twangster

I thought the same thing. Ignore and use a lounger if you are allowed to.

With satellite internet you should never assume 100% availability. It will be unavailable at times, or perform poorly at times. Naturally this will occur when you need it most,

Just booked Allure for a shorty in a suite. Got me thinking. With Allure and what looks like Utopia going into the short FL market I wonder if this change was done for the short market. $100 deposits for Utopia when it will see much higher prices compared to Allure (new ship premium). My deposits for Allure would have been more that $100 after June 1st and if Utopia is priced like I think it will be the $100 suite deposit may have been motivation for Royal to make this change before Utopia is opened for booking.

Purely from an internet perspective the experience will likely be the same.

What ship or class of ship are you sailing? Anyone under age 21 in the group?

Did you mean GS?

Contact a TA to inquire about group rates and if they are available. Group rates are usually the cheapest and they are refundable. You won't find these rates on the public website or through Royal direct.

Royal has streamlined the check in process so it is must faster than it was in the years before the shutdown. They started down this path before the shutdown. It stands to reason that shutdown or not, they can't handle masses of the total ship count all arriving at the same time. Naturally there is a desire to distribute arriving guests across the check in period. As ships grow larger this becomes more of an issue. If you arrive out of turn and it's a miserable wait in a long line you can blame yourself and all the others that did the same. It's that simple.

I might start wearing it on my t-shirt by the pool. That really seems to get people wound up. 🤣😇

Nope. I was told it didn't. But then again I went to chops since I had the UDP.

Would a refundable booking work for you? Secure the cabin, can be converted to NRD later if cheaper, full refund if it doesn't work out.

Are you sure? I didn't think the UDP worked in the MDR.

My TA can't always get me into headquarter groups as a solo. Named groups no problem. I wonder what my TA is doing wrong. Hmmm.

No problem. As far as the train station in Seward goes, there are two. If you book the train through Royal, the whole train is chartered by Royal, it stops right at the cruise terminal, maybe 300 yards away. If you book the train direct with the Alaskan Railroad, the public train station is a 20 minute walk to the cruise terminal or they offer a motorcoach ride for free. Either way, when you check your luggage in Anchorage it goes directly to the ship. You not see your luggage again until it's delivered to your cabin. Do not pack passports, wallets, paperwork, etc in your checked luggage. Take all that stuff as carry on for the train.

"The sky is falling! The sky is falling!" Nope, just another Royal lifeboat. They do warn small craft to stay at least 50m away.

Everything on AD was cheap. My aft balconies over Christmas were under $700 refundable.

I recently spun the GTY wheel and ended up with a pretty decent balcony location. Not too far from an elevator lobby and on a deck I like. If there were only a handful of cabins to pick from and this cabin was one of them I would have picked it myself. The category I was assigned is closed and there has been nothing else I could think about moving to but I've stopped looking as I am okay with my assignment. Pretty happy really. I used the bar code trick to learn of my cabin about 10 days before it became official.

How are you getting to Seward? I've done the train a few times so I'm looking for feedback on other means as I think about trying something different.

I often do wear it just to mess with people in the SL. My last two oasis class cruises were in sky and star class. Wore my Pinnacle badge in the SL knowing it would mess with people. Last cruise was on Radiance. Only wore my name badge to top tier, didn't wear it anywhere else for 15 nights.

They keep on saying that grand suite are cheaper on older ships but I don't see that. Someone forgot to tell the revenue dept to lower the full suites on older ships.

They way the new higher prices are working out, the extra points I earned through the double points promotion in 2021 and 2022 are now being countered by the cruises I'm not booking due to current pricing. In other words my cruising budget didn't go up to match inflation, so I cruise less. Once we are into 2025 and looking back, any extra CAS points earned in the restart years, 2021-2022 will have been "lost" over the next two years 2023-2024, so over the four years from 2021-2024 I'll be at my normal average. In the end the double points promo did nothing for me but maintained me where I would have been with no pandemic and the crazy inflation that came out of it.

Choice is a Casino Royale tier level. The first level in the program. Diamond of course is your Crown and Anchor tier level.

As a follow up the ship left on schedule.

To get to this point of implementing change and standardizing the suite deposit policy across the fleet must have taken some time for the review, analysis and gathering internal agreement before making this public. I only hope they follow up by giving the same due effort and time into standardizing suite benefits more closely across the fleet. Including Voom with all full suites for example, especially now with the lower cost Voom through Starlink. The 11am to 11pm SL beer & wine only on Oasis class is another example. That is mostly a crewing issue which they accept on Oasis class but no others. Those bar crew don't do double duty as CK hosts or anything else. If they are able to maintain extra bar crew on Oasis class for the SL bar why not on other classes? While they may never add a CK venue on older classes there are many small and subtle ways they could standardize more suite benefits across the fleet.

Because they are from somewhere else.