Maddysdaddy

I'm risk averse, especially flying in the winter, and will pay for a night (or two or three) in a hotel, in order to ensure that we make it onto our cruise.

My thought is that even if bad weather doesn't hit where I'm flying out of, everything seems to be so interconnected, that snow or freezing rain halfway across the country can cause cancellations in hub cities, which means that even though it's bright and sunny where I am, my flight can potentially be delayed or cancelled.

If I was flying from a sun destination into Miami, I would worry less about a same day flight, but winter weather scares the heck out of me when it comes to flights.

To me, the cost of a hotel is significantly less than what it would cost to try to catch up with our ship at a port of call.

Or you could just make up a new name and have them announce you as that.

"We welcome the Skywalker family"

"We welcome the Kardashian family"

Thanks OP. Better to be safe than sorry. It seems like everyone is forgetting the time that Sandra Bullock had to foil the plans of Willem Dafoe, who had hacked into (and hijacked) the cruise ship they were on. Just sayin'.

At least with respect to my family, I was willing to pay the additional cost to sail with Disney because my daughter was in the sweet spot for what DCL offered to us (kids clubs, shows, etc.).

I knew that there would come an end-date where those things that set DCL apart would no longer be worth the additional cost. For us, that came after our cruise last year, when my tweenaged daughter decided that the clubs did not interest her and that she would rather spend her days on deck with us reading books and listening to her ipod.

That being the case, there is no reason for me to continue paying twice as much for an oceanview cabin, as I am for a mini-suite/large balcony room (with unlimited adult drinks) on NCL next year, in order to cruise on virtually the same itinerary. We'll miss Castaway Key (we get Nassau instead - ugh), but am happy with what I'm seeing from NCL so far (although I'm open to the possibility that we'll board the ship and say, "Gee, we miss Disney").

Because it is 2 twins pushed together, if you move, she shouldn't feel it....since it's 2 different mattresses! Stay on your side, and you'll be fine!

Fingers crossed...

The phrase "I love you, but if you don't stop (moving around/kicking the sheets off/pulling the sheets up/snoring/sighing/having the volume on the radio too loud), I promise that no jury will ever convict me" applies to her feelings about sharing a bed smaller than a King with me.

It's America's Grey Cup. :D

Considering this will be the 103rd Grey Cup and only the 49th Super Bowl, you're not incorrect...

I could have sworn that the last time I looked on the NCL site (a couple of months ago), it listed the bed as a King. That's it, I'm cancelling my reservation - just another bait and switch from NCL ;)

Hi all. Was just looking on the NCL website to see if they had updated the square footage description for the mini suites (specifically M6) , and in the room descriptions, it says that two beds are pulled together to make a Queen.

Am I going crazy, or did the description not used to say that the bed was King size?

I love my wife, but I have a feeling with me being such a restless insomniac, sharing a Queen rather than a King might well result in me being banished to a lounger on the balcony all night. ;)

Hi Maddysdaddy ... I spoke with my son and it's as I thought... There is definitely adult language in the show in several places... It's a great show but I understand where you are coming from about your daughter... She might be a little too young for this one.

Thank you for checking - very much appreciated! We may need to tell the munchkin that she will have to suck it up and go to the kids club for a couple of hours one evening.

I've only looked at the Cagney's menu, and if - as people have described it here - it's the equivalent a middle-of-the-road steakhouse, their prices are significantly less than what I would pay to eat at an 'ok' steakhouse at home.

Can't find the menu of my regular place online, but I just looked at my local Ruth's Chris menu, and just to pull a couple of examples, their petite filet without sides or sauce is $46 (Cagney's is $16) and their ribeye is $59 (Cagney's is $21). The steakhouse I go to is about $10 less expensive than Ruth's.

Even if the quality of meat isn't as good at Cagney's, it's still half to 2/3's less expensive than having a steak at home. Even going to my local butcher will cost me close to $20 per steak for a decent sized ribeye.

That being said, I appreciate that I am already paying for a meal in the MDR as part of my cruise fare, so to be fair, the a la carte prices aren't 100% reflective of the true cost of the meal, but even if you mentally add that amount into the cost of dining at Cagney's, it still seems like a very reasonably priced meal.

woo hoo!!! that's my son on the sax!!!! You all will have to let me know how he does...I am on the cruise Thanksgiving week! I saw this show in Chicago and it was truly amazing. I know they revamped it for NCL..can't wait to see it!

