OzKiwiJJ

I concur on the La Boheme rose. We also enjoyed the Empress Pinot Gris, which is actually made in a Pinot Grigio style. Both the Australian Pinot Noirs are OK. The Lock and Key is a bit lighter than the Rob Dolan so gives an alternative match to some foods.

But that's the same for restaurants, especially larger ones or ones that have several outlets, so it's comparable.

They work out fairly close when you add the 18% service charge on top of the Westerdam price then convert to AUD. You don't get charged the extra service charge on Princess.

A good percentage of people who have the Plus fare don't realise what those wines are and, of course, don't care what the prices are. They are wines they enjoy drinking and that's what's important to them. So Princess gets through buckets of the stuff while people like me get seriously annoyed because there are very few decent wines available under the package. Unless they resolve this soon they are going to start losing customers like us. We are currently considering cancelling the Round Australia cruise we have booked in October to do an Asian cruise with one of the luxury lines who have some very good deals at the moment.

I certainly agree that the De Bortoli Willowglen wines are seriously over-priced. It makes me wonder if whoever they dealt with here to source those wines ripped them off bigtime. But most of the other Australian wines are priced realistically based on the retail prices I've seen for those wines. Even the ridiculously over-priced Cloudy Bay Sauv Blanc is consistent to the standard restaurant markups of around 2.5 - 3 times retail price.

Typically the per glass pours are 150 ml on cruise ships, so 5 glasses to a bottle. The markups are high, yes, but no more so than a decent restaurant on land. They have to source the wine, have it delivered, store it onboard (I wonder if they have special storage to minimize movement in rough seas?), chill wines that need it, priovide glasses, and serve it. Comparing the onboard price to bottle store prices is just absurd.

Typically Princess cruises bought in Aus/NZ and operating with AUD onboard costs do not have daily gratuities but cruises operating with USD onboard costs do. However I'm sure I saw a US promo for USD ships that included gratuities as well as the Plus package. It was sometime last year but I can't remember exactly when. The original confirmation emails usually show what is included, way down the bottom.

The cruise lines usually add in shop space to the public spaces tally which, on some ships, can be very misleading as they are often not very busy compared with bars and lounges. From memory Majestic is like that - a whole section on deck 7 that has shops that were mostly empty most of the time. Designed for wealthy Chinese who want to shop luxury brands.

Yes, that day 3 test makes a big difference, I think. It catches those who had caught Covid just before their cruise but hadn't tested positive, plus those who faked their test results. Majestic Princess has some serious design flaws compared with older ships in the Princess fleet, and ships in other cruise lines. They seriously cut back on the bars on Majestic and most Royal Class ships - the spacious Wheelhouse Bar became the much smaller Crown Grill Bar, there is no Explorers lounge - it was replaced by the weird Princess Live, and there is no Crooners on Majestic. They tend to have popular dance music entertainers in the Piazza which gets very overcrowded. The Piazza is also where in International Cafe is and (I think) the bar in that area is also a Good Spirits Bar. That area alone is probably a major infection point for Covid. When we did a short cruise on Majestic in 2018 it was jam-packed all day and night.

The Royal Caribbean ships are larger so it takes more cases to reach Tier 2. I wish all cruise lines would announce the number of cases like they did on Westerdam. It might make a difference in some people's attitudes if they did. Anyway numbers should be easing off now as the current wave seems to be tailing off. The big numbers on Princess ships were when the current wave was just ramping up.

The cruise lines offer you a choice of airline but often have one that is substantially cheaper than the rest - which is why we got a business class flight one way to NZ cheaper than Qantas wanted for an economy class seat on the same flight. It didn't help with the airport queues though, at both ends!

Different demographics too. The Royal brands tend to attract a younger demographic whereas the Princess demographic is older, probably with poorer immune systems.

It happened to me only the other way around. I tacked a new cruise in front of an existing one and the existing one disappeared! Talk about panic!!!! Then I noticed the end date of the new cruise was actually the end date of the second cruise.

Is the missing cruise B2B with an earlier cruise? If so it gets automatically tacked on to the earlier cruise and you don't have to do anything for the second cruise.

They did that on Westerdam. 🤔🙄😁

It's not just a Princess thing. It was the same on Holland America - masks were required when moving around inside the ship. The onboard environment is significantly different to every day life on land. The only equivalent would be a large conference or something where people are mostly confined to one place - hotel or resort - for a week or more. People think they don't need to wear a mask because they don't wear one in their day-to-day life but they don't consider that their day-to-day life isn't confined to just one, relatively small, area that contains thousands of people. In their day-to-day life they spend much of their time at home or in their workplace, some shopping, maybe a meal out or a night at the pub/club, exercise or sports etc. But most of these are in much more open spaces than the confines of a cruise ship and they probably come in contact with far fewer people.

True. I made some Easrer buns a couple of years ago but couldn't be bothered piping on the cross. They still tasted great!

Goop? 🤣🤣🤣

This is the NZ forum as well as the Australian forum.

NZ is even more oriented towards credit cards than Australia, in fact we saw some places that no longer accept cash.

Yes, I just found a photo I took of Rolf in one of the suites and you can just see the side of one of the TVs in that.

Wishing him all the best for recovery, both physical and emotional. 😘

The suites have the big screens too, as far as I can recall. I think all the TVs have been replaced by flat screens on Coral but since we rarely use cabin TVs I'm not 100% certain.

Ships dock at Port Chalmers for Dunedin, not Lyttelton. 🙄😀

I don't think it's the cruise that dictates that. The shuttle bus drop offs are probably agreed with the Wellington council and they try to have the stops where they are most required ie near Te Papa and near the Cable Car. At one stage they stopped using the Brandon St stop as there were road works in that area. They moved it to outside the Old Government Building but I don't think that was a popular stop. Good to see they've gone back to Brandon St.