ArcaMax

Q: I paid $2,369 for a Panama Canal cruise with Princess Cruises through a travel agent last year. My wife, Norma, and I made a deposit, then paid the final balance one day before the due date. Two days later, I checked my account on the Princess app, and the reservation was gone. When our travel agent called Princess, a customer service representative told her that we were in default for nonpayment and owed approximately $2,000 more. Where was this new charge coming from? Nobody at Princess could tell us.

After weeks of calls and emails to Princess representatives, including their director of customer relations and vice president of guest services, the mystery finally unraveled. Apparently, we were being charged for a "Princess Plus" upgrade that cost $1,440 -- a 62% price increase that we never authorized and didn't even know about.

It turns out my wife tried to upgrade us to Princess Plus, an optional add-on package that bundles several onboard amenities into a daily price, through the website. The system returned an error message saying that the purchase didn't go through and instructed her to either contact the travel agent or pay for the upgrade onboard. We planned to handle it on the ship. Yet somehow, Princess was now treating us as if we'd purchased this upgrade and never paid for it. They canceled our reservation and kept $1,298 of our money as a cancellation fee.

This feels less like a billing problem and more like a system failure that the company is exploiting. I'm a retired accountant. I know how computer systems work. If someone's account shows "no balance due," and their travel agent can't see a pending charge either, this meants that something is catastrophically wrong with Princess' infrastructure. The company is hiding behind system failures that should've been fixed.

We don't even care about the cruise anymore. We just want our $1,298 back. -- Robert Battaglia, Oro Valley, Arizona

A: Princess never should've canceled your reservation. When your final payment went through, your account should've been settled. If the system later discovered a phantom charge that nobody could document or explain, Princess needed to contact you first.

Instead, Princess relied on a billing system that gave conflicting information to different employees. Your travel agent couldn't see the charge. The Princess customer service representative couldn't explain what you supposedly owed. The company's own portal told your wife that the upgrade purchase failed. Yet somehow, all of this added up to a cancellation and a fee.

When a customer makes a payment by the due date, and the company's statement shows "no balance due," the burden is on the cruise line to explain any subsequent charges before taking punitive action. You did a great job of keeping records. A paper trail is essential when you're dealing with any billing dispute. You can appeal any rejection to the executive contacts at Princess that are listed on Elliott.org. A brief, firm email to a manager would've been the next step.

When my advocacy team and I contacted Princess on your behalf, the company directed us to your travel agent. This is a common deflection in the cruise industry; many cruise lines prefer to have travel agents handle disputes rather than deal with customers directly. The agency declined to comment, saying that the matter was between you and Princess.

Ultimately, Princess agreed. A full three months after your cancellation, the cruise line refunded $1,298 to your credit card. Princess should tell its IT department to fix the billing software. This probably isn't the first time that the cruise line has canceled a reservation because of a system problem -- and it surely won't be the last.

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Christopher Elliott is the founder of Elliott Advocacy (elliottadvocacy.org), a nonprofit organization that helps consumers solve their problems. Email him at chris@elliott.org or get help by contacting him at elliottadvocacy.org/help/.

(c) 2026 Christopher Elliott

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