canderson

Thanks for the forewarning. I'll request the locators for both the UA and TP flights. Yes, I'm very familiar with Star Alliance and code share issues. We'll be direct DEN to LHR on UA, but the LHR to Lisbon leg is a TAP Portugal codeshare, and I fully expect a seat assignment hassle there if it works like my usual Lufthansa experiences.

Q for those who have been down this road before -- this is our first: When there are changes to flight itinerary, does SS normally notify either the guest or the travel agent? Just found that we have had ours changed entirely, but only discovered it by accident as I was in our SS reservation online today. Actually turned out to be a better pair of flights as regards schedule (and Polaris class on a 787-9 rather than on the older 757 setup), but notice of such changes would certainly be appreciated. Ah, and edit to ask: At what point to we get record locators, and perhaps seat assignment information?

After poking around on their web site a bit, I may have found why there was no package offered when we booked nor afterward. They have nothing to sell us:

New SS cruiser here. Package? I'm reasonably certain that we weren't offered any choices when booking nor online afterward.

Just understand that there are some itineraries where, if you are far enough out of sight of land, the StarLink system isn't yet operational. If the Starlink satellites within the field of view of the ship don't also have a view to a ground station somewhere, they have no place to send/receive your communications. Unlike the older mid-orbit geostationary constellations, the Starlink satellites are MUCH closer to the ground, and while this helps a lot with latency, speed and the like, it limits their field of view considerably. That said, since the Moon will be in Greece / Middle East during the period you mention, you should be in great shape.

Only if spell check changed toque to torque.

True, but menus aren't. What @West Windsor girl reports at Atlantide is different from recently posted photos of SS menus. That Dawn cruise seems to have been a very anomalous one.

Yeah. An unoccupied seat means someone collapsed during the boarding process and there wasn't anyone waiting at the gate on standby. In retrospect, I'm glad we took the business air option with SS. Compared to when we booked our next cruise, we'd be looking at about 50% more than the credit and the business class upgrade with SS cost us. Got a decent itinerary and while it's not the 787 Polaris Class that I'd prefer, can't knock Polaris on a 757, either... at least not compared to the alternatives for a long overseas flight. I don't sleep for diddly sitting up, and traveling eastbound, it's pretty important to at least give it a try. I wonder how SS manages this. The trend has been clear for a while now, so you'd think they'd go ahead and actually book the seats.

Whatever became of consolidators and consolidator fares? Are the airlines so flush with customers that they have stopped selling blocks of seats? Used to be the way to buy international business or first class.

Sounds to me as though you're a candidate for a new hobby ... geocaching. One of the several facets of the game are 'trackables' that are placed by their owners, and moved around the world by other players and tracked online. You might find some fun there. The primary objective, of course, is to find the hidden cache in which they are placed. www.geocaching.com Put in your home address and odds are you'll be surprised at what you find hidden not far from wherever it is that you live.

Having spent many years dealing with the various RCG IT systems, I see nothing familiar about either the front end or back end processing at SS.

This will be our fitst SS cruise. We stuck with a Silver for our November TA (lots of full tilt boogie kts days, and lots of planned veranda time) on Dawn due to the strange location of the three upper suite classes on this ship class. On the bow into the wind for two of them, directly under the pool for the Owner's... none of them really ideal. Having only a 27m beam seems to have been felt to have forced some design compromises, but one could envision a better layout to accommodate the larger suites even so.

The 6 Vista cabins (and the 6 Panoramas either side of the Owner's suites) on the Muse are the only non-veranda cabins on the ship, so I think the other poster was correct in calling it an upgrade when moved from one of those to a Classic Veranda. Granted, these aren't huge verandas, but you do wind up with more total space as well. Vista non-HC = 335 sq ft Panorama = 334 sq ft Classic Veranda = 387 sq ft

No surprise that it's a charter. The good thing is that a charter from the E coast saves a great deal of flight time. Even flights into Nuuk (the largest of the airports there, and on the west coast of Greenland) from the U.S. wind up flying to places like Heathrow or Amsterdam first. Seems there's just not enough demand for the airlines to supply a more direct route. No telling what kind of aircraft the charter airline will use. You'd have to query Silversea to see if they're willing to provide the details for whatever it is they've commissioned for the trip. If you're lucky, someone here who has made that trip might be able to share whatever experience they've had in the past, but that would be no assurance of what you'll have for your trip.

