Honolulu Blue

I started a roll call for the 2025 edition of the Super Legends Cruise that I just booked.

I have a similar story on one of my cruises from some years ago that wasn't on either Celebrity or Royal. We made haste to our disembarkation port, which happened to be the nearest large port.

@JamieLogical: Thank you for your detailed summary of yesterday. I found it especially interesting. I'm sorry Princess screwed up your allocation of drinks. We're discussing the drink limit on Princess in another thread and failed to note this disadvantage of it.

For me, I'd prioritize it this way: "Mandatory" gratuities, if not already prepaid The casino Any interesting excursions that I haven't prepurchased Souvenirs from the gift shop Specialty dining that interests me

Thank you for your comments and thanks for your support. I'll have to check out the artists you mentioned. There's lots of time until the cruise and I suppose I can spare an hour or two in the name of entertainment. I wish this cruise was twice as long with twice as much talent while not costing twice as much. But it is what it is. Let me know if you make it onboard. It's always fun to be with people you kind of know. 😀

I should have taken the advice of another Jody Watley song - "Learn to Say No". But I tinkered with the Super Legends Cruise site, signed up for an account, looked for cabins near the library (where I ended up on TEC 2023), booked one, paid the $50 deposit, and set myself up for $160 payments for the next 12 months. So, I guess I signed up for another music themed cruise, my fourth in 2025. I hope Jody Watley is in really good form. 🙏 P.S. I forgot to mention that she was supposed to be part of TEC '23 but canceled out on us for unknown reasons.

I got e-mail notification of the Super Legends Cruise in September 12-15, 2025. It's on Navigator OTS. I'm familiar with that ship thanks to last year's 80s Cruise. I liked it better than the Mariner. The timing is all right - it's well away from my other cruises, though I don't like that it's during prime hurricane season. Yes it's short, and it's VERY expensive, but the lineup is interesting: I like what I've heard of the Isley Brothers and would look forward to hearing from them again. Sheila E. will be on next year's TEC, so this would be a double down. Not too risky, since I expect her to be quite good. Tavares will be on next year's UDC. They should be all right, worth my time to while away an hour by the pool with. Heatwave was on the last UDC, but I missed them. They have two killer songs that I'd look forward to hearing. But the key performer here is Jody Watley. I really liked her back in the day. If she's still got "it", then she could top Sheena from the top of my charts. Anyway, El Lay is a long way to travel for just three days, and I don't much care for the terminal in San Pedro. And the itinerary is just 8 hours in Ensenada. The per day cost in even the most basic cabin would be the most of any cruise I've had or booked. But I keep hearing Jody singing to me, "You turned your back on me when I needed you most of all" (my favorite song from her, BTW). It remains to be seen whether I resist her siren's call. Stay tuned.

We covered some of this territory in the post below. Promotions are a big reward - perhaps the biggest, IMHO. I remain in shock at how forcefully and swiftly Celebrity takes action over a few kind words.

Thanks for noting this. I've seen the same.

Thanks for the reply. Celebrity moves fast! I'll make a note of this. You never know when it might come in handy.

This is also very interesting. How long did it take from mention to promotion? If it was during the same cruise, this would be the height of mixed emotions for me, assuming I wasn't in AQ. It's also telling that Celebrity thinks that moving to the AQ is a promotion, and at least some moves there are based on merit.

Thank you for the rest of the story! 🙂

Thank you for your insight as usual. I highlighted this portion because I think it's especially relevant to the OP's question and some of my thoughts on this matter.

Thanks for sharing this. Was this onboard a cruise? I've never proactively spoken to management onboard any ship about an outstanding employee. I've relied on surveys for this. Perhaps I should start? Two lessons that I get from your story: 1) One person can make a BIG difference in someone's life 2) Sometimes greatness isn't obvious; sometimes it needs to be pointed out by someone who notices and cares.

Actually I think their limit is meant mostly to send signals to two groups of people. To law enforcement, judicial, and governmental authorities, it says, "see, we TRY to limit our passengers' drinking to reasonable levels." To those who regularly imbibe more than the limit per day, it says, "You're potentially more trouble than you're worth. You should probably pick another cruise line." Whether Carnival Corp accomplishes their missions is a discussion for another place and time. JMHO. I'm out. Please continue your discussion. 👍

I got a couple of notes with my e-mails from ECP this afternoon. This coming TEC is 85% full. Pretty good, but Star Trek is at 97%. 😮 Also, next year's Rock Legends Cruise just changed their port stop to CocoCay. They were scheduled in Labadee. 😵, so they made the obvious call there. TEC is still scheduled to head for Haiti as one of their three stops. When will they make the change? Who knows??

