VibeGuy

The hazard of self-insuring a sailing is having to pay the claim. With the demise of Cruise with Confidence and the much more limited COVID waiver meeting the really unimpressive financial performance of Carnival Corporation, I don’t think anyone in your situation is going to get a particularly sympathetic response from Princess. I’m going to be a buns-hole here and suggest that a long-scheduled vacation trumps many, many family emergencies. The dead will remain dead whether you mourn them from Topeka or Trinidad. The living are unlikely to want you to be out Big Money as a show of symbolic support. A sense of filial obligation to share the burden of caregiving is touching, but maybe someone covering you for a week now could be balanced by you taking on two weeks for them later. You see my point: barring needing to donate an organ yourself, it might be completely reasonable to take the trip you worked and paid for, and find other ways to cover obligations real and hypothesized. barring that, the best you can realistically expect is a refund of taxes, fees and port charges

Has anyone been able to put in a bid for any portion of a B2B(2B)(2B) sailing? I suspect that’s why we are unable to bid.

It’s related to both entrée and relevé. We’ve become soft in our ability to tolerate alternating courses. ;0)

Wow, Kerastase? That’s a substantial upgrade.

Ugh, that is a substantial downgrade to the Plus package - while not all of the Vines selections were available by the glass in the MDR, enough of them were to find something tasty to accompany any course. I tend to default to the Conundrum as all-purpose drinkable white and the various Rhone varietals for red, and had nothing to complain about.

Yes. We refer to the mains/plats principal/secondi/relevés as entrées for reasons lost to the sands of time. You know what we anglophone North Americans do to French. It isn’t pretty.

20 diners per seating, two seatings per night, seven nights per average sailing: 280 slots. Roughly 100 suite guests on Discovery. Now, I’m no math genius. But it sure seems like a lot of CapEx (and Brooke Shields doesn’t work for free) to build this out and only get 35% utilisation even if every adult in a suite takes you up on the offer. I suppose using it to incentivise future cruise purchases on other ships (in full suites, with Platinum, no refunds!) increases it some, but I see this becoming a paid experience sooner rather than later. The one thing they *might* be smart to do is divide seatings and dates such that those crassly paying separately are isolated from those having the experience via a suite entitlement. I admit I’m intrigued and slightly envious, but at this stage in my life I’m able to do back to backs until my DH gets on my back rather than compressing everything into a week in a suite. I do think this would make an astounding milestone recognition but the powers that be have decided those are no longer a thing, so, there’s that.

It’s a little surprising to me given that the mini-suites are more broadly distributed on the Royal class than the Grand and Gem classes. It’s not like a mechanical problem midships Dolphin deck takes out 20% of the minis, as it definitely can on the earlier builds. ProTip about the refundable OBC - the check takes weeks. Loading some to your casino bank at the start of the cruise and playing a couple of spins a day, you could easily cash that amount out at the end of the voyage and walk away with it. “Some” is a matter of taste, naturally, but $100/scheduled day would certainly not be the kind of sum that raised eyebrows.

The whole area is a tourist trap of world renown - Fisherman’s Wharf. There’s also the Ferry Building which has delightful shops and restaurants. if you want to cover more distance, it’s very possible to use the Muni streetcars to get around - the stop is right at the entrance to the pier Princess uses. There’s also an automated bicycle rental station right there. No tour necessary.

Oversell Too many people in the fire zone/muster station for number of qualified crew Not enough stewards for the number of adjacent booked cabins - want to spread the load Cabins offline for mechanical or maintenance - especially air conditioning or plumbing Cabin with three or more berths sold for two Solar flares

There’s a purpose-built space next to Sabatinis on these two ships. It’s not (much) larger than the semi-private alcoves with a similar table size in the Sabatinis spaces on Crown / Ruby / Emerald. Look for the round space near the entry on the deck plan.

N=1 here, but I have a serious allergy to crustaceans, some of the mainstays of Chef’s Table dining. We’ve requested to join in three times (different ships, different executive chefs and maitres d’hotel) and been graciously received each time. Based on what other people have posted from either the same or adjacent sailings, the only visible change it’s caused for other guests is that cross-contamination procedures are used and the crustaceans are served from separate platters. They’ve very thoughtfully provided alternative hors d’œuvre (halibut ceviche instead of king crab leg cocktail, for example) and it’s all been handled like it was No Big Deal. Obviously, not all food allergies are created equal, but it’s definitely not a prima facie disqualifier for participation. As to the how, definitely make the request of the Dine Line promptly upon boarding, but also put the touch on the dining room managers and headwaiters those first nights - they know who will make good dinner companions and can definitely put in a good word on your behalf. I look forward to the (eventual) return of hors d’œuvre in the galley before we resume attending. I am endlessly fascinated by how the whole operation works.

