The Traveling Man

Only.

Caution: snarky response ahead. They do it precisely so "you won't know the shipping charges and our markup until you get to the cash register.”

And eagles and totems and salmon, oh my.

Instead of printing your home address on the tags, you may want to just list your email. That way someone who locates a misplaced bag can notify you, but no potential burglar will learn the address of your temporarily vacant house.

If it still is an issue this October when we plan to sail on the Dawn I will do the same thing. Our final payment is due in a couple of weeks. We currently are set up to prepay the DSC. If this problem continues, I will remove the service charges from the reservation in favor of paying them once we are on board. It appears to be an easier process to have the DSC reduced or removed from an on board account than having them refunded once you prepay them. I understand the reluctance of many posters on this thread to reduce or remove service charges. Those fees, we are told, go to the workers on board the ship as incentives (sounds like gratuities to me). I doesn't seem fair to penalize a group of workers who have had nothing to do with the decisions that resulted in NCL not serving alcohol when in or near certain ports. Nonetheless, my contractual and financial obligations are solely and directly to NCL as a corporate entity, not to each and every one of the employees, vendors, or government entities to which NCL pays for goods or services. How NCL disburses the funds which we, as passengers, pay to NCL is strictly the province of NCL to administer. If they choose to pay their employees less or more than seems fair, that is NCL's decision. If NCL chooses to designate some portion of our payments as being allocated to certain purposes, that also is NCL's prerogative. I pay them an agreed upon "X" amount of dollars for certain expectations for the cruise. They spend it as needed or as they see fit. If NCL promises a certain product or service and then fails to provide it, I feel shortchanged and will seek any lawful avenue available to adjust for the resulting economic disadvantage. If the only viable way to do this is to reduce or eliminate the Daily Service Charge, then so be it. NCL has brought this upon themselves. My wife and I are in an advantageous position as compared to many others who have posted on the thread. We rarely drink cocktails, beer, or hard liquor. We do, however, enjoy wine both with our meals and at other times during the day. The terms of NCL's beverage package allow those with a package to bring bottles of wine on board without charge. If the current situation continues, we will stop by a store in Southampton and purchase several bottles. If NCL is not allowed to serve wine from their "cellar" or chooses not to, we simply will drink our own wine. We then will ask that an appropriate amount be deducted from our DSC to account for the cost of the wine as well as the service charge. I sincerely hope it does not come to this. I hope that NCL gets its act together long before October and we can enjoy our cruise as we have enjoyed more than 30 other NCL cruises. But I will continue to monitor this situation and will prepare accordingly.

They used to indicate that you should attach them to the laundry ticket. To be honest, I really haven't looked at them carefully in the last five years or so. Thanks for the update. I had not noticed the change in wording.

CN staff are evaluated, among other criteria, by how many CN deposits they sell. If they want to get ahead, be promoted, or earn rewards, they have to sell more CNs.

We have done exactly that several times. Also have put down a cash deposit on a future cruise when I was temporarily out of CNs. Prior to final payment on that cruise, we took a different cruise, bought some more CNs, then applied one of them to that future cruise.

Depending upon how many Sapphire, Diamond, and Ambassador members are on board, there may be several groups in the MDR on the same evening, each seated with a different officer. I have seen as many as four tables in the same MDR on the same night. If there are enough Latitude members who sign up for DWTO, some officers may "pull a second shift" and have dinner with a different group of passengers on each of two or more evenings during the cruise. Most of these dinners are held in one of the MDRs, but some officers prefer to dine in one of the specialty restaurants. This happens more often when you dine with the Captain or General Manager rather than a junior officer. We have been invited to Le Bistro three times with GMs and once to Cagney's with the Chief Engineer. On our most recent cruise we had dinner in the MDR with the GM one night, then saw the Captain and another group of Latitudes members having dinner together in Cagney's a few nights later. Usually each Latitudes member gets to have DWTO just once per cruise, even if the cruise is more than a week in length. Some cruises, shorter than five days or so, do not provide this benefit. On a couple of cruises, though, we have been able to have DWTO twice on the same cruise. One of these was a 15 day Trans Atlantic, while the other was an 11 day Mediterranean. In the past, most dinners were for five or six passengers and one officer. Lately the trend has been toward more passengers and two or more officers, all seated at a rather large table. A recent post on another thread on this forum indicated that there was seating for more than 20 persons at one table. I prefer the smaller groups. You can more easily engage in meaningful conversations when you are seated in a more intimate gathering.

