After the abrupt cancellation of the three-year-old Life at Sea cruise in November, greater than 100 passengers are still waiting for refunds from Miray, the Turkish carrier responsible for the enterprise.
Now they are looking for fraud charges and are struggling with serious financial problems, New York Times reported.
On Tuesday, 78 Life at Sea cruise passengers sent a letter to Markenzy Lapointe, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, asking for an investigation into Miray. They claim the company contributed an estimated $16 million to buy a recent ship, which was not obtained.
At the time of the appeal, Life at Sea admitted that the delays and transfers were on account of its failure to buy AIDAaura from AIDA Cruises, and promised to pay the refund in monthly installments from mid-December to the end of February, CNN reported.
Many passengers had to present up their jobs, liquidate their assets and deplete their life savings to afford what was considered the odyssey of a lifetime. Most paid tens of hundreds of dollars to order cabins, with prices ranging from $90,000 to $975,000 per suite. However, as repayment deadlines got here and went for greater than a month, only 4 passengers received a partial refund, in keeping with the NYT.
“Some people put everything they had into this and now they’re broke, homeless, or wandering from cruise to cruise like bumblebees because they have nowhere to go.” – David Purcell, a 78-year-old retired lawyer from St. Louis, who sold his house and automotive to book the trip, told the outlet.
The account of Miray’s owners is different and attributes delays in refunds to bank holds resulting from quite a few bank card chargeback disputes. However, in keeping with the report, many passengers dispute this, saying their chargeback requests were a last resort after repeated refund disappointments.