canderson

Had this happen 2 X cruises ago. It was about 7 days into a 14 nt TA. We had yet to set foot into the MDR on that cruise, but something on the menu took our attention, and we decided to drop by for lunch. The M'd greeted us by name at the entrance ... we'd never seen him before. Was a little freaky.

Rumor has it that our mug shots are distributed around the ship. Just for fun, I'm going to try to visually confirm on this next cruise.

Mostly agree, but the 2019 Etude Estate turned out pretty well. Had one at dinner over the weekend with lamb shank.

I wonder if that's only for the 'revo' S class ships? When we were on Reflection in late '22, there was no key card access to Michael's.

Yes, all suites are billed at the same $23/day pp gratuity amount... unless your reservation is old enough that it caught the 'gratuities included' era. So if you're asking if someone booking a SS today vs a CS today would pay the same, the answer is yes. I've also heard it said that if you are upgrading to a higher priced cabin, you can ask that your previous AI (or whatever) deal remain intact and that this is often honored, and not treated as a cancel/re-book. We've yet to be in that position, so can't say from personal experience. We upgraded one cabin again this year when prices dropped, but had booked the original late enough that the AI deal was the same then/now.

I wonder if the Finnish Steerprop units are finally starting to have thrust bearing problems like the old M-Class Rolls/Alstom azipods used to develop?

Then the OBC should be $150 from X for a 'normal' booking. No grats, though, which can add up fast.

It was explained b4. When you booked originally, the deal included grats and OBC. Guessing you booked before late Oct 23. Current deal, current price does NOT include grats or OBC. Sometimes the math works, sometimes it doesn't.

FWIW, we've used a little TP-Link AC750 lately with good results.

Travel router can provide access to additional devices, and is used successfully by some here. But that won't get you past the 5Mbps bandwidth issue. Your travel router will itself have a single connection capped at 5Mbps to spread amongst your devices.

Not even in an upper suite was a hardwired connection seen on Reflection on our last (post-Starlink) cruise. There's one associated with the TV, but that won't get you to the outside world. Plan to use WiFi for your connection. Even their premium brand Silversea limits bandwidth to 10Mbps.

Yes, booking suites will often cause a bigger delta in price, especially after final. The % delta isn't all that different, but the number can be quite large. As for the TA, it's good business if the TA is looking to retain clients long term. If prepared (keep most likely to benefit bookings in an easy spreadsheet) the lookup of one can cover numerous bookings. The original work is only about an additional 30 seconds per client. There are also times when it's more likely to occur. Won't catch all price drops, but can catch the big ones. When making mock bookings, don't log in first and you won't get those annoying emails.

Not if the reservation is booked ahead and held through final payment, no. There's a very short window of opportunity where the math may work out very nicely, or may not. Give the timing, the nature of the original booking (especially deposit) some thought, and I'll bet you come up with a few new ideas. There's always a small risk involved with regard to taking the original cruise or having to move to another based upon availability and any unseen but existing wait lists, but on the whole, we've been pretty happy with the results when we've seen the right inventory available at the right time. Certainly doesn't happen for every X cruise, but there do seem to be some very strong trends. Enough said.

Could also be a real loss of OBC if the cruise was booked far enough back to have included that as part of the AI or other promotion.

By the way -- If you're using a TA and they're not helping you with this kind of thing, it's time to find another TA.

Because there is. Read post #22, and follow the Celebrity link I left there. $500 in OBC can cover a lot of 'fixed' expenses, like gratuities (which will be running us $540 per cabin on our next cruise), and if nothing else, can be spent on whatever fun and frivolous thing the recipient can think up. Shorex paid for by credit card can be cancelled and paid for with OBC. A little imagination goes a long way!

So you wouldn't feel bad to later find your fare had dropped by $500, and that you'd left that money on the table? To each his/her own, I guess.

Given the number of cruise ships afloat and the number of ports available, and the number of days in a year, if a cruise line sees that things may continue to go sideways in a particular area, they'll often be proactive about schedule changes just to assure they can put together a decent alternate itinerary. Probably just as well to reset customer expectations as early as possible. What they seem slow to do is admit the initial situation that is going to start to prevent cruises in a given area, cancelling/rescheduling the earlier cruises in a crisis zone rather late in the game. Once they finally get past that, things seem to go a lot more smoothly and far more in advance, like yours.

The only time I'd agree with this would be if for some reason my original fare/booking didn't allow for any adjustment, making the point moot. And yes, it's necessary for there to be a cabin available with a published fare on the X site in order to request the adjustment, but you never know when this might happen. Even if you've not seen anything comparable available for many months, there are often cancellations right before final payment. Although there has always been one equivalent cabin available on our Nov '24 TA for some reason (and to our surprise, there still is), a second popped up at 91 days out. With the price drop, we applied for the OBC for our own cabin, and since the fare was now a fair bit less, we upgraded our 'kids' from the cabin they had to the same class cabin as ours. There was no reprice on theirs since there hadn't been any of those available since last June. In 2021, we had a whopping $5,600 to play with on a 15nt B2B. In 2022, we didn't score because there were no more cabins in our class to compare. In 2023, we moved to Silversea for that year. In 2024, we picked up another $1,700 or so of OBC to play with on a 14nt. Best Price Guarantee really is still a 'thing': https://www.celebritycruises.com/company/customer-support/best-price-guarantee

Only once did we have an appropriate amount of delta (mid 4 figures) and the two M class PH that would have been an upgrade were already spoken for. RS is plenty roomy enough, and we made a few very happy crew members!

Post-final, it's the only remedy in our experience.

Can only say that our TA did - again this year - and we'll be enjoying the OBC to cover gratuities and a few bottled of wine.

We're assuming that was intended to be funny, hence the 😄 'reactions' to the post.

On 2021 we found one in a high storage area in our cabin (M class)! 5X5 on that cruise!

What it does is change what she's going to be doing for a living, and hence, what issues she's in a position to do anything about to begin with. A CEO as was the case before would have had far more latitude.