twangster

It has a lot more variety compared to my freezer at home every day I'm not cruising. 🙂

Or I can book with MSC since their pricing isn't outrageous. Seriously $346 for a 3 night cruise with drink package and 2 device wifi. Sure I get 6 drinks on Royal and free wifi but the sme interior cabin is $800. Duh! Plus the casino on MSC is smoke free. So MSC gets my business. If Royal can get people to $800 for a 3 night cruise good for them. If MSC follows Royal and jacks up their rates then I will stay home.

My ESPN+ subscription is going up 34% I'm not renewing. If people are willing to pay the new rates companies will be willing to accept their money. If people don't buy at the new prices they'll either come down or the company will close their doors.

There is no single best time to drop a passenger for all cruises. It depends what is available the day you call to cancel your 2nd. If there is a reduced single supplement fare available you might get something back but most of the time it's 200% for solo so you'd get nothing back for canceling a 2nd guest. It depends. On my way to 340 and the magic reduced single supplement I paid 200% single supplement for the majority of my solo cruises. Their ship, their rules. Yes it sucks but that's the way it is. I only once used a ghost to get an interior GTY fare that wasn't available to solo guests. When Cuba was made off limits there were two ships suddenly with no destination so when they redeployed those ships they was no single supplement. I scored big with that and did a dozen or so on them. It was great but definitely not the norm.

The chart remains unchainged but since the restart some (not all) solo from no-show cabin mate have only reveiced single points much to the dismay of those who counted on booking a ghost as their cabin mate.

In November Chops was open noon - 1:30 pm on day one. On a sea day all 3 were open noon - 1:30 pm.

Apparently this Pinnacle didn't take that approach but it is possible for a child to sail solo (in the eyes of the loyalty program). Children can be booked into a cabin next to their parents cabin. No reason why a single child couldn't also be booked into a cabin next door to their parents making them a solo cruiser - in the eyes of the CAS.

D+ gets 30% off. Cruise Planner "standard" discount is 25% inc. the BOGO50 deal. Depending on sales they could go to 30% in the cruise planner and there is always the possibility it could go higher than 30% in the cruise planner. Historically the D+ discount was a safe choice. Now you can sometimes do better on select ships and sails dates, especially older ships and longer cruises.

royalcarribean blog . com / cruise-compass

Email them. For Oasis it's oa_concierge01@rccl.com oa_concierge02@rccl.com Change "oa" to your ship two letter code. al - allure an - anthem hm - harmony oy - odyssey ov - ovation qn - quantum sy - symphony wn - wonder etc.

I feel like this is one of those YMMV scenarios. Ask 50 people who gone through this and you'll likely get 51 different answers.

Congratulations and welcome to the club!

If you are booking full suites there is typically no refundable option except for a few exceptions such as the VP category sometimes. For non-suite cabins as noted above you have to go all the way through the booking process to the second last step to find it. Even then there are times when they don't make it available on the website but a travel agent can quote it.

I've sailed MSC from Florida and have a handful booked on them. I've never sailed them outside of the Caribbean. Right now they offer some very attractive pricing from Florida. I can sail on MSC with their Easy Plus drink package and basic WiFi 2 devices for between one half and one third of what Royal is charging. The overnight stop at their private island without going to Nassau is a pretty great itinerary too. Seashore is a bargain over Thanksgiving relative to Royal so that's one of my bookings with them. I'm also eyeing their World Europa for a Med cruise just to try their mega ship. Some time ago I did a status match in their loyalty program that gives me a 5% discount on new cruises. So while I would prefer to sail Royal and Royal ships will always "feel like home" I have no problem sailing MSC when Royal's pricing is out of this world or the situation such as itinerary or ship makes MSC a better fit.

I've often had local wifi issues on Q class. I keep an empty water bottle on hand to prop open my cabin door a crack when I want to get work done. Just opening the door a crack seems to let in enough signal to make a big difference. WiFi signal don't go through metal doors very well. Only once has anyone noticed. A guest once knocked on my door to let me know my door was open a crack. "Do you know your door is open?" Me: "Yes". 🙂

If she has made any cruise planner purchases (except deluxe beverage package) they will refund faster if she goes into the cruise planner and cancels those now. Since the deluxe beverage package requires all adults in the cabin to purchase it that could impact cabin mates so this one item is best to consider leaving for now and let it cancel after no show.

