So theyve taken this down (the link is to web archive) and I wonder why?
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Well yes. There’s a whole host of questions that come up around this kind of thing.
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Someone mentioned they got a new lawyer. I haven’t fact-checked.
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I’m out of the country but did see this headline on Instagram and it does really disappoint me. It would infuriate me if I had a non refundable cruise booked as well.
When we did RCL the age range was 3-6 and 7-12. While I feel like on paper this may sound reasonable, the difference between a 3 and 6 year old is literally night and day. My boys were 4 and 7 and my 4.5 year old just wanted to play sports and video games with his brother and not story time with 3 year olds. On DCL they were 5 and 8 and it was fantastic to have them together.
It honestly breaks my heart if DS8 only has 1.5 years left in the Lab/Club on DCL. These hard cutoffs are tough. I feel like I’d worry more about a just-turned 11 year old who may still be in elementary school suddenly thrust in with teenagers. I kind of feel like Disney has enough experience and can get creative enough to give kids and families the flexibility that they need.
There’s always going to be a problem kid or situation but hopefully we don’t need to ruin it for everyone.
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Yes. Which makes me wonder about this whole thing. Maybe this is an outcome of a law suit settlement. Because if a crime was committed the answer is to eliminate the opportunity with more supervision with minors. Shifting age groups is superficial really.
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Meanwhile, I haven’t heard anything on the local news stations our of New Orleans about this yet. But it also seems like a lot of this happened outside of Oceaneer’s purview according to that article. So… why the change?
The incident was in March. There is a ton of news that happens every day. The fact that a particular story didn’t get picked up isn’t a surprise. It’s all over the Disney news sites, though.
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Multiple instances by the same kid. Both in and out of the kids club. Some articles have more details than others.
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I’ve been seeing this on our specific salings Facebook group too & I’m starting to wonder if that’s what they’ll come back with, all our money back for whatever portions of the 3 legs we decide to cancel.
Thanks for actually posting the link. The links I’d seen from when I started paying closer attention were all showing as invalid so I didn’t ever get to see what was actually posted about the incident.
Definitely agree on this. I do think it happened both inside and out of the Kids club. But it was one kid on one sailing in all the many thousands of sailings that have been for DCL and definitely what could they do to stop the slide issue? Should all 12 year olds now never be able to slide? Or only have specific hours to slide? And what about grown adults who are also perpetrators?
Again, absolutely agree. It does sound like it will be possible to cancel without penalty but the first day, again due to the rushed nature of the timeline, so many people were told otherwise and so that reeked of absolute bait & switch. And if a financial institution like the one I work for tried to pull that we’d have complaints that would have to be resolved with regulatory deadlines and regulators to report to. It’s bananas to me that there’s no similar level of consumer protection for travel.
That was one of my thoughts on it too. Tied closely with, where were his parents in this and how much of this was a result of either of their actions/inaction (to protect him from whatever’s going on)? So tragic all around.
It really was truly sad when we got the email. The way DH said my name to get my attention when he pulled it up was his “something’s horribly awfully wrong” and I thought he’d gotten notification that someone we knew had passed away suddenly (not a close family/friend member, but maybe a long-time but not still closely keeping in touch friend, or relative of someone close to us which has happened more the last 3 years than ever before). He did reassure me right after I panickily asked “What is it?” that everyone we know is still healthy but then handed me his phone to read it myself since he couldn’t bear to say it.
When we eventually told DS12 (we told him it was likely one incident with an older kid and a younger kid but didn’t go into more detail than that) he pulled up our AmazonMusic account and had it play Taylor Swift’s “This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things” (his personal favorite TS song) that he pulls out for situations just like this. But hopefully they can figure it out!
