ontheweb

Have a great trip. Looking forward to your report.

Laughing again, I just looked at the reactions to my posts and see I posted basically the same thing back in July of 2022.

HA! HA! In 1997, we did a land vacation at an AI in Jamaica for our 20th anniversary. There was a small tax to depart. The lady at the airport in front of us said she had spent all her money and could not pay the tax. She also said please make me stay. They did not.

We had never missed a port (unless you count getting to Fort Lauderdale 2 days late because of a hurricane or an entire cruise cancelled due to Covid). Then we went on the NCL Prima last summer, London (Southampton) to Reykjavik, and missed 2 ports. The ports were Zebrugges for Brugge for according to them an extremely low tide and Isafjordur, Iceland that they missed on every single one of their cruises because the dock was not finished and they said the ship's lifeboats were not certified to be used as tenders.

WOW! You showed incredible patience reading through 23 pages! And it looks like today is the 3 year anniversary of the start of this thread.

Thank you for sharing the details of your trip with all of us.

The author again is Phillip Norman. Let me give you all of the titles. John Lennon: The Life Paul McCartney: The Biography George Harrison: The Reluctant Beatle (the one I am reading now) There are also biographies by him of Eric Clapton. Elton John, and Mick Jagger. Also, there are books about the Beatles.

Also, you can find the roll call for your cruise and see if there are any fellow passengers who have booked private tours and are looking for others to join.

I do hope we eventually get to see Stonehenge. And I see in the list at the front of the George Harrison biography that the author, Phillip Norman, has also written biographies of John Lennon and Paul McCartney,

Isn't everyone a big Beatles' fan? I am actually at the moment reading a biography of George Harrison, George Harrison The Reluctant Beatle by Phillip Norman. It is quite interesting. No, we never rebooked the cruise. We did get to see some Norwegian fjords this past summer on an NCL Prima cruise, London (Southampton) to Reykjavik.

I wonder if we were booked on the same cancelled cruise. I don't remember the Princess ship's name, but it was a Norwegian fjords cruise out of Southampton in August. We cancelled with a refundable deposit before final payment as we saw they could not possibly sail this itinerary. They did not cancel the cruise until after final payment was due. When I went to the roll call and said we were cancelling because how could they possibly do this cruise, I saw someone else had just booked the cruise and joined the roll call.

Do they actually just advise that, or is really that they will not sell the excursion to you unless your flight meets that requirement?

I looked at the International Friends tour of Stonehenge before our cruise this past summer from Southampton, but there was a minimum amount of days you had to be staying in London and we were only staying one day. (And all it did that days was pour. We ended up spending something like 8 hours in the British Museum, easy for my art teacher wife, but hard on me.)

Glad you made it there! And your pictures are beautiful!

So jealous, we had this booked for a cruise in 2020 which of course never happened because of the Covid shutdown. My DW actually had said she looked forward to this excursion more than the cruise. One of the best things about this type of transfer to the airport is you still feel that you are on your cruise vacation instead of depressed it is over. I know that is what we experienced when we took a Princess transfer to Heathrow from Dover via Canterbury.

Good luck with the weather. We lucked out that that was probably our nicest weather day. Keukenhof is incredibly beautiful. I hope you get to post many, many pictures. Please let us all know how you do with the wheelchair there. There are paths, but to really cover it, there is a lot of walking.

It should be added to this thread that if one is lucky enough to have found an excellent TA who is not just an order taker but someone who is an experienced cruiser, he or she should be knowledgeable about any and all documentation requirements.

Yes, I have seen that. On our second cruise, we had a hurricane and got into Fort Lauderdale 2 days late. We were put on standby and luckily were the last ones called on the next flight. (We knew as the list got smaller that even if we did not make that flight, we were sure to be on the next one and get home that day. However, there were people not so lucky. As we waited to get to the airline representative, we heard passengers who were told they would not get a flight until the next day scream at the airline representative as if that would magically make flights available to them.

I hope when that denial of boarding occurred somewhat regularly in that time frame, you and your colleagues were not routinely yelled at.

If I am reading you correctly, it is the rule of the country that matters, not of the cruise lines that you deal with. (And I do realize that there are cruise lines that you do not deal with that do have passport requirements even for closed loop cruises and might have a 6 month rule.)

You are no longer being charged for the excursion that has been cancelled. Why would you even think that you should be getting a credit?

I would hope that at all ports, it is the same as @Ferry_Watcher described---they are looking to allow you to board. She would have first hand knowledge of whether Royal Caribbean insists on 6 months left for a passport (at least for Canada). It may be different if there is a country being visited that has a 6 month rule.

Still nothing that interests us like Chagall and Matisse in Nice. The second time we were there we walked around Cannes, a lot more interesting than a harbor full of luxury yachts or a funny changing of the guard,

What about the experience of the people doing the checking at the dock like @Ferry_Watcher? Granted her knowledge is limited to Canada, but she does deal with Royal Caribbean among other lines?

But the contract is the legally binding provision, while the website is basically marketing. And to make things worse, they basically say it's your responsibility, don't count on us for an answer. Maybe the best thing is to go by what experiences other passengers have had with this question.