Family’s $15K Carnival Cruise vacation canceled just 2 days prior, without their knowledge, after sharing booking number on Facebook
A Kentucky family’s $15,000 Carnival Cruise vacation they had been planning for a year was canceled just two days before the ship was set to sail after they accidentally shared their booking number online in a case of identity theft.
Tiffany Banks was devastated to learn that her trip aboard the Carnival Celebration ship with her husband and their four kids was canceled without her knowledge the day before the family was going to fly to Florida to leave on the boat.
Banks said in a series of TikTok videos that she had no idea their vacation, for which they had already paid in full, was trashed until she got an email about off-ship excursion cancellations and called to investigate.
A Carnival customer service representative told her that she had canceled her $12,000 reservation for the ship’s largest room — the Excel Presidential Suite — through the online system.
The mom and nurse practitioner said she went into “a full-blown panic” and she and her four kids were all in tears.
“We have nearly $15,000 tied up in for this vacation including excursions. The room itself was I think $12,000 or $13,000, and then we’ve got a few grand tied up in excursions, and actually with almost $2,000 for flights,” she said in a May 12 TikTok video.
Banks said she never canceled the trip and wondered if it was a system glitch.
Carnival said the room they had booked was now reserved by another customer and offered the family two interior rooms — the cheapest on the ship — instead, but the mom did not feel it was an adequate replacement.
Carnival also refused to offer a full refund as its cancellation policy states that no money will be returned within 15 days of the cruise date.
The family flew to Miami and tried to board the ship anyway, hoping for a last-minute solution, but were unable to get on and the ship sailed off without them, Banks said in a teary follow-up video.
They instead stayed at an Airbnb in the Sunshine State, hoping to make the best of their change of plans while the mom shared frustrating updates on TikTok.
In one clip, she responded to “haters” who accused her of hiding things or not sharing the full story.
“I’m an open book. I talk too much. I give out too much information — that’s just me naturally,” she said in remarks that would become an ironic prediction of what was to come in the saga.
A few days later, Carnival called Banks back with an explanation of how her long-awaited cruise trip was canned.
The cruise line told Banks that she was the “victim of a form of identity theft” but that there was no security breach on Carnival’s part, according to a recording of the call she shared on TikTok.
Banks and her husband accidentally shared their cruise booking reference number when posting a screenshot of an email with the countdown to their vacation on Facebook a few weeks out, according to the clip.
The same day they posted the booking number on Facebook, someone created an online Carnival account and added the number to their profile.
Then, 48 hours before the cruise sail date, the person canceled the family’s entire cabin booking, the Carnival rep told Banks in the recording.
Banks said Carnival told her that it believes the IP address of the person who canceled was in British Columbia but it was unable to get an identity of the fraudster.
The company offered her future cruise credit for $10,404 contingent on the mom posting on social media “something to the effect of Carnival has now resolved the issue.”
But Banks said she wasn’t interested and questioned the ease with which someone was able to take over her booking with no verification process.
“We’re not sailing with Carnival ever again,” she said.
The Post reached out to Carnival but did not immediately receive a response.