The suddenness of it does seem to indicate either a PR move to get ahead of bad press about to drop or as a result of a settlement which sucks so bad that someone else’s bad experience from one problem kid now turns into zero 11 or 12 yr olds getting to be included in the fun stuff at Oceaneer, because yes, ultimately, the shifting is superficial to the general nature of this one incident. And another fix could’ve been to staff more in the areas that pose concern, like a monitoring presence at the bathroom entries and any play areas of the club where the youngest of the kids tend to gravitate or I guess at the slides too. But no, kicking out the 11 and 12’s entirely was what they came up with to “solve” it.
Thanks all for sharing & commiserating with me. We’re still in a holding pattern to hear back from the rep we talked to but didn’t expect anything on the earlier end of this week. But our aim is to hear whatever they come back and ask them for a day to think about it (mostly because it’s likely that a cancellation will be involved- unless they magically somehow rethink the no exceptions and we get one for at least most of the three legs).
Since we’ll be in Orlando anyway, I have started pricing out options mostly for the Hard Rock Hotel and Park-to-Park tickets (park hopping in Disney speak) and it definitely is under the range that the cruise.
There is an Epcot Extra Hours event also our first full day and even though it’d be giving Disney back money, DS12’s favorite place in WDW is Epcot and favorite ride is Guardians Cosmic Rewind which would make a fair compensation for not getting the Oceaneer Club.
I’ve also spent time really digging into the nitty gritty of what I can find out there about Edge and it does look like they have some fun things there, it would just take some encouraging on mine & DH’s part for DS12 to make new friends (not his forte with a totally new environment all on his own).
I also mapped out some of the open House hours for Oceaneer Club from recent Navigators and have now added a 4th tab to my spreadsheet to plan a schedule that makes sure the hours that are usual for those open houses are totally available and clear around anything we’ll do together as a family (like eating), so we have a plan in place. However, this plan will cut out me getting the photo package because we won’t focus on characters like I was planning to for at least one leg to make use of a photo package. If we get into line for a character, for we’ll just do the photo on our phones and we might buy one family photopass picture if we still chose to get the 3 younger kids done up for Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique. And the Olaf’s Royal Picnic we have scheduled does look like it will come with one photo from that experience which is what I most wanted the photo package for anyway.
Also, when I went through my new plan, I substituted of the 3 night legs for 3 days of Universal and it seems like we can get everything we want to do, especially if I’m cutting out time to go get ALLLL the photos to make the most of the photo package we were going to buy, done in 7 nights (abbreviated down from 10). But we’re not sure if that’s what we’ll end up doing or not.
So we’ll make the best of whatever situation, but no matter what, this whole thing has left both DH & I really, really scrutinizing how much money we actually do give Disney and for the first time given us a pause on how much more do we really want to give them if this is how they are always going to be treating us. We really were excited to cruise DCL all the time and maybe try a line like Royal Caribbean a time or two to compare, but definitely get a high loyalty status with Disney. And now that desire’s all dried up and we think we’ll just go when the cousins want to coordinate another cruise (something like every 2-4 years).
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I’m very shocked they haven’t gotten back to you yet. This seems like a long holding period when you’re already so close to sail dates.
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When we talked to the rep on Friday she warned us that the teams she would have to coordinate with only work business hours on business days so it could take “up to a week” to get back to us. She said she does like to make it shorter than that, but didn’t want to promise anything sooner since the teams she’d be coordinating with wouldn’t be on the desk all hours of all days like some of the front line, or even guest relations escalated desks.
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I’m glad she set the expectations like that then. And I suppose they’re probably managing cases on nearness to departure date instead of first come, first serve…since the policy goes into place in 2 days time.
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Yes, she was really great to set that expectation and she was also great at listening and hearing out our concerns in full which is I think why she ultimately took it away to look at the options. I think most people got told “nothing we can do, talk to the counselors on board the ship” and only after the initial day or so started saying they would refund in full anyone who wanted to cancel, even within the normal penalty periods.
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This is what I assumed
These are key. Stay on the ship on a castaway day and go with your kids to do the marvel thing, the coaster simulator and the frozen thing. I have no idea how any kid actually gets to use those at all when there are 100 kids in there, and we were the only people in there on castaway day, so my kid got to level up a bunch of times and really use the thing. He liked edge a lot but he’s into video games.
