Where in the world am I today?: Edmonton, AB, Canada

I received the image that I’m including with this post from Bob Cates after a recent bought of emails we had both received from the agent who books us both onto Cruise Ships… The policy for the last few years that I’ve been working for Princess Cruises has been that performers who travel with excess baggage would be re-imbursed provided that they submit the original receipts along with a ‘reimbursement form’ stating what each item was. In the last few months, I’ve received the following from my agent on numerous occasions…

PRINCESS CRUISES POLICY ON EXCESS BAGGAGE

• Princess Cruises will only reimburse Excess Baggage fees for acts that travel with necessary show props (jugglers, ventriloquists, comedy magicians, etc).
• The standard maximum reimbursement is $50 USD per airline traveled during the course of a contract.
• Excess Baggage expectations must be pre-approved and specified on the Guest Entertainer Booking Form.
• When possible, please store necessary performance items in your carry-on luggage.

To date I haven’t been denied full reimbursement for excess baggage on any of the trips I’ve made for Princess, though there are still two trips for which I’ve submitted receipts that I haven’t been reimbursed for yet, so I’ll be very interested to see how strictly the company adheres to the policy as stated above.

I was on a ship back in June and ran into a guy from the Princess Finance department who was commenting that although the ships still seem quite full of passengers that the people are buying the tickets to get on the cruise at a discounted rate then not spending as much as in previous years which was having a big impact on revenues… “In Today’s Economy” is a catch phrase that’s being thrown around a lot but to date this is the first time that I’ve seen the direct impact of this statement on how I’ve been doing business in recent years.

Again, I’ll be very interested to see how big the cheque I get from Princess is once my latest reimbursement forms have been fully processed.

.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 7th, 2009 at 12:01 am and is filed under Technical Tuesdays. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.