At this point so close to the sail date there is little reason to call in and notify. https://www.royalcaribbean.com/faq/questions/booking-cancellation-refund-policy Since there is no refund to be had under 30 days she won't get any cruise fare back. Port fees and taxes will be refunded for her. Any cruise planner purchases for her will be refunded. These are usually automatic but it might not occur until after the cruise completes. In some cases if the cabin requires X number of guests and one calls in to cancel then it could cause the cabin to be re-assigned. If there are still 3 or more guests sailings that is less likely but the general wisdom since there is no benefit to calling it in is to be a no show.

Yes but Pit Stop Bar is very smokey from the casino. It's more open to the casino compared to the Pub on other Radiance class ships. After a few hours watching a game I wreaked of cigarette smoke.

Someone slipped an iron past security.

I once created a spreadsheet with four of the loyalty programs using balcony/verandah cabins since these are the most common types of cabins that most cruisers will occupy. Suites are always in their own league so I didn't include suites. I then normalized the data to reflect the highest tier level and charted it. Notice the shape of the curve for each is very similar. The only outlier is the weird Emerald level in CAS as we all know. They all have a long haul from the 2nd highest level to the highest level. Slightly less so with Carnival VIFP. This doesn't account for actual benefits, simply the points math to reach each level. I think NCL updated their program since. I haven't updated the chart for Latitudes to reflect that. The point is that each program's tier levels are pretty similar in terms of nights in a balcony cabin based on double occupancy without any brand specific ways to earn more points per night since not all lines do that. Carnival for example doesn't offer solo extra points.

Oasis is off and out of PoM on her next cruise. She was using the same exhaust stacks we used for most of our cruise so it seems all is well.

Perhaps this is a preview of one change that the new CAS director has eluded will be announced in January. If so, a single Pinnacle member may be in high demand to share a cabin with. 🤣🤣😇 Adds a new level of wife-swapping opportunity if traveling with another non-Diamond couple. Book each with a Diamond member in different cabins. Everyone gets drinks!

RCI installs multiple Starlink antennas on their ships and load balances sessions across them. On the smaller ships like Jewel of the Seas they have installed 8 Starlink antennas. On Oasis of the Seas they installed 16 Starlink antennas, at least that I could find. There were a couple of mounting brackets ready but with no antenna mounted. On Oasis if I repeated a linux curl command to reveal my public address the results displayed 15 different public IP address in the course of 5 - 10 seconds. Each new session from my laptop went through a different Starlink antenna. All the public IP address were based in Atlanta, GA. They install multiple antennas so they can aggregate bandwidth and achieve diversity. The standard "consumer" Starlink maritime system is currently limited to 350Mbps. It's unknown if that limitation applies to the business grade service in use on cruise ships. They tend to place the antennas in two different groupings based on the class of the ship, some forward, some midship or aft. On Oasis 12 Starlink antennas are in a semicircle along the edge of the Suite Lounge/Coastal Kitchen roof line. The other 4 Starlink antennas are forward on the roof above the Suite Sun Deck, 2 on each side of the ship. My assumption is that X isn't going with a single Starlink antenna per ship either. As I've researched and tested various Starlink related items I've learned not to rely on conventional wisdom with Starlink maritime service. It is emerging technology with few details published for this application. Not everything they do with the consumer residential, RV or maritime Starlink service applies to this type of deployment.

I overlaid the map from the Oasis with the Starlink Maritime coverage map. https://api.starlink.com/public-files/maritime-coverage-map.pdf Light blue is Starlink maritime coverage today. Our route according to Royal. Overlaying the two and painting in the Royal map onto the Starlink coverage map yields this: Normally we would sail down the coast of Florida and turn east to run along the north shore of Cuba to reach Labadee. Collectively we have sailed this route thousands of times. It seems they were trying to keep the ship within Starlink coverage but I suspect the Starlink coverage map isn't absolute nor an indication of 100% solid coverage. I think it's more like "Towards the edges of the light blue you will get some internet but not the full Starlink experience". If that is true then the edges of the Starlink coverage zone is fringe coverage where you can expect some internet at times which is certainly what I experienced especially coming back where we took a route slightly more to the east. Had we taken the southern route through the Florida Straits we would have gone solidly into the no coverage area along the north shore of Cuba.