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I noticed that 9am-3pm is ALLLLLLLL open house on Castaway Cay days & mentioned it to DH. He said “but you’ll sacrifice time on the island!”
We really do love it on Castaway Cay too. My initial plans included visits all 3 days with slightly different focuses: first visit to do all the photos & characters with some beach time but nothing booked specifically, second visit for the getaway package with floats, snorkels & bikes booked planning to spend the full day on the island in the middle of the more relaxed 4 night leg & then last visit is also our last full day so was planning to still do some beach time but be back on the ship early enough to calmly pack & finish laundry before the last show so we could also catch a little bit of the Super Bowl on the pool deck in between the show & dinner.
I had also planned for us to first, before getting off at Castaway Cay, going up to try AquaMouse before debarking at least twice, maybe all 3 mornings. But the very many hours open house also would be a phenomenal opportunity to take advantage of doing the coaster and is a very good plan if the weather is not beach weather (February so could be, could not be).
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Yes, we rode 3x without getting up from our float as soon as it opened on castaway day. Imo, kill one of the castaway days and devote the am to Oceaneers and AquaMouse. Then do some beach time in pm
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Why did I think you had been on RCL? I would very much recommend trying it. My DS8 really liked both clubs equally. I think I still owe you my overall comparison but there are many, many positives with RCL!
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I think it may have been when I loved your screenshot of your RCL spreadsheet comparing ships/itins. DH & I are considering but haven’t committed to one yet for a somewhat milestone anniversary that we have coming up next year. But Disney was definitely our first.
For DH he didn’t love the idea of being “stuck on a ship” until the umpteenth person told him how great a Disney cruise was between 2014-2018. So he agreed to try Disney & even got excited about it. Now that he’s been one, his opinion is: if there’s crab at the buffet & reasonably fun entertainment (which a casino totally counts for him & he would love to do on a couples cruise), he’s there.
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Coming back to give a sort of update. The agent at Guest Services did get back to us within a week but we missed the call so it was just a voicemail giving us her extension to call her back. Between the holiday and possibly some well-earned time off for her, we’ve only been able to leave a couple of messages.
The first time we called back DH thought he had pressed 1 to leave a voicemail but ended up on the line to speak to a different agent that definitely tried to “handle” DH & especially so when he read the notes on our account stating there would be no exceptions for kids club and told him we’d still have a wonderful cruise & that the change would not stop that. He did also re-iterate DCL is willing to let us cancel for a full refund.
We had wanted to wait until after getting off the phone to make a decision so we’ve been taking the time to think about it & also have been trying to get back in touch with the original agent.
We think we’ve landed on keeping all 3 legs that we’d planned. Part of that is due to the fact that it will now be DD10’s last time in Oceaneer because she turns 11 several weeks after we get back & she’s asked us for time. And even though we’d love for our cancellation to make a difference, it probably won’t and we’ll be the losers out of a fun vacation. We’ve also talked with DS12 and convinced him that the extra leg means one more set of Open House hours for the club and if he falls in love with Edge (or if by some miracle they walk back the new policy and allow for some leeway for any 11/12’s) he’ll have that time to enjoy it too. And as a token “sorry Disney pulled your last time in Oceaneer away from you”, we’ve offered him the chance to plan a future all-land trip to Orlando with whatever mix of UOR/WDW he wants. I’m not sure if we’ll pull that off this year, but maybe if the price is right??
And for now we’ve still paused on putting any more $$$ down on any future cruises (and they have a 50% off deposit deal going right now that we might otherwise be using to pick out another cruise for later 2024). Also, the Treasure sailing for Feb 2025 that we booked when those itineraries opened up earlier this year is very much up in the air if we will go.
And so in summary, we’re still not happy with the change, but are now in the making the best of it we can phase.
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