P&O cruise deferred from last year. P&O will not now accept unvaccinated passengers. Refund? 17 January 2022 at 9:21PM in Coronavirus travel help & info 21 replies 1.4K views

getmore4less

For those that don't know cruise only bookings are covered by the package regulations

now to the question.

Bluenorw said:

Booked a cruise with P&O in 2020. Cruise cancelled and accepted transfer to a cruise for this year.  However, P&O will not accept unvaccinated passengers and two of the party are not vaccinated. As this is a requirement imposed by P&O after the original cruise was booked, are there grounds for a refund if we cannot now travel?

When was the original booking?
When was the cruise?
When was it cancelled?
What date did you move to?
Have you made final payment? 

Did that change come with any incentive? IIRC they were offering enhanced amount to put forward to any future cruise.

If there was no incentive and it was a substitute cruise under package regulation then it may still qualify for a full refund.

I suspect it may have been an offer of refund or FCC not a substitute, cruise lines are sneaky to try to keep your money.

Once you decline the refund(or a refund credit) you lose the statutory right to refund in the future you effectively convert your cash to a future cruise credit then any further refunds are in that form.

That leads to you actual question can you get a refund now that the underlying conditions have changed.

 A couple of point on that....   

P&O introduced mandatory vaccines for all over 7 month ago and announced vaccines would be required as early as March 2021

This should have been dealt with by now, should have made the claim for a refund much sooner

On the potential plus side there is a precedence , when P&O reintroduced vaccinations for children P&O cancelled the bookings where people were traveling with unvaccinated children.

I suspect the best you can do is get you money back in the form of a FCC unless you can show that the replacement was an offering under package regulations and is still covered as an original booking where a refund would be due

if your cruise was cancelled after March when vaccines were announced it was an error to convert to a FCC if you knew tou would not be getting the protection of a vaccines..

I suspect there may be a few options still available under P&O policies.

Move the cruise further out under the flexible rules and hope the policy changes
https://www.pocruises.com/travel-health-advisories/flexible-cancellation-policy
(I doubt policy will change as unvaccinated have caused issues on cruises and many will want to cancel if they let the unvaccinated travel)

Review change of passenger policy, under package regulations this should be possible at reasonable cost
https://www.pocruises.com/legal-and-privacy/booking-terms-and-conditions
(para 12-17)

Cancel for the relevant loss



The vaccination policies are in place because of where the cruises go, the cruise lines have meet the restriction of the destinations without the policy a lot of cruises would have to be withdrawn.