eileeshb

I work in a resort town so can't take vacation between May and September which leaves October as the only option for Alaska. April is hit & miss at work depending on when Easter falls and this year it's quite early which eliminates that month too.

I've noticed a few things seem to be closed there on a Monday which happens to be the day we're scheduled to be in port. I can't complain as I work in a resort town and we close on Mondays out of high season.

They don't always make them available, it depends on how many guests have bought a full cruise spa pass.

I'm going solo to Alaska with NCL in October, I've been solo on every cruise I've done. One of my friends is keen to do Alaska too so she may come along and celebrate a roundy birthday on the ship. Her father wanted to do Alaska too but her mother just isn't into travelling and he has Parkinson's. As she describes his mobility these days, he can run no problem he just can't walk and she doesn't think he'd be able for the long haul flights from Ireland.

I've only sailed with NCL and out of school holiday windows so the age spread tends to be quite varied. You can get a look at all of their excursions regardless of specific itinerary https://www.ncl.com/fr/en/shore-excursions Not all will be offered on each itinerary but I found it was good for getting ideas of what's available at different ports and I could then search for local providers (check trip advisor and CC for reviews). Also the prices on the webpage above are the full normal price without the $50 excursion credit discount.

My last cruise was March last year, my next will be October of this year and since the end of last summer I've been doing endless research on the ports and having it in the back of my mind with any shopping I'm doing. My amazon save for later list gets longer week by week..

I've been to howl at the moon on all the cruises I've done and it's usually great but a couple of cruises it was a complete wash out either because the guest musicians were too far up their own butts showing off rather than paying attention to the audience or because the passengers weren't into it so there was only a handful of people at the show. The latter happened on a cruise shortly after the resumption and the ship was less than 50% full and was mostly european guests who wouldn't be familiar with the concept.

Oh I know all about that one, the local surfers had a lengthy argument with the local council here about a new pier for ferries that was planned. At the time there was a resident wild dolphin in the area of the pier work and they had to draw her away to another area before they did any blasting. Since then she moves up and down the coast an awful lot more rather than staying where she had originally settled. I know a couple of the planners in the council and they were astonished at the amount of highly technical submissions they got from the international surfing community for both that project and Trump’s planned seawall in front of his golf course here.

I’ve only had it on an itinerary once and we made it but the tender queuing process was such a mess a lot of people missed their early excursions, I had a ticket for the first tender after the vips and excursions but it was something like 1.30pm by the time I made it to the island. I remember hearing/reading that the reason there isn’t a pier is due to the depth of the water making it’s construction prohibitively expensive.

Ahh the joys of NCLs rubbish software department. I swear there’s a random number generator buried in every program and webpage and depending what value it generates it will decide to work or not! I was on Epic twice in the space of 6 months, first one the app behaved and everything worked as it should, the second time - nope would not cooperate no matter what I did on the same phone as the first trip. I’m a techie and tried everything possible from power cycling the phone to uninstalling and reinstalling the app. It’s a complete lottery.

Oddly there was bias against seafood in Ireland for donkey’s years as everybody considered it “poor people’s” food because you could go out and catch it yourself. Nowadays there are growing numbers of seafood restaurants and my brother’s staple for eating out is fish & chips. Personally I’m more into shellfish and used to go out picking mussels and catching shrimp at one of the local rocky beaches when I was a teen.

This may be a wasted question, but … do the retailers in Juneau adjust their hours to include times when large ships are in port? I’ll be on Norwegian Bliss in October and our port time is supposed to be 1:30pm to 11pm and given the reduced daylight most of the appealing excursions run from 2pm to 6pm. In my case I want to go whale watching which means I probably won’t get a chance to see anything (except pub/restaurants) in town if everything is closing at 5 or 6pm. Is there any chance the local craft shops and museums will be open late to cater to the cruisers? AFAIK there’s only 3 more scheduled arrivals for the season after mine, encore x2 and bliss’s final sailing for the season.

There’s a few places in Ireland with heaps of Puffins in the summer, the most popular would be the cliffs of moher (a stones throw from my home turf) and also the Skelligs down in Kerry. There were so many puffins around when Star Wars was being filmed on Skellig Michael that they created the porgs in order to hide them via cgi.

