VibeGuy

I haven’t seen a full English in the MDR for breakfast, but I’ve seen all the crucial components in the Horizon Court.

I’ll cut them some slack on Iceland, Greenland and the northernmost part of Alaska sailings because O3b MEO starts to degrade at 45°N (roughly the OR/WA border) and disappears almost entirely by 60°N (Skagway), and even HEO is going to be getting awfully close to the horizon at that point. Physics again. but what explains the predicted three-day outage in the middle of Emerald’s transatlantic? SES has asset in that longitude, and if they don’t have capacity they claim they can route traffic to other operators by over the air config of the onboard systems. The cynic in me says that Princess went out on a limb and deployed MedallionNet at a loss-leader $10/day knowing the actual per-delivered-GB cost of the backhaul was much, much higher, but the planned availability of mPower would drop the costs substantially. The new constellation is delayed (launches in to 2023, up to six months after launch for positioning, provisioning and testing) and SES is all “hey, wanna buy some cheap high-latency GEO/HEO capacity to sate the masses?” and here we are. Princess is not in the same financial position to absorb those losses as they were pre-shutdown. This is, of course, speculation, informed by two and a half months onboard since the restart and asking friends on various sailings to take a speed test at sea. It’s definitely not as good as it was and it’s not just overuse by passengers.

Latency like that is a hate crime at this point.

Because I literally have an officer’s NFC card, and the steward who has let me in to my cabin has used a card. The medallions have a service life of about four weeks onboard, and that starts adding up to a lot of ewaste to manage.

Princess has dealt with supply chain disruptions by dumbing down the wine by the glass program, after spending some serious effort improving it before the shutdown. On Ruby I didn’t notice a decline in food quality - in fact, fin fish sourcing and execution has improved substantially. The only place I really notice cutbacks is in the room service menu. I miss the lasagna.

You can’t DIY it - if you booked directly with Princess, call them. If you booked via a TA, call them instead. If you booked a sailing where the single supplement is 100%, it’s just the taxes and fees difference. If you have a discounted supplement they will recalculate the fare based on the per person double occupancy rate that you booked.

Diamond on (Tuesday?) here the upload is also atrocious, and this could well be heavy usage, except the ship is sailing 60% full.

Ruby, the other night: note that the upload isn’t awful. But the latency is miserable.

Speed maybe a demand problem, but the lag is brutal using HEO - and when you have typical apps loading a bunch of useless telemetry and tracking cruft, each of which either has to complete or timeout for the app to move forward, it’s a nightmare. Moving to the MEO assets makes crappy speed a *lot* more tolerable because for typical web and mail usage, the content is small, but the connection-related delays are wildly multiplied.

Use fast.com onboard - there’s a More Info button when the first test completes. the “unloaded latency” number onboard is primarily driven by the crass physics of the speed of light in a vacuum. When they are using the O3B network, this number is around 100. When they are using legacy HEO assets it cannot be below 225. SES’s delays in turning up O3B mPower (new MEO) have been disclosed in various filings related to their stock. They’re blaming the lack of MEO performance in Europe on the number of ships deployed in a comparatively dense region and promise it will all get better when the new thing comes online, but the Mexican Riviera has a lot fewer ships competing for bandwidth. Exec from SES saying “let them eat HEO” - https://www.seatrade-cruise.com/information-technology/ses-meet-soaring-cruise-bandwidth-demand-o3b-mpower I don’t buy the ”too many passengers” argument. Ruby was using the HEO assets this time last year when 75% of cabins went out empty.

No. It’s because they’re selling the 2010 internet with 2022 packages. Princess has a much-ballyhooed partnership for internet with a company called SES. SES operates three sets of satellites that can be routinely used for ship internet - HEO, MEO and a new MEO + constellation. For a while, pre-Recent Unpleasantries, Princess was using the MEO constellation and it was remarkably good - “the best WiFi at sea” was a reasonable way to describe it. For whatever reason, since the restart, even when operating between 45°N and 45°S, where the “old” MEO network works best, Princess has been using the HEO satellites. I’ve seen ping data from this week on Ruby, Diamond and Discovery that all show the use of the legacy HEO network. There’s nothing wrong with HEO, except that they move less data (lower bandwidth) and they’re 16,000 miles higher in the sky (adds a quarter second to each packet - it’s the speed of light and each packet has to go up and down to get to the earth station. Their provider is supposed to be turning up their New Better MEO network by the end of the year. I’m not holding my breath. Princess is absolutely not being transparent about this, but physics doesn’t lie. If the ping time is over 250ms, they’re using the older, slower network.

The crew access is all with the cards, as well. The First Ventilation Officer on Ruby might still be looking for his. . .

Even with FCC registration they’d still need registrations in every jurisdiction where the device is offered in commerce. There’s no upside to shipping them directly to non-US passengers and a world of regulatory and documentary hassle.

