twangster

Check back daily, people do cancel for a number of reasons. With 6,000 guests involved, stuff happens to someone all the time.

If the muster zone for your cabin is full they can't add one more. Every soul on board must have a seat in a lifeboat by international convention. No exceptions.

Some things just can't be redesigned, the basic structure and bones of the ship. That limits everything and would require a lot more engineering to do a meaningful rebuild. Really hard to overhaul everything that makes a vessel fuel efficient. Hull design for example. Even replacing the engines and propulsion units in a retrofit scenario costs significantly more than building a ship around new engines. New ships are built from the engines up. If they did spend $900M to retrofit an old ship it would still be an old ship required to dry dock every two and half years which takes it out of service twice as often. That's lost revenue. It would always be an old ship that doesn't move through the water like a new ship engineered in current times. Better to spend $1.1B and have new everything. I have a 20 year old car. I could completely disassemble it and rebuild it using new electric motors, blind spot detector systems, airbag systems, anti lock braking computers and such but it would be double or more compared to what it costs to buy a new Tesla. Why would I invest that kind of money to rebuild an old car?

Found at Royal Caribbean Blog Star test load, Sundays, Port Canaveral

Found at Royal Caribbean Blog Test load for Star

Performance hit using an AC750 Through the AC750: Moments later direct without using the AC750

When I looked last night the CAS discounts had not been loaded yet.

Celebrity will match your Royal Diamond status to Elite in their program. Elite perks are very different though.

I will say that back in the day when I first used an AC750 and also a Hootoo device Voom speeds were limited to 4 Mbps down and 2Mbps up. With those kind of speeds the performance of the travel router didn't matter so much. With the faster speeds that are available on some ships the Starlink speeds are now exceeding the performance of these compact travel routers. So while they may work, they may have lower throughput or will become a bottleneck compared to joining the ship WLAN directly. I've been playing with my AC750 and have discovered you can't set the 5Ghz channel, it mirrors the 5Ghz channel that you set it to join. This means that the radios are doing double duty transmitting and receiving on the same frequencies so it uses the RF spectrum twice for the same data flow, effectively competing with itself, at least for the hardware version I have. If you set the AC750 to join on the 2.4Ghz band then you are inherently limited by the nature of the 20 or 40 Mhz channels in use which may result in lower throughput compared to what Starlink is making available on the ship when connected directly to the ship's 5Ghz radios. I am seeing my AC750 top out at around 35 Mbps up and down where as I sometimes get three to four times that download speed when connected directly. It stands to reason given the age of the AC750 family of products and their compact size that performance may not have been a huge design goal. Being limited to 35 Mbps may work for some but if you are moving large amounts of data it's a pretty big hit to take. I'm going to play with it some more at home on my gigabit fiber service but at the moment I'm not overly impressed with the performance of the AC750 now that internet speeds are becoming larger.

Radiance Nov. 2023 The onboard letter now resembles the grid available online.

The D and D+ Voom discount is based on the amount of a 24 hour pass. On Radiance right now here is the Voom price sheet. The 24 hour pass rate is $27.99 per day. Since a D+ gets two free days or equivalent off a full voyage plan that puts the discount at $27.99 x 2 = $55.98.

Yes, really.

Under the previous satellite provider their platform looked for travel routers and disconnected them. Unknown how a travel router will function now that Starlink is the provider.

Star to Florida late July 2025 doing 7 night East and West Caribbean with Perfect Day. Current plan is a 4 day Labadee cruise before settling into the 7 night rotation. Subject to change.

Through the canal and when we near South America we used Starlink gateways in Columbia. This did cause some alerts from my email provider because I appeared to be connecting from a foreign and unusual source. As we cruised up the west coast the Starlink gateway was in Mexico city. It wasn't until we were near California did we use a Starlink gateway in an American city. That was the final night. For most of the cruise we were connected to non-US Starlink gateway cities. I have the ability to VPN to my home office where I have a enterprise grade firewall. This worked fine for me because I have it set to allow VPN from anywhere. If your employer restricts access from foreign countries that could be a problem for you. I'm on Radiance now having left out of Tampa yesterday. As we approach the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico nearing Cuba we are still using Atlanta as our Starlink gateway city. As we continue towards Costa Maya I am expecting we may switch to Mexico City for our Starlink gateway. In the past I have been able to connect two VPN sessions, one to my home office and then I could VPN to another destination that would see my connection coming from my home office. This approach does cost some overhead from double tunnels but it can get around any geo restrictions. Not all VPN applications work well or play nice with each other on the same computer so it's definitely something that can be hit or miss depending on what software is being used. I have also used a second laptop to connect to my home VPN and then used an ethernet cable to connect a work laptop through my personal laptop. With my personal laptop VPN'd to home and the work laptop sharing my personal laptop's connection, the work laptop looked like it was at home so it was able to work just like it does when it is physically at my home. Traveling with two laptops it a bit of a pain but it does open up some additional options to work around geo restrictions.

CAS discounts are definitely always maybe. DP340 is no exception. You can discuss it with them and in the end most of the time you end up right where you were.

The first rule about fight club is...

In 2018 I saw the writing on the wall with respect to Empress and Majesty. So I made a point of watching for opportunities to sail them knowing they wouldn't be around forever. There were no announced plan to move these two ships to pasture but my gut said to sail them. I have the same gut feeling about Vision class. They won't be around forever. I have a twenty year old car. It's a great car. It's a manual transmission and it doesn't have anti lock brakes but it's in good shape and it's a fun car to drive. I had to retrofit a bluetooth radio and I added a Carplay display. I put on some seat covers and it looks fine but there is no mistaking it is twenty years old. I recently replaced the head on the engine and the clutch will need to be replaced soon. Some suspension work is in the future. A twenty plus year old ship is kind of the same. They can put new flat panels in cabins and such but there is no hiding the fact that the ship is twenty plus years old. They are getting costly to maintain, they will break down more often, they are not efficient to operate just like my twenty year old car is a pig on gas. There is no practical way to make something twenty years old fuel efficient. If you want to experience Vision class look for opportunities to sail them over the next few years.

I have the Fjords covered in 2024 with a great itinerary so I'm good. Doing a big train trip in Canada next year too. Really enjoyed an expedition cruise on Silversea. Looking at Seabourn to give them a shot. Sampling lines and vacations beyond Royal. I've never had a bad Royal cruise but just as I grew out of Carnival a while ago, I may be growing beyond what Royal can do for me now. I never had a bad Carnival cruise either.

Three more years sounds about right. They probably would have been sent to the pasture (Pulmantur) already if that door didn't close. Heck Grandeur was already heading that way.

Not just you. Feel like they are catering to new to cruise but I guess that is what you get with a mass market cruise line.

It is disappointing to see Royal further mixing up suite benefits across the fleet. The matrix of "if this ship then these suite benefits, if that ship then those suite benefits" was already inconsistent and confusing. Now, within Oasis and Quantum class it isn't consistent. This is a move in the wrong direction.

What other ships, other than Icon, Utopia and Spectrum, have Sky Junior Suites?

Hey boss, I need a raise to pay for the all things in the world going up ridiculous amounts. I've never been one to advocate removing the DSC but now I'll be joining the long line at guest services.

They were supposed to replace the wifi platform on board with a new Cisco solution but that level of tech detail is not appreciated or noticed by many so I haven't been able to confirm. I'll be on her in a few weeks so if there is something you are looking for I can look at that time.