The Itinerary Moved

Out of every hundred bookings arranged around a cruise, a handful will not happen on the day they were arranged for. A sailing shifts by a day. A flight is moved by an airline. A transfer is late enough to eat the evening. It is a feature of the way people travel rather than anything unusual.

So the honest thing is to publish exactly what a change costs, and to make the first piece of advice about timing rather than about money.

Write early, which is the whole trick

Everything in this post improves if the message lands sooner. The scale that decides what is kept reads the clock and nothing else, so an afternoon spent hoping the flight will be fixed is an afternoon spent moving from one band of the scale into a worse one.

A line saying the sailing has moved, sent the moment you know, costs nothing and almost always solves the problem outright.

The free move

One change of date carries no cost at all. Two conditions: the request has to reach the thread more than twenty-four hours before the booked time, and the new date has to fall inside fourteen days. With both met, the half that was agreed in advance simply travels across to the new date intact.

That covers most itinerary changes, which tend to move a sailing by a day or two rather than by a season. Where the new date sits further out, write anyway and say so rather than cancelling on the assumption that nothing can be done.

What a cancellation costs

The notice decides it, and nothing else does. More than twenty-four hours before the booked time, nothing is kept and the whole of the advance half comes back. Inside the final day but before she has left, half of it is kept and half returns. Once she is travelling, the whole of it stays.

Two things cut into the last of those. If the hour you released is taken by somebody else, everything is repaid, because the time was not lost. And where you can demonstrate that the loss ran below the share kept, the smaller number is what remains. Nothing is ever claimed beyond that half, and calling a booking off never makes either of you liable for damages.

The line that surprises people

A flight moved by an airline, or an itinerary altered by the line, sits on your side of that scale rather than on the force majeure side of it. Guests occasionally expect the opposite, on the reasonable feeling that neither of you chose it.

The reason is what a confirmed hour is. It holds a piece of an evening that cannot be offered to anybody else, and who caused the change does not give that evening back. What it does earn is the free move, which exists precisely so that a shifted sailing costs nothing when it is reported in time.

What force majeure actually covers

Something outside the control of both sides that stops the booking happening at all: a transport shutdown, serious disruption across the city, an official instruction that makes the journey impossible. Nothing is lost there and nothing is disputed. The half that was agreed becomes credit, held against a date the two of you do not have to name immediately.

A cold, a change of heart, a transfer that ran late and a decision at midnight that sleep matters more are all on the other side of that line, and each is read on the scale.

When the house is the one that cannot deliver

It happens rarely and the choice then belongs to the two of you. Ask for the advance half back in full, or leave it as credit against a new date for as long as you need. Should the woman you named turn out not to be free, word goes out as soon as the house knows, and you either name another from the roster or take the money back.

Keep the move in reserve

One practical suggestion for couples arranging both ends of a trip in the same conversation. The free change of date is one per booking, so if the itinerary looks likely to shift at one end, do not spend the move on the end that was never in doubt. The booking terms page carries the whole scale, with the figures worked through.