I don’t believe Princess nor Carnival Corporation actually ever see nor retain the payment card number. The app and the POS terminals at check-in both use processor-side tokenization to keep the footprint exposed to card data as minimal as possible. In the case of the app, the card number storage method would call the processor or payment gateway directly, rather than sending the data to an intermediary server. What comes back to the app and the shipboard systems is a reference to the stored token, and that token is both unrecognizable as a card number and irrevocably bound to the merchant. I have no idea how they handle the identity data but my assumption is it’s not nearly as well protected as the payment card data because the manifests are human-readable (the CBP submission process is not particularly modern). I do believe you’ll get automated phone calls with dire warnings if you’re not “Ocean Ready” with at least the immigration information, starting a few days before sailing.

Sorry, I should have been clearer. I did not mean to imply constant BT beaconing. I meant that the device always emits RF by being a powered-on electronic device. While any one Medallion hopefully isn’t much of an emitter when the radio is off, some jurisdictions get very upset about unregistered devices emitting any detectable RF just from a microcontroller, for example.

There used to be an hour or two of limited 2:1 offers at selected bars, but that died before the Recent Unpleasantries

Too much clove, not enough cinnamon and sugar.

The easiest option is QuickShuttle, which operates buses directly from the Bellingham Airport to Canada Place. QuickCoach.com. Amtrak and Greyhound would require a substantial backtrack to the other end of Bellingham via cab or Uber. Princess does not market transfers from Bellingham. Uber and Lyft no longer allow booking of transborder rides, which is not to say you couldn’t negotiate with an individual driver for outside-the-app payment. Same with taxis. One way car rentals are legal - Avis and Alamo are both willing for a price for pickup at BLI. Finally, for the thrifty and adventurous, it’s actually possible to use public transit with a brief walk across the border. Really. One uses the Whatcom Transportation Authority from the airport to Blaine, walks through a lovely park-like setting, on sidewalks, to the border, clears customs and immigration on foot, and then walks about a mile and a quarter to pick up TransLink to a light rail station. This isn’t theoretical - I’ve actually done it to board in Vancouver. There are enough moving parts that you’ll wish you’d flown into YVR, however.

The really long cruises that aren’t sold in smaller segments never actually repeat an entire menu. the new fleet executive chef has said he wants to deploy new menu items, but he’s also been struggling to bring returning ships up to a common standard. So I think it’s possible that we’re seeing new items as a result of the necessary menu diversity for a month of dinners, but I’m not sure if they’re new-new, from the archives, or actual harbingers of a coming menu refresh.

If you had told me in The Before Times that we would ever be caught dead on a Christmas or NYE sailing, I would have very much enjoyed the conversation and then casually mentioned an excellent neurosurgeon who repairs holes in heads. Now we are people who use “winter” as a verb and have physicians in foreign countries and no longer worry about drunks on icy roads at the start of new medical deductible and copay season. We’re going to take advantage of the soft bookings and drink hot buttered rum. But cold. And without butter.

An adult liver can metabolise about one standard drink per hour. Princess pours are remarkably consistent. Let’s assume one greets the day with a mimosa at 9:30 and has another at 10:30. One then has a glass of Prosecco to pregame lunch at 11:30 and a glass of wine with said lunch at 12:30. One now retires to a sunbed in the Lotus Spa Pool area and commences four hours of languid reading and soaking, each of which has a libation. Perhaps a glass of wine while showering and changing. Roll into the PES event and a couple of Port Lemonades later it’s time for dinner. Sparkling to start, a glass of still with the entrée. A drink with the show, a nightcap after. Boom, there’s 15, it’s not even midnight yet and a 160 pound adult has never had a BAC over 0.02. You can obviously drink a little harder (swap some of those for Beverly Hills Iced Teas), but it’s absolutely possible to max out the package without ever having a noticeable buzz, let alone being drunk and disorderly or even needing much recovery time.

Come help debug Diamond in a few weeks. I’m a delight at Good Spirits, I know which fork to use at table and I’ll make sure you win more trivia prizes than you know what to do with. I admit, you’ve been a bit of an inspiration - when I was more conventionally employed, we were a little limited to no more than three segments in a row. Now the limit is just the ship moving somewhere one of us has warrants.

I’d be happy with a mechanism to see the PES apps offer and buffet features in the MC app, on which they’ve spent a bucket of shareholder money. Imagine, an app that shows things to the people who should see it, when they should see it. *puts down bag of gummies not intended for children*

Vines has had a Demi-sec Vouvray and a Navarro Gewurztraminer in the past, both of which have pretty noticeable residual sugar. With the current state of the wine lists, it’s a bit of a crapshoot to know what they’ll have going forward.

It’s perfectly cromulent to have an emotional reaction when a dangled perk that drove some incremental spend is yanked away. Nobody likes being played for a fool. I am disappointed that I got precisely one $100 Loyalty Commend when I casually figured it would be a thing for awhile. I’m miffed that the change from sailings to days took place just as I hit my 50th sailing. I’m resigned to my fate that 500 nights will be just more water under the keel. Disappointment, pique and resignation are not positive emotional responses, but they’re completely legitimate given what Princess has done at the unpublished ultra-loyal levels.