Can I pick your brain on this one for a quick second?

Hoping you can give me your thoughts on whether the show was appropriate for a "tween". My daughter (almost 12) is almost at the age I was when Breakfast Club, Weird Science, etc were release and I saw them in the theatre, but we haven't introduced her to any of the John Hughes films yet - figured 14(ish) was a good age to do that.

If the show is too "adult" then we'll skip it, but considering I know the lyrics to virtually every song in the playlist off by heart, I'd really, really like to go.

OP - some unsolicited advice that you can do with what you want...

Based on my experience with DCL internet, you should be fine checking email, but you may want to reconsider how much news you want to surf, as online papers and magazines tend to be picture heavy, which will eat into your package fairly heavily.

Also know that websites which are graphics-heavy may take some time to load for you. While I found that connection speed was reasonable for being out in the middle of the ocean, it was by no means a quick process, and there were some fairly severe functionality limitations, e.g. I could log in to my office's webmail fairly easily, but had very limited success trying to log in to my desktop via Citrix (even trying to work in the middle of the night when I assumed that overall bandwidth usage across the ship would be minimal).

You know what they say - Age is just a number. Can be old at 35 by not knowing who Pitbull nor liking current dance club music and young at 60 for knowing who he is and dancing to him at 2am at the club, lol. [emoji23]

As I've said many times to my wife, I knew I was getting old when I realized that the time I now go to bed, is the time that I used to start thinking about getting ready to go out for the evening.

Well, that and having to get up in the middle of the night, every night, to use the washroom.

And, I guess, when it hit me that my head was now having a race to see which would happen first - going completely grey or losing my hair.

And don't get me started on when we go out to restaurants or stores in the mall, and I want to (but never do) speak to management to ask them to turn the music down.

And when I started referring to teenagers as a whole, as "big bunches of hoodlums".

Oh, and let's not forget the conversation I had last month, where - without thinking about it - I referred to "The Google", as in "We should look that up on the Google."

And yes, I'm 42, just about to turn 43, with an 11 year old daughter (heaven help her...)

Never thought I would feel old and irrelevant at 42. I saw this announcement and had to ask "who or what is Pitbull". That being said, I am a middle aged attorney from Canada, whose most recent exposure to rap was Run DMC's version of Walk This Way.

Let's be honest - there are any number of hosts from NPR who would be much, much more relevant to me and my listening preferences. :cool: (yes, yes I am supercool!)

Seriously though, now that my daughter is a tween, I guess I need to turn off the talk radio and start listening to music again, just so I have some idea of the crappy music that the kids listen to today, and can then complain about how much better it was in "my day" - U2, Aerosmith, Genesis...

I'm going on my first cruise next month. The deal of 3-8 passengers free plus the UBP free and the NCL exchange rate couldn't be beat. We were looking Disney cruises but I couldn't justify the cost. $7000 USD for Disney vs $2500 CDN for NCL for my family of 5.

This is my situation exactly, with the only tweak being that my daughter is now at an age where the youth clubs on Disney were no longer of interest to her, so if our new family norm is her joining my wife and I laying on loungers and reading books and listening to music all day, then there was no particularly compelling reason to go back to Disney (as much as we loved sailing on them).

To answer the OP's question - no, the promos had nothing to do with us choosing to sail NCL - rather it was simply a matter of seeing which cruise line was sailing on the date we were available, and seeing that NCL had a new ship which would fit the bill, and figuring "why not". It wasn't until after that I learned about being able to save a significant amount with the option to pay in Canadian funds.

I can only speak as of my last DCL cruise, 18 months ago (sigh), where our servers not only were happy to make substitutions, they often recommended taking item A from entree B and pairing it with entree C.

Even though my next cruise is not on Disney, I still closely follow the DCL forums here and elsewhere, and I have not seen anything posted about changes that may have been made which would take away the ability to make changes to your meal.

My personal feeling is that a 3 day cruise is better than no cruise at all, but the enjoyment of a cruise increases exponentially the longer you sail.