Clearly you never saw what my otherwise culinarily talented and conscientious mother could do to a beef roast. There’s a reason Lawry’s The Prime Rib was my favorite restaurant as a kid.

It’s definitely nice to have but all Princess pools *can* be heated (and some are always overheated - I’m looking at you, Ruby and Sapphire Lotus Spa Pools). So the question is your tolerance for rain and cold getting in and out of the pool. (Princess generally opens them when sea conditions permit even if the weather is drizzly, and conditions rough enough to close the pools are known to close the midship pool under the magrodome). We’ve done Alaska with (Star, Sapphire, Island, Coral) and without (Ruby) and given that it’s pretty port intensive I’d call it a wash. Where I think it *really* matters is when you have a bunch of sea days in a row in the cooler months, from temperate ports to warmer climes.

In probably a half-dozen meals in SHARE, from the first night it was open on Ruby, onward, I never understood the opprobrium. My *one* piece of negative feedback to an executive was addressed within weeks - it was way, way too bright in there the first night. You could have done brain surgery without squinting. Lower-wattage lights were procured. The current Sabatini’s menu isn’t my favorite, but the service style is much better for people with allergies than the (distant) past one with salvers of the antipasti and starters. The room is still nice and looks less like Nonna’s house and more like contemporary spaces. Before the current MDR menus reached their current form, Princess went through a phase where things were either described as small or large plates. Literally nothing changed about them but using a more contemporary definition, and you would have thought they’d installed stripper poles in the dining room and servers were peeling for tips. So change never sits well. to the OP’s topic: I admit, I’m a two-entrée diner by Princess standards. By Edwardian standards, I eat a completely reasonable finfish course and then have an Actual Entrée. In my perfect world of VibeGuy’s Floating Food and Libation Emporia, everything would be turned towards small plates and guests could hop and skip through the course order at will. Shrimp cocktail, soup, fin fish, roasted meat, salad, composed dessert, fruit and cheese? Of course, sir. Soup, salad, some of the lamb and some of the prawns? Be our guest. A salad, dressed cooked vegetables and sorbet? If sir insists on such abstemious behavior, it is our pleasure. So this doesn’t hit me personally - we usually have enough people at table that a nibble of the second-choice entrée is usually an option, and since we seem to B2B endlessly, we’ll see the menu again.

That’s actually no longer the case. The Plus package with gratuity and WiFi must apply to all passengers in the cabin, but the drink package alone can be added to just one guest. Princess had a lil’ legal issue with that policy and it was quietly changed several years back.

The plus package can now be added to almost any booking up to a few days prior to departure, but what I’m not sure is if it has to be through the original sales channel or not. Here’s how you it displays for me (booked through a Princess Vacation Planner) 1) Login: here’s the success screen: 2) Select your upcoming voyage, and click Manage This Booking: 3) Click Onboard Services if you can upgrade this way you’ll (probably)see this screen: If you, instead, scroll all the way to the bottom of this page, you’ll see this section, where your prepurchased packages are listed. If you don’t see them here, you don’t have them, but they’ll show up here shortly after purchase. Ignore the price you see here - Princess does this for accounting reasons. You’ll only be charged what you see in the upgrade flow, $50/day. hope this helps. Bon voyage!

*mutters something about him having bear arms on formal nights*

7’ tall Stanley was spotted recently on Sapphire, looking fat and sassy, and there were no piles of bare bones nearby so he doesn’t appear to be surviving on guest flesh.

There’s a button in the staff view of the reservation system that can turn a time:party size reservation into a time:specific table reservation - some dining room management are happy to use it, others less so.

I wouldn’t worry about them from a *labor action* perspective. My dislike of them stems from their refusal to build connections in irrops - you’re flying nonstop A-C, which cancels, they won’t put you on A-B-C unless that’s a published, sold sequence. I went 0:2 with them and they haven’t seen a dime since.

Also, duty free liquor doesn’t move through local distribution.

Southwest, like distilled water, is unionized but IIRC, they have never struck. They’re the one carrier I wouldn’t worry about.

No, it definitely applies to linehaul segment cruises as seen in the Med or Australia where there isn’t a return to a common port but the segments can be combined in various ways for purchase as a single voyage.

It depends how it was sold, not how you booked. If anyone was allowed to buy it in smaller increments than you did, you get a credit for each incremental sailing, to the total of matching days. So if your 14 was really two 7s back to back, you get two. If it was a 3, 4 and 7 run together, you’d get three. But if the only way to get on the ship the same days you were on was to buy the whole 14, you get 1. This is an improvement over the pre-2010ish policy, where it was how you bought that mattered, not how it was possibly sold.