Bajanswife

Possibly the double was a "guarantee" cabin, so the base rate was lower to begin with - I didn't go any further through the booking process to see the details. I suppose if you didn't want a guarantee your price for a double would go up and not be less than a single, but for those who are willing to take the guarantee cabin it's a terrible price for a single!

There's a cruise I was looking at that costs around $700 for 2 people in an ocean view, and $1,000 for 1 person in the same cabin!! How the heck can that be right? If I decided to book for 2 and then cancelled or "no showed" the second person, would I have to pay the difference, or would they let the original price stand? Who would ever book that cruise solo?

In those days Barbados was also an embarkation port, and lots of Bajans would take the cruise from home so that they could go shopping in PR and bring home large items that they couldn't bring on an aircraft. I never did it myself, but many of my friends did. That cruise is very much missed by Bajans.

Barbados still maintains a daily dashboard of number of tests and number of positive cases, as well as how many people are sick enough to be in our dedicated Covid hospital and how many are in home isolation. Numbers are definitely increasing again, I am guessing as a result of the new Omicron sub variants as well as large gatherings finally being allowed again. Our positivity rate is around 40% now, but that's largely because we aren't doing much random testing now, so most of the tests are already suspected cases anyway. We had an uptick in deaths (mainly old people, majority unvaccinated) earlier in the year, but it has tapered off to an occasional basis now. We still have a mask mandate in place for all indoor locations, though in private offices people relax that to varying degrees depending on office set-up and employee comfort levels/risk assessment. I'm not comfortable in crowds on a regular basis, because I really don't want the disruption of an isolation period right now. I visited South Florida in June and did not wear a mask once, and attended a concert and went into multiple shopping malls. But I was prepared to catch Covid on that occasion, and wouldn't you know I did not! I have never knowingly had Covid, though I suppose some of my sinus issues (from allergies) could have been a hidden Covid infection.

Scott Davis with Williams Tours - he is fantastic. http://www.williamstoursbarbados.com/

From Bathsheba I would estimate it's 10 minute drive maybe? You have to go up the hill from Bathsheba then down the hill into Cattlewash and drive most of the length of Ermy Bourne Highway to Belleplaine.

Pretty sure they don't do that anymore. Nothing much happens in Bridgetown at night these days. For evening activities head to the south coast (St. Lawrence Gap especially, but the stretch from Hastings to Worthing has some restaurants and small bars) or west coast (Holetown). Having said that, you never know what will be happening by November - best to check back closer to the time.

Unless of course the cruise line doesn't stock your brand of rum either. 😕

Roaches ... eh. I'm from the Caribbean - a good whack from a shoe is all that's required. 😉

We recently chose and booked our first cruise. Our first decision was general region, and that was based on interest, cost/ease of getting there etc. Since we are from Barbados (and still live there), we weren't interested in the other islands close to us because we have been to many of them already. We considered Alaska, and might do it one day, but it was pretty far for us to go to try out cruising. We weren't looking at Europe or anywhere that far at this time. So we were left with Western Caribbean/Mexico. Florida ports are easiest for us to fly to, so we decided to look at all cruises that went from a Florida port over to the Western Caribbean region, with at least one Mexican or Central American port. Then we looked at spring dates. We know how unpredictable travel can be in the Hurricane Season, so we ruled that out (at least for our first time cruise), and winter and summer seasons are generally busier and more expensive. Based on all these parameters we then did some searches on Cruise Critic, Expedia etc. to check what cruises qualified and the approximate cost of each (I had a spreadsheet lol). The most cost effective cruises were the older Carnival ships, and I was going to choose one of them, but then this is where the ship choice took over - my husband thought we should splash out for our first cruise and choose an amazing ship with lots to do on sea days. The Carnival Mardi Gras ended up ticking all our boxes at a price we could manage. It took a fair amount of time and research to arrive at that choice. If we decide to cruise again the decision will likely start with region again (probably Alaska) because I'm not sure we'd want to do Caribbean ports again for obvious reasons. I don't see us falling in love with cruising and wanting only cruises from now on, regardless of where they go - we both still work full time and have a bunch of land based vacations still on our list. There's only so much vacation time (and money)!

Great, thanks. If it's that easy to upgrade we will start with value and go from there.

On this same topic, my husband follows a few people on YouTube and likes to keep up with their videos in his downtime. They are maybe 15 - 30 minutes in length. Would the value plan be enough or would this require the premium? And if we try the value and find we need the premium, do we just go to Guest Services to upgrade?

When do people usually buy the insurance - when the remainder of the cruise cost is due? At this stage I have only paid a fairly small deposit. Remainder is due at the end of January next year.