Blink and you'll miss it: a lesson learned

As I'm sure many of you do, I keep my ear to the ground when it comes to price drops or adjustments.

I usually book in U.S. funds but on a recent cruise I purchased future cruise credits in Canadian funds since the dollar had been at par for some time. A month or two later, of course, the Canadian dollar started dropping leaving me to regret my decision. And by then I had already applied my future cruise credits (see blog below).

Recently, though, the Canadian dollar has gained strength and started to rise again. I could either cancel and rebook in U.S. or I could just wait and see if Princess adjusted their exchange rate which could potentially save me some money.

Well, I found out on Monday through a kind Cruise Critic poster that Princess had just adjusted their foreign exchange rate from $1.25 to $1.15. This effectively dropped the price of my booked cruise by about $170 a person. A nice little price drop and the second one since we'd booked the cruise.

But I was busy and got sidetracked. I figured I was safe because the drop was due to a change in their foreign exchange rate and what were the chances they'd adjust that again so quickly?

So I contacted my TA yesterday and although the spread between U.S. and Canadian prices were at the new rate, in the space of 24 hours the U.S. price had gone up. It had gone up to the point where the Canadian price was exactly where it had been before the rate adjustment. Grrrr...... my potential $340 savings gone.

So now I'm back to watching the pricing, hoping it will drop again and THIS time, I will move on it right away.