The 80s Cruise released the highlight video of their cruise a few weeks ago. The jump cuts from video to video were mostly very fast, so I can't be absolutely sure that they didn't sneak me in there. But I didn't get a confirmed sighting of me. There were a couple of close calls. There was a closeup of Stephen Pearcy signing a copy of his autobiography. But it wasn't my book - the ink color was different. And during Sheena's concert, the camera was behind me, and I can almost tell where I was standing with camera in hand... but it was dark, and I didn't see enough details to confirm my presence. Oh, and former VJs Mark, Julie, and Alan did a little speech about next year's cruise. I think it was during the late concert, because I don't remember it and I didn't see myself. It's about 4 minutes long. Have fun!

A few notes from around the Net: Both Rock and Romance and Flower Power have sold out. R&R did it early this month, while FP took a little longer and sold out about a week ago. I hope George got his back to back suites if he wanted them. I got an announcement that Summer of 99 is on for next year. Creed will host again. No other performers were announced at this time. It will go April 9-13 and head from Miami to Nassau and back on the Norwegian Gem. It's about $2500 for a solo interior cabin, and I can take another $100 off if I'm willing to pay in full. Despite all this, I was intrigued enough to sign up for the pre sale. I'll get a time to book on or about May 27. We'll see what happens. Soul Train 2.0 keeps adding performers. It sounds like it's going to go.

I'm the complete opposite - I like the Millennium and Summit, which are both in the same class. I haven't sailed on any other Celebrity ships, but I like them well enough. On the other hand, I've done two Royal class ships and the Ruby. I liked the bigger, newer Princess ships better. I got half off on Internet on Princess on my third cruise. I value that much more highly than a bag of laundry, which I ordinarily don't do on cruises of 7 days or less. It's all about priorities.

Thanks for the kind words. I'm sure Celebrity is thrilled to have this repositioning cruise chartered. Traditionally, across cruise lines, cabins on repositioning cruises tend to be sluggish sellers that only sell out at giveaway prices. They might have passed along a discount for the charter to Jazz Cruises, which if true, then I'm happy for them. I like win-wins. 😃

I received my e-mail a few hours ago announcing the opening of bookings for the Journey of Jazz Cruise to the general public. A few details caught my eye - all the suites and some other top-end non-suite cabins are already sold out, as are the allocated solo inside and balcony cabins. Overall they say the ship is almost 50% booked. That's a pretty good start, IMHO.

This intrigues me... trivia as in going down to the local pub and competing with the locals, or staying at home and breaking out the box of Trivial Pursuit? Either way, I think I'll give you a wide berth if I see you on my ship. Then again, I'm only good at trivia in a few categories. 🙂

They LOVE Mr. Heald and they LOVE Carnival. Rare is the unkind word said about either.

To bend this topic around a bit, I use an Amazon Fire and don't have the Carnival app loaded on it. It's easy to switch the WiFi from my phone to it - just do the Silk thing and go to login.com . That will ask you if you want to login to this device and log off of the other device. Two clicks and done. I can't ask to be much easier than that.

Thanks everyone. A few quickie comments on your comments and lessons learned: Perhaps "scream at me" is an exaggeration. The polished MDR employees are unlikely to scream at their passengers, even me. They're more likely to scream at the chef when he rebuffs my request, which doesn't make me feel much better. Or they're likely to put me on the crew dartboard for the week as the most unreasonable passenger they've had to deal with. That doesn't make me feel any better either. It doesn't seem to be popular among this veteran group, but perhaps that was just the weekend crowd. Why ask about what is apparently such a radical thing? The stomach wants what it wants. I'm sure many of you have food cravings and/or memories of meals from the recent past. I wondered about how flexible MDR menus actually are. It turns out that they're not too flexible. Flowers are red. Green leaves are green. There's no need to see MDR menus any other way than the way they always have been seen. The "proper" procedure for this seems to be similar to the special needs menus - ask beforehand and maybe I'll get what I want. It sounds like too much hassle for all involved for me to try it (even on luxury lines), so I don't think I'll be doing this any time soon. Some of you, I'm sure are breathing a sigh of relief. I briefly forgot about MDR pre-plating. I'm sure regular restaurants at sea and land do the same (especially with popular meals/entrees), but not to the same degree as everyone's favorite MDRs. Thanks again, and I look forward to continued replies with more wisdom.