The reason for choosing the Regent Safaris and Jewels cruise was its post-cruise trip to Cambodia. There are many other cruise lines that offer a similar trip to Africa and Asia, but the deciding factor was the post-cruise trip to Cambodia.

We followed all the “travel checklist” instructions in Regent's “Cruise Vacation Document” and “Angkor Wat Document” sent to us by Regent before the cruise, specifically the “passports” section. Regent's instructions for required documentation said..."Guest must carry a valid passport with at least 6 months validity and have spare pages for the Cambodian Visa." We made sure that we would have enough pages in our passports for visa stamps for Indonesia, Mozambique, Tanzania, Kenya, and Cambodia, as directed by Regent. What Regent should have said was each country visited will stamp your passport and insert a Visa where appropriate. We have been on many other multi-port cruises where the passport was not stamped in every port, just the appropriate Visa attached. This is a BIG difference. If I'd known this was going to be handled differently from previous cruises, I would have gotten a new passport, even though my current one doesn't expire until November 2016, just to make sure that there were enough pages.

Unfortunately, when we arrived at the Singapore airport to board our plane to Cambodia, I was denied a boarding pass because there were no more “acceptable” pages in my passport for the Cambodian visa. Since my passport was held by Regent for the entire trip and was not released to me until the evening before we arrived in Singapore, I had no idea that I could not receive a Cambodian visa. There were still two empty pages left in my passport but these were deemed unacceptable for the Cambodian visa. If I had known before we got to the airport, I could have easily rectified the problem by going to the American Embassy. They would have given me acceptable visa pages for my passport. We certainly had plenty of time since, unbelievably, it took an hour and a half just to board our sightseeing bus at the dock. Then, there was another couple of hours of sightseeing in Singapore before getting to the airport. Read more