If you can find out what’s happening with the entertainment for the rest of the year that would be great. I’m in the process of trying to convince a friend to join me on an Alaskan cruise at the end of the season so I’d like to know if Six and Jersey Boys will be continuing after the news that NCL has cancelled contracts for some performers and shows on other ships.

1) I think so, I certainly brought a water bottle with me but no one was checking what was in it, so fill a yeti or the like with what you want and you should be ok, but just don’t get too rowdy 2) yes and yes 3) 8am to 10pm but may close earlier on the last night and there’s tours running through the spa on embarkation day up to 5pm.

He’s in a studio which means he has to be over 18.

If you want to get the upgrade price it will be listed as an option to add on right now in your reservation. There is a tactic to wait until after midnight after embarkation to buy the upgrade as it knocks a days charge off the price but to adopt that you can not use any of your free minutes before that. As soon as you start using minutes you’re no longer eligible for upgrade pricing, instead you have to pay full whack. You can buy minutes to add on as you go if you don’t want an unlimited package. unfortunately I don’t have a recent flyer as my last 2 cruises were when they still weren’t distributing the hard copy newsletter. the one I have from a few years ago had 3 different unlimited WiFi options: social media only, general WiFi, or streaming & vpn. the minutes packages ranged from pay as u go per minute, 100minute or 250minutes but these are supposedly not enabled for streaming or vpn.

The use of WiFi will depend on how much roaming data he’ll have when on land. When I did my Mediterranean cruise I spent more time off the ship than on it so bear that in mind too. The only reason I upgraded my WiFi on that cruise was that we had a sea day (covid related) which happened to coincide with a rugby match I wanted to see and I needed vpn streaming to see it. check on the WiFi perk in your cabin, is it minutes just for passenger 1 or 1 and 2, If it’s for each just give him one of your accounts to use while you & DH share the other.

I haven’t seen Six or Choir of Man but my understanding of both of those show is that they’re relatively simple staging compared to the likes of Priscilla, Kinky boots, etc. There seems to be a move towards shows that are simpler to stage without numerous set changes which will reduce the number of stage hands required too.

I damn near vomited from the smell of stale smoke when they made us queue through the casino both for disembarkation and for tenders at GSC. hmm I think I may add that allergy to my future bookings.

For Bonaire the snorkel excursions depart from right beside the ship, or at least they did for the excursion I did last year. But the city tour will involve a hike down the pier to get to/from the bus so that adds another few minutes to the excursion duration on your city tour.

I can see more people asking guest services to refund their service charges explain it’s because they’re giving less service for a higher cost and then just tip the steward, etc individually as it’s the one way to get the message through to NCL HQ. thankfully my next cruise has a service charge rate 2 steps behind the new rate as I booked it before the 2022 rate increase.

I’m a solo cruising to Alaska in October and as I’m coming from Ireland it will be a serious mission of a trip. I am planning to book excursions at all the ports partly due to the port times. I’ll be cruising with NCL so at Ketchikan their dock is way out of town and the shuttle buses back to the ship stop ridiculously early and for that reason alone I booked the lumberjack show because the bus back to the ship from that will be later than the shuttle. Ketchikan is the one port where none of the excursions particularly appealed to me as they were horrendously unjustifiably overpriced, $100+ to get to totem bight park (the place with lots of totem poles) which is supposedly walking distance from downtown! Apparently you can do it via public transport but the bus stop is dodgy to find near the NCL pier. Thankfully the $50 excursion credit per excursion from NCL means I won’t be paying a stupid amount of money on the lumberjack show. It also fully covers the tram in Juneau in addition to the reduction in the costs of some of the other excursions like the railway in Skagway and whale watching in Juneau. For me doing an Alaska cruise involves a full 24hrs of travelling to get to Seattle or Vancouver.

Do any of the airport hotels have shuttles serving the south centre mall? I’m trying to decide between booking a hotel by the mall or one by the hotel for the night after the cruise, it’s looking like my flight home may be at 7.30am if I don’t get a cheaper price on the midday departure on disembarkation day.

I’d suggest reaching out to the accessibility team, there’s a link to the relevant info at the bottom of the main webpage. I won’t post the link I found as I’m on the European website so it’d be a different url.