line by line. Juneau's share stayed cuz we berthed at Juneau. Ketchikan's had to move.

$95 for a dock we never touched

Taxes and fees: $289.24 each, $578.48 total. Matching the line items against the itinerary left $95 attached to Ketchikan for the two of us, charges collected for a berth the ship never came close to. Excursions: $340, already returned. Recovered without asking: $340. Recovered after a fight: $95. Phone calls: two. Fax cost: $4.50. Fare paid: $2,618. Every number in this paragraph still lives in a folder on my desk, because a dispute is only as strong as its receipts.

two phone calls, two scripts

June 3, first call: an agent read a script about excursion refunds and told me port fees are not refundable, full stop, ticket closed, have a nice voyage. I quoted section 9(b) with the page number, and she offered to "note the account." June 17, second call: a supervisor named Marcus said fee reviews happen "automatically after the voyage," in the tone of a man reading the same script one layer up. July 1 came and went with nothin' automatic about it. Two scripts, zero results.

FedEx Office on a Friday, $4.50

June 20, Friday lunch hour, FedEx Office in Beaverton: one page faxed to the Seattle office, booking number, fare breakdown screenshot, section 9(b) quoted with page and section, and a closing line stating I anticipated the credit within 30 days. $4.50, receipt into the folder. Email had vanished twice into a web form. The fax at least produced a timestamped confirmation slip saying somebody's machine received a page, and a timestamped slip is a story with a witness.

the check dated July 3

A letter dated June 30 arrived July 8 with a check for $95.00, dated July 3, and one line apologizing for the delay in processing, on letterhead I now keep in the same folder as the fax receipt. Deposited by phone photograph before the mail flag went back up. Total recovered: $435. That is $340 that fixed itself and $95 that needed a fax, two calls, and one Friday lunch hour.

the brochure in the drawer

Dana's Guard Island brochure never left her desk drawer, and the paper map came off the closet door in June without a ceremony. Cabin 7048 looked at open water where Ketchikan should have been, and the ledger closed like this: $340 automatic, $95 by fax, $4.50 spent, seven weeks from gale to check. That is the whole refund. The drawer stays shut until somebody promises us an island again.