Paelos

This is correct there's an jurisdiction employment law difference between service charge and gratuity. The employer can't keep gratuity.

The price of 4 drinks a day on RCL is about $65 including the mandatory fees. Run that out over 7 days and you're looking at about $450 on value from that perk, $900 for two adults. However if you run comps of balcony to balcony on an Oasis class and Excel class right now? You will be very quickly that RCL is more than building that cost into the price. And you'd have to take quite a few cruises to be eligible for that perk unless you gamed it during covid. The other area I'd point to is on board spend on RCL went up a ton in other places. Their dining costs are up 50% from what I saw in 2019, and their private island water park prices are absolutely insane, almost double in that same time. When you compare complimentary dining options on excel class versus how much is paid dining on Oasis, you are better off just buying the 4 drinks on carnival.

I was on her a year ago. It's perfectly fine if you are okay with a huge ship mentality, which means you're reserving everything and there will be lines for popular items. The criticism mostly centers around things related to just that, people don't want to wait or when they have to wait they are more critical of that item. My view? The only thing that really sucked on the Mardi Gras is the buffet. It's truly awful and the selection is pitiful compared to older ships. That being said the other food options make it basically irrelevant.

It's the right call. At some point an actual person with foresight got to the upper leadership at RCL and reminded them if any incident happened to passengers the company would basically never recover. That risk isn't worth the short term revenue for the stop in Labadee.

Agree, that's the nature of risk analysis. It's not an acceptable risk for me, would be for others. I wouldn't have a problem with the ship stopping there if people wanted to get off and I just hung out on deck looking for fires in the distance.

Zero chance I'd get off the ship for Haiti now, and it's not about living in fear, it's simple risk/reward. I can have a below average beach day in a port that's honestly a sub-tier version of Coco-Cay, with the downside of finding myself cut of from the ship if gangs storm the gate and try to take hostages. Likely to happen? No. Then again, I bet if I took bets that gangs would overrun a prison everyone would have said that's insane, why would they even try? Yet here we are.

So my experience is as follows. Last cruise I went on in Feb I gambled very little, probably about 700 total points, but that was enough to get a 40% offer and the Drinks on Us in the Casino. I didn't book it because there wasn't much value there and I didn't have the time off. I would also get a lot of last minute interiors for free, but those were also impossible due to no time off. After about 6 months those all fell off. I'm going again in April and it's on a 4-3 B2B. My plan is to gamble a good bit on the 4 day since it has more time at sea, and it's during the week. My goal is to get to 1,000 points across a couple of days of play and hit that free drinks limit (we have $500 of OBC on each leg, so I'm just going to use that as my bankroll). Also from a points perspective, tables get you nothing, it's not even worth your time. If you are serious about getting comps it's machines or nothing. That being said, trying to find the right combination of video poker play and slot play is my goal to get max points.

Heading on the Liberty in April with my wife, so I appreciated your review! I'll give the BBQ place a stop by for sure. We've also booked the steakhouse on the first night, and I fully prepare to drink that free bottle of wine! Hopefully I have some good luck in the casino. What games in the casino did you like to play? You had mentioned there weren't many "cheap" games, so what bet/denomination were you able to find that you liked?

My advice would be to check the Fun Times from St. Greg and they give you a general idea of what they are showing now. If you're going several months into the future