My wife and I are each Diamond Latitudes members so we have taken advantage of the free laundry offer many times. Years ago we each would receive a laundry coupon, but now NCL provides only one coupon per stateroom. The terms and conditions listed on the Latitudes page of the NCL website, however, specify that this perk is per Latitudes member, not per stateroom, so we are entitled to two free bags of laundry per cruise. We asked about this on a cruise several years ago and were told that we could simply write "Latitudes Free Laundry" on the laundry ticket and we would not be charged even if we did not attach a laundry coupon. It has worked for us on more than a dozen cruises since then, as we have never been charged for laundry. On longer cruises of two weeks or more we often have submitted laundry bags three or four times per cruise. Again, we have never been charged for laundry since we made Platinum.

Don't forget the garlic. It's very prevalent on some menu items.

Yes, many passengers have asked their cabin attendant to do that.

Yes, you need to register at the Cruise Next Desk on the day of embarkation for several Latitudes benefits, including Dinner With The Officers, Behind The Scenes Tour, and others. You will be notified a day or two later of when and where to meet your officer(s) for dinner. We have been to 13 DWTO in one of the MDRs, 3 in Le Bistro, and one in Cagney's. You don't get to choose the location, date, or which officer(s) will join you. It varies from ship to ship, but usually the priority seating benefit means that for shows which require reservations you can skip to the head of the standby line even if you haven't made a reservation.

We have sailed on each of the Edge class ships and are booked on one of the first voyages of the next one in the class. We absolutely love the design of those ships. I'm not quite sure who you count among the "nicely aged," but I'm north of 70 and my wife is getting there soon.

Passengers were required to show their passport when checking in at the Miami cruise terminal for travel on the Sky. Passengers leaving the ship in Panama for a shore excursion were reminded with a note attached to their shorex ticket that they must carry their passport when exiting the ship for their tour. An announcement was made by shorex personnel when we met in the auditorium prior to leaving the ship to go ashore in Panama. However, no one in Panama ever asked to see our passports. Our cruise departed Miami on 6 February 2023 and docked in Colon, Panama on 11 February.

One in the dirt to warm the barrel.

Multi BILLION.

Including this?

A) The average age of passengers is actually older than 60 on many NCL cruises B) I have sailed on more than 30 NCL cruises on which there were exactly zero enrichment lectures C) NCL may not have the "party ship" reputation of some other cruise lines, but the dance parties and entertainment venues on NCL ships usually run til midnight on most cruises

We recently were on a cruise which had a port stop in Panama. We were informed that Panama requires visitors to carry a passport with them which is valid at least six months beyond the planned date of their exit from Panama.

We were on a Baltic cruise several years ago. Someone on board checked online for the weather in St. Petersburgh instead of St. Petersburg and got quite a shock when they stepped outside in shorts and a T-shirt. We were on a cruise to Australia just before COVID. One of our fellow passengers had checked schedules for flights from Miami to Melbourne. WOW, they thought. Only a couple of hours!

Let's do the Time Warp again.

There are 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary math and those who don't.

There has been an extensive amount of discussion about this subject on the NCL boards, but has anyone experienced this issue while sailing on a different cruise line? Are there any ports in the UK or the EU where RCCL, Princess, HAL, or any other cruise line is not serving alcohol because of some port regulation?

WOW! A table for 20! Most of the time it's just six to ten persons. Who were the officers? My wife and I have shared dinner with 28 NCL officers, so maybe we know some of the ones you met.