thistledoo

Nicely worded Roseberry. Ditto from me.

Radiance of the Seas. 12nights January 19, South Pacific Cruise. Inside Guarantee $65 pp per day (excluding grats). Booked last night from the RCCL website. Received the cabin allocation this morning - large oceanview.

It's my birthday present, thankyou RCCL, we're delighted.

Update: it looks like the inside guarantees are gone, but there are good deals still for outside and balcony guarantees.

I pre-paid $AUD37.40 prior to our cruise on the Diamond in October. Bought a second coffee card on board for $AUD36.00.

Pre-paying was supposed to be cheaper!

We were on the same cruise, I mostly agree with everything said previously, we had a good cruise, the only problems we had were that out luggage had the room number tags ripped off them, obviously we didn't tip the baggage handlers enough, ( not Princess' fault) they said they wanted more but we didn't give in to the blackmail and consequently had to go and find our bags at 8pm in the evening in a heap of bags with no tags down by passenger services desk - who wouldn't deal with inquiries about missing bags until then.

Is this a regular occurrence? How much should you tip for each item of luggage?

We're on the Royal next April.

1. They made me get off

 

2. The disembarkation questionnaire was handed out about a week before the end of he cruise, as if they were trying to rub in that it was coming to an end.

We also thought the disembarkation form was sent out a bit early. We put it away for a few days as we didn't want to think about getting off!

The worst behavour we saw was in the Horizon one lunch time when a woman called out the chef and loudly berated him for putting too much pepper in the mashed potatoes - unbelievable, we were gobsmacked that she would do that.

It was totally uncalled for. the staff were terrific.

We heard very few major complaints, the main one was about the stuff up in the tender process in Port Douglas, which was entirely justified. However it ran smoothly after that.

BTW, we thought the 3 Curtis Stone items on the menu were a bit ordinary - the pork belly was like shoe leather the day we tried it. We also noticed the repeated menus towards the end, perhaps they were running low on supplies?

Really enjoying the review.

I bet the woman who won $4,000+ at the last Bingo session on our recent Diamond Princess cruise didn't think the odds were too high! No, it wasn't me.

I have tried every which way to get past the Book Now screen where it freezes. I can log in and view current bookings and do searches, but nothing else.

I have tried both Safari and Google Chrome on an iPad (just in case the IT techies are monitoring our woes).

If it's not fixed soon we'll be switching to a different cruise line.

I don't know if you would have time to do both but I would recommend using Good Company tours as they are a lot cheaper than the ship. They picked us up and took us to the Train and then a local tour after the train trip and then returned us to the ship for 2 adults and 1 child cost us NZ$264 if we went through the ship it would of cost us US $840.

http://www.goodcompanytours.co.nz/cruise.html

Cheers Trish

We did this Good Company tour the other week. It was excellent value for the money paid. Sit on the left side of the bus for the best views on the afternoon city tour.

Akaroa is beautiful. Try the Akaroa Mail Run to really see the countryside.

 

Just be aware if the port call to Akaroa is cancelled for any reason you will not be able to get a refund on the mail run pre-paid tour (talking from experience).

Ditto to what Gut said. We disembarked at 09:00 and there was a long line of cabs waiting.

After a day pounding the streets of Sydney and a night in a soft non-rocking bed we've got our land legs back again. It was great to sail into a beautiful day in Sydney, the weather in the previous week had been pretty dismal and cold (apart from Picton which was just the most beautiful day).

The cruise was fantastic and highly recommended. There were a few organisational glitches, to be expected on a voyage of this length, but which really didn't detract from the whole 33-day experience.

There were a couple of disappointments, mainly missing Akaroa because of the high winds, and Wellington where we tried our best to enjoy the sights while walking around in 110kmh gusts of wind! At least we got in to see the beautiful Milford Sound and as mentioned above, Picton was great. We had glimpses of sun in Dunedin, but again it was windy and very cold. Despite the weather, we loved the South Island of NZ and we are planning to do a longer road trip there in the future.

The good thing about a long cruise is that you really have time to get to know people and some of the crew and we have made some lovely new friends.

That's the Spirit of Tasmania at the pier with the Diamond. It turned out to be a nice sunny day in Melbourne, although very windy and very cold (for us Queenslanders)!

Could be a bit lumpy going out of the heads this evening

Kiwi Kruzer - thanks for posting the pictures.

http://www.dpti.sa.gov.au/latest_news/web_cameras

Looks like a good crowd have gathered to see you off at Outer Harbour ....:)

It gave us a real buzz to see them all there for sailaway! It was a great day weather-wise in Adelaide, it was just a pity we couldn't have been alongside longer.

Melbourne next.

I'm currently on the Diamond Princess where it was very lumpy the past two days crossing the Bight. I used the bands in the daytime together with Travelcalm Ginger and the combination of the two worked very well for me. The seas are a lot calmer today heading into Adelaide and all I've taken is a couple of pieces of crystallised ginger with breakfast and I feel fine.

I found the bands do make the back of my hands swell a little bit so I would only use them when really necessary.

Nanna, Birubi is just the best organiser and you will be given a complete set of instructions at the M&G, if not before.

In Geraldton today and the tender process seems to have gone smoothly, a little bit lumpy but nothing alarming. We haven't known quite where we've been for the past few days as our TV scan display has been down. They ran out of muesli this morning for the mere mortals, but there was plenty of other substitutes.

A round a head colds is starting to go around the ship, including yours truly. Anyone getting on tomorrow might want to stock up on cold and flu tablets and cough syrup/lozenges. Apparently there are 700 getting on in Fremantle.

They had the Melbourne Cup up on MUTS from early morning on Tuesday, and a barbeque around the pool. I don't know if anyone was running sweeps. What a great result!

Apart from a few minor hiccups, it's all going great. Hard to believe we've been on the ship for 2 weeks already!

Fremantle (Perth) tomorrow, followed by our Margaret River tour organised by Birubi.

There's quite a few newbies with their luggage lined up waiting to get on the ship.

We live in the tropics and we found it uncomfortably hot today. The humidity is right up.

Next up, Bali.

Hi NaughtyNanna

We paid for corkage on wine. We bought some wine to have in our cabin, and one bottle in particular that was a gift to take to the dining room. They stamped the three bottles we paid corkage on, leaving two unstamped.

Murphys Law being what it is, the unstamped bottle was one we wanted to take to the dining room and they wouldn't allow us to take it in without paying additional corkage because it wasn't stamped. So make sure they stamp your best bottles and keep the roughies for the cabin.

Hope this makes sense!

It's all good. We made it back in time for Happy Hour ahead of the multitudes behind us :):):). The most deserted Happy Hour we've ever been to!

Gut, lucky you got an early tender back. We're just on, they're pnly taking 50 on each tender.

Fun and games in Port Douglas. The tender process back to the ship has gone terribly awry. The tide is so low none of the tenders can leave. We were asked to disembark our tender as it stuck to the bottom. Row, row, row your boat chorus has just been sung by the crowd.

We're on the Diamond, cruising through the Whitsundays. It's a beautiful morning with calm seas. The ship handled the rough weather up the NSW coast very well. All is good with the world.

We wandered down to the Quay tonight and watched the Solstice depart. Pretty impressive!

Our turn tomorrow night :):):):)

We have used booking.com extensively in Australia and in Japan. There is never an issue with cancelling and changing bookings as long as the booking conditions allow it. We do check hotel websites first to compare their pricing, and look at reviews on Trip Advisor.

Yesterday we were offered a $10 upgrade on a pre-cruise booking for this week.