Could well be true. The 6 Vista cabins are the only cabins on Deck 4, though they do seem to include the only 3 specifically wheelchair accessible cabins on the ship. If there was no demand for any of these, I can see why they'd just move the few pax in those cabins to a more centralized location.

The other RCG lines include printable tags in the cruise docs *.pdf that they email about 30 days before the cruise. A lot of folks pick up a set of very popular durable sleeves to fold/stuff them into: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B07WPW9MJH

Anybody? Do we contact SS directly even if booked through a TA?

So even if working through a TA, the request is made directly with SS? This will be our first with SS as well, so not sure how they work this. When cruising with Celebrity, although working through a TA for the reservation, we would get the email or call directly from the shoreside concierge soliciting any special requests that dealt with this kind of thing about 30 days out from boarding.

Have heard that Oceana provides a good blend of 'resort casual' coupled with very good shipboard experience/service on smaller ships that, like SS, are able to visit more varied ports.

It's not the few formal nights, it's all of the other nights that in part differentiate this line from others. Just a guess, but I'm betting that the Maître d' in La Dame would ask to have a baseball cap removed before entering. As I say, you don't see that happening in Murano these days. Yes, there are other factors in play, but ... This isn't the only line that provides exceptional service, and one of them is a good bit less formal in its dinner dress requirements. If that style of cruising was our preference, we'd have made a point of moving to that line rather than agitating for a change in policy (or ignoring the one in place) by SS. The title of this thread is "Booking our first SS cruise", and as I say, this is one of the several reasons that this will also be our first with SS.

OR ... It could be that those who are tired of baseball caps appearing in Murano (Celebrity's version of La Dame) at dinner will gravitate to SS. That's one of the several reasons that we've just now migrated to SS from Celebrity after many years. I believe that there are enough people interested in cruising that a line can carve out a niche for itself rather than attempting to please the masses. But the ONLY way to do that is to differentiate the product, which is what SS still seems to be doing. If a line chooses to differentiate its product in some way to carve out their own niche in the overall market, it's not going to make a secret of that. No one sailing SS should be unaware of its differences before booking. @Stickman1990 "I just don’t understand what difference what I choose to wear makes one single difference to your cruise experience." Taking it to a logical extreme, what if La Dame used Iron Maiden album covers as their dining room artwork. Might change the tone of the place a bit, don't you think? Yes, that's extreme, but there's no denying that there's a visual component to any venue, including the dining experience. Perhaps more important, and getting back to the issue of differentiation... let's assume that everyone took your approach to the question. Why, then, would I choose SS if becomes no different from any other cruise line? Telling the line that you don't care about their business model by refusing to work within it, nor care about those passengers who choose the line because of those differences, shows a lack of respect for both the business and those who appreciate its business model enough to make a point of traveling with them rather than another line.

Since we've not cruised for less than 14 consecutive nights for some years now, the TA's OBC hasn't been that hard to spend, though cruising with SS will make it a bit harder! We did have one, a 'restart' cruise, in late 2021 where a massive repricing caused a silly (high 4 figures) amount of OBC from the line, and we took the TA's post-cruise check for that one.

Note in the previous post the bold word "refundable". OBC provided directly by the TA (not directly by the line or by the TA as a pass-through from the line) is refundable, and is returned by all lines we've ever sailed.

Your TA kicks back a portion of their profit to you either way. It's costing them the same to have it passed along as refundable OBC (if you don't use all/part of it, the line refunds it to you) for your cruise, or mailing it to you as a check after your cruise.

I prefer it with either fresh salmon, or better yet, skipjack (also a tuna, very dark red meat) that I've caught off one of the islands there.