Royal Caribbean is updating and simplifying its cancellation policy, in an effort to make the entire policy simpler to understand.

In a nutshell, the penalty schedule has been reduced from four unique schedules to now two penalty periods. In addition, for sailings 5-nights or longer, the cancellation period has been moved up from 75 days prior-to-sailing to 90 days prior-to-sailing.

The new cancellation guidelines will take effect beginning March 7, 2016. Individual and group reservations created after March 7th, 2016 will be impacted by this change.

Royal Caribbean decided to adjust its cancellation policy, "in an effort to better align with industry standards and to make the schedule simpler and more concise." The timing of this announcement was selected to coincide with the 2017/2018 deployment opening schedule.

Royal Caribbean is taking steps to make it clearer to guests that book their cruises how their booking discounts are being applied.

Travel Weekly has a post about Royal Caribbean's new "Pricing and Promotions" upgrade that allows travel agents and guests to easily see where promotions are applied.  In addition, this change will improve the ability to combine discounts and keep track of which amounts are applied.

Royal Caribbean instituted this new program to show guests how their discounts are being applied throughout the booking process, from start to finish.  The end goal is to make things more transparent.

“In the past people would just call us and say ‘I’m over 55, what’s your rate for seniors?’” noted Diana Block, vice president of revenue management for Royal Caribbean International. "We might say, 'it’s $1,099.' They couldn’t see the value; that in the general marketplace it was $1,299 and that we were giving them a $200 discount.”