Onboard placeholder booking - cautionary tale ( with a happy ending )

[The Fox]

I'm hoping that sharing my recent experience with our onboard placeholder booking will assist other Dibbers on DCL cruises in the future.

We were on our 4th wonderful cruise on the Disney Magic in August. The vacation planning desk was always busy throughout the cruise. Half way through the cruise I queued and spoke to the cast member at the desk who advised me that placeholder bookings should be made by filling in a form and putting it in a box on the desk. He had long queues to deal with and so I followed his advice.

Two days later, the placeholder request had not been processed and so I queued again. The cast member told me not to worry and it would be processed as soon as possible as he worked through the large volume of firms deposited in the placeholder box during the cruise.

Three days after our debarkation, I had still not received a confirmation of our onboard booking and my credit card had not be charged for the $250 deposit. I e mailed DCL to raise my concerns. They advised me to wait for 7 days and to get in touch again if I had not received confirmation of the booking.

7 days later - still no confirmation and still no charge to credit card. I e mailed again with details of my efforts to book the placeholder onboard and expressed my continuing concerns.

I had a lovely call from DCL in which they acknowledged that my placeholder card had not been processed and they could not find it despite enquiries. They did allow me to book a placeholder on full onboard booking terms over the phone as they accepted that something must have gone wrong due to the volume of onboard booking requests made during our cruise. The placeholder expires 2 years from our phone call rather than date of debarkation.

The lesson I have learned is to make a note of when the booking request was delivered and the name of the cast member at the vacation planning desk ( might even be worth a photo of the card and the posting?). Follow up if no confirmation number is provided whilst onboard. I will also keep a close eye out for confirmation of the online booking and for the charge to my credit card. It seems to be worth following up and raising concerns with DCL sooner rather than later so that they can sort it out ( as I'm happy to say they did for me).

I hope this helps Dibbers who might encounter this issue in the future.

We had yet another magical DCL cruise ( just works perfectly for our family) and cannot wait until cruise number 5 in 2020.