VibeGuy

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.

If Princess wants to dumb everything down to 7NT Eastern and Western Caribbean sailings, some transcanals, 7NT Mexican Riviera and 7NT Alaska line haul and circle Seattle sailings, 15NT Hawaii and then maintain a small Europe and Asia program, then a rewarding loyalty program is going to be all the more critical, because most cruisers will only do those so many times. (Disney Fanatics and aquatic snowbirds like myself notwithstanding). I don’t quite feel demographically ready for HAL, but it’s the obvious home for us. Between being introduced to Princess as a kid (and Sitmar and Cunard - my aunt wasn’t particularly brand loyal and I wasn’t picking the line) and sort of heavily settling in with Princess around the turn of the century, I was a pretty big RCL fan. They just shifted the hard product to megaships (their last appealing build was the Radiance class) and the soft product to a much more a la carte / less personal style that wasn’t how I enjoyed spending my more-limited vacation time. Princess put the right ships in the right places and treated us well and kicked back some loyalty benefits. If hard product, soft product and loyalty program are the three legs of the stool my spend is balancing on, and they keep kicking at the loyalty one, the other two have to work a lot harder to keep 20, 30, 50, whatever nights flowing in (24 in 2021, 60 in 2022, currently 6 booked for 2023). With our favorite ship spending 2023 on the west coast, it’s likely they’ll keep the spend but they’re taking “of course we’re sailing Princess” to “of course we’re sailing, it’s most likely Princess” and the next logical step after that is “of course we’re sailing, maybe it’s Princess”. Wouldn’t it be nice to have some guests who are absolutely certain where their next vacation dollars are being spent? Isn’t that the point of loyalty incentives?

Princess absolutely stated that nights rather than sailings would drive recognition when they quietly discontinued Loyalty Commend OBC. And then they promptly discontinued night-based milestone recognition. Extraordinary times, blah, blah, blah. It’s a handy pretext to align the relatively generous Princess benefits with the historically less generous benefits from other Carnivore brands. Unlike lodging and airline programs where the points held by members are liabilities accounted for on the books, none of the Carnival-umbrella programs actually generate a liability that needs to be booked. Everything they spend on loyalty benefits gets taken as a marketing expense or promotional discount on the booking at hand. Nothing is promised for the future. I know who was on the ships for a year into the restart. It wasn’t young families new to cruising. While many passengers were admittedly burning off canceled-cruise FCCs and bribe money, new money from people who like the product brought ships back on line, got experienced staff and crew back on the job and demonstrated that the business was still viable. So naturally, the best thing to do was eliminate the notion of future benefits for sailing. The grass isn’t particularly greener elsewhere. But truly top-tier/hundreds-of-nights loyalty is demonstrably less rewarded today than it was at the shutdown.

The medallion magnet is several orders less powerful than a pacemaker device control magnet, but it’s literally not worth finding out. It’s too easy to slip it into a breast pocket or around your neck. What makes the Medallion a particular regulatory nightmare is that it is always awake and transmitting from the moment the battery is installed at the factory. So it’s not just offering a device for sale which *might* emit RF in a band with regulatory impacts - for its entire life, it emits said energy. Some customs broker somewhere must have an incredible song and dance routine.

Santa Fe and sometimes Pacific Moon. They’re using Vivaldi and Savoy for contractors and crew.

Ugh. There is some specific *thing* that the plumbers can do when the sink has hot water and the shower doesn’t or vice versa, and it seems like the likelihood of needing it is directly proportional to how long the ship was out of service - Ruby needed it in every cabin we were in, and it’s some very minor thing because it’s done from the panel in the hallway and takes three minutes. If you can possibly imagine, the Sterling Steakhouses (eye roll) on Diamond and Sapphire used to be even less atmospheric because the servers wore US flag-motif vests. So bad. It’s one of the features I like least about the twins. I’m disappointed that Izumi isn’t fully functional. We are onboard in a few weeks and I’ve been looking forward to some quiet hot water.

Emerald now has just the thermal suite - I believe is $20/day, give or take, when purchased for the whole voyage, complimentary with a spa service and a bit more purchased a la carte.

Cash cows and actual bovines have a lot in common. Neither likes it when you come to the milking parlor with cold hands. The $100 Loyalty Commend was effectively a $0.30/day rebate from previous cruises. It was a gesture, and a nice one. The Milestone recognition was also a gesture, and a nice one. The laundry is admittedly the perk that actually keeps us loyal. Hotel loyalty is very transactional - what have you done for me lately, and it takes ten years at a particularly loyalty level to eliminate annual requalification. In exchange for 75 nights a year, I get a bonus free night ($250-300 if used well), lounge access that ranges from bottled water and pretzels in Dubuque to free pour of excellent liquor and five distinct food presentations per day in Asia, and automatic upgrades from whatever I booked up to a decent junior suite most times, and some ridiculous suites at times. Oh, and complimentary breakfast. Conservatively, my loyalty returns $40/night in benefits (breakfast for two, some evening beverages, bottled water, minor snacks) at the upper half of their portfolio and nothing at the lower half. The upgrades are gravy. I’m also earning redeemable points at about 10% of my spend. (17.5 points per dollar spent, $0.006 per point) Princess never came close to that before, and now without loyalty commend OBC, it’s a substantial devaluation. I’ve never thought loyalty improved my chances with the upgrade fairy. It doesn’t earn me free nights. I really like the product (both the hard product of the actual cabins and the shipboard facilities and the soft product of the service experience), but where before there were a lot of things driving me towards Cruise 51 to enjoy the rewards as our ability to travel continues to accelerate, there’s no reason to drive incremental spend to Princess or Carnivore Corporation as a whole. As someone under 50 who hopefully has a lot of years of cruising left, I guess I have to be a lot more transactional.

I used to think their apple pie was abysmal. It has since improved. I don’t get why the pumpkin is Not Quite Right, either - their pastry people generally execute the recipes well, so I blame someone from Sitmar whose recipe has been handed down like family lore.

Sapphire rides the best of the Gem/Grand Class, IMHO, with a slightly wider beam and a lower CG. if you’re onboard and are prone to motion discomfort, try sleeping/laying with your head and feet perpendicular to the slower-changing moment. So if the ship rolls side to side every second and pitches nose-up and down every three seconds, you want to be port-starboard. Don’t ask me what to do in a yaw situation.

These are almost inevitable delays when it’s the first sailing after a prolonged absence from US ports.

They used to be $1.25 each at the lodges and ran on US quarters. I don’t think anyone has posted about it since the restart.

Never seen a “bag special” on Princess in Alaska.

Beware those Passionadas. They go down like a toddler on a freshly-waxed floor.

I’m currently booked with both a casino rate and Plus added on; my booking was handed by a PVP, not the Casino department.

Nope. The Princess-provided balloons are gone - it’s just passengers or group organizers doing it now, so it’s notably uncommon. Cruising changes. Some very nice junior officers on Sitmar used to be *completely fine* with letting an adorable kiddo fire a .410 shotgun off the aft deck.