caribill

You can always offer to treat them to dinner at the buffet.

Messaging: Send/receive messages with other passengers Location tracking: Tells Princess system where your Medallion currently is located if on the ship. Normally it is with you. This allows you to use screens around the ship to locate someone else in your group by showing where their Medallion currently is. For example,using a screen near the elevators near the deck 6 dining room and see that the person you are looking for is (some possibilities) in the dining room, in the front row of the Princess Theater, in their cabin, in a rest room on deck 5, or wherever they might be on the ship.

As I understand your post, if not the lead in category, the deposits are refundable for choosing to allow Princess to select the cabin. Are the prices the same if not the lead in category for selecting a cabin or allowing Princess to select?

As indicated, in the UK all deposits are non-refundable, so your analysis is correct for UK residents.

Meaning Princess is again becoming more and more like the competition and customers having less incentive to book a Princess cruise.

Correct. You lose the ability to apply the FCD to a cruise along with the OBC it would bring, but the FCD cost is refunded to the original method of payment. This assumes the FCD was not used as a non-refundable deposit.

Quietly making it cost $100 more to select a cabin. Very sneaky.

The "vanilla-chocolate banana sundae"

So like semi-sweet chips? Or larger pieces than that? Have you asked for some or seen anyone else do so?

That is boilerplate and covers the worst case which may or not be accurate for all cruises it appears for.

People in the same cabin are automatically allowed to use the locate person function for each other.

As a replacement for the cruise card, the Medallion is fine. For me the best two new features that a cruise card did not have and the Medallion has: a) Unlocking your door as you approach it. Very convenient whether or not you are carrying something. b) Using interactive screens around the ship to locate a traveling companion who is away from you

I assume that is when the dining room opened up and at that time 100% of the tables are available, so it is not hard to have the same table for the entire cruise as you arranged. But if you make a reservation for every evening at 7:40 PM, there may be zero tables available when you arrive, much less the same one every evening being available when you arrive.

I though that was the demographic that Princess concentrates on having booked on their ships.

But they could "track" it and locate it for him.

Pax Cabin is part of the Medallion effort to keep track of your every movement and, like Alexa, listens to your every spoken word so it not only knows where you are, but where you plan to be..

I always use the cabin phone to set up a wake up call from the ship. That call has always been at the correct ship time.

Pens and notepads in the cabin were eliminated due to Covid precautions. You can ask your cabin steward and/or the passenger services desk for both. Chocolates were also eliminated due to Covid precautions, but I think they are now gone to save Princess $$$.

I have found that the app can load the port guides before the cruise. On the Ruby, at least, hard copies were available at the shore excursion desk.

If you look for something on Amazon.com, you will start getting ads from Amazon pushing the type item you looked for. But not from other places.

On embarkation day there will be staff there to show interested people around and make the reservations. Chances are when you visited it was an afternoon nobody had booked space there due to the weather so staff did not have to be there.

Nope. That happens to me also. To switch for getting ads for something you are more interested in, after looking at TVs, look for cruises. Then all the new unwanted ads will be for cruises.

The best place I have found to look for current ship time is on the display on the cabin telephone.

I guess I did not phrase it properly. Yes, the vendor will be using local time. But when you want to book the excursion weeks or more before the cruise, you do not know if the ship will be using local time and thus cannot always be sure the ship will dock before the start of the excursion. I can always be aware of local time before a cruise, but I cannot always be aware of what ship time will be in every port before as cruise.

Proving the value of having a good TA who is on your side working with Princess on your behalf.