Just another person from the peanut gallery chiming in about the confusion with respect to the name mini-suite.

I booked my family's first NCL cruise in February, and on the NCL homepage, it talked about suites receiving all available packages.

Not knowing then what I know now and, going by the ordinary usage of the words, I assumed that a "mini-suite" was a suite which, because of deck configurations, was smaller in size than a "regular" suite (hence the use of the word "mini").

I was quickly disabused of that understanding when I called to book (which was later confirmed by this Board), but the fact that newbies like me keep asking the same question over and over again on CC is indicative of the fact that the use of the word "suite" in describing a room that isn't, is a problem.

That sounds higher than we have ever paid but good to know.

Given that my wife and I are so busy with work, life and with being personal assistants/butler/maid/chauffeur for our tweenage daughter that we 'maybe' go on a date night once every six months, we were ok splurging on ourselves at Remy and Palo.

To break down what we spent on the Fantasy last year: dinner at Remy with the wine pairings, Port course, and tip, was $500 even. Brunch at Remy with the champagne pairings and tip was $200. Brunch at Palo with an extra drink (or two) and tip was $125. Add in the cost of the zipline excursion ($375) and the daily service charges and extra tip for our room attendant, and we may actually have been over my $1500 guesstimate.

I compare this with our first cruise on the Magic back in 2011, and the only extra charges we had were for dinner at Palo and the daily service charges (and I think $50 for bingo one day). So it is possible to sail without having to spend very much on board.

On our sailing on the Fantasy last year (7-day Eastern Carib), my family's only expenses were a wine package at dinner ($150?), a ziplining excursion in St. Thomas for the three of us, and brunches in Palo and Remy (champagne pairings) and dinner at Remy (wine pairings and Port course) - and the daily service charge (obviously). I think our bill at the end of the day was around $12-1500.

If you are concerned about missing out on Animator's Palate and have an early seating for dinner, you could do what my wife and I did, which was sit through dinner with our daughter so she could eat, drop her off at the Club, and then go for a 'later' dinner at Palo/Remy.

Every time I open this thread, I expect to see a post advising that NCL has been following along and has decided to "deal" with this issue going forward.

I'm a relative newbie to NCL and to posting on CC, but I wonder if some people don't need to dial their postings back for fear that NCL may either stop offering to accept payment in Cdn dollars or remove the ability to purchase OBC in Cdn.

Taking an extreme advantage of a loophole may be smart for you, but may also lead to that same loophole subsequently being closed for everyone else. But that's just my two cents on the matter - flame suit on.

We have done both, brunches (and dinner) and I would choose Remy.

My wife and I have done both as well, and there really isn't a wrong decision to be made. It really depends what type of experience you are looking for - at Palo, you will have an all-you-can-eat Italian style brunch (food quality is fairly good), whereas Remy is a plated brunch with what we thought was fantastic food.

If you can swing it, my recommendation would be Remy. There is little at Palo that you likely haven't had a million times before, whereas Remy provided new and interesting tastes (at least for us). And if you can 'really' swing it, the champagne pairings at the Remy brunch really added to the experience for us.

I have zero sympathy for the fact that two young ladies missed their ship because they lost track of time (or didn't bother to check what time they needed to be back) while drinking and partying.

What I don't understand is all of the "Mom" bashing coming from some of the posters on this thread, with the insinuation that Mom in this case did something wrong by disembarking in order to try to find her daughters and ensure that they weren't stranded in a foreign country, no matter how nice it may be, with potentially little more than the clothes on their back and a few dollars in cash.

Yes the 20 something's were idiots for missing the boat, but as a parent myself, I just can't wrap my head around the argument that the best way to 'teach them a life lesson', is to just abandon them and let them figure out how to get home themselves. One would hope that between the port agent and their own life skills, they could have figured it out themselves, but why, as a parent, would you make the situation more stressful by not trying to help, just to prove a point?

What if it wasn't Mom who was sailing with the young ladies, what if it was their spouses. Would those same posters who claim that Mom was in the wrong, say that the husbands would also be in the wrong for not leaving their irresponsible wives behind?

A carrier out of my local airport is starting to fly into Palm Beach this winter. Any thoughts on that as an alternative to FLL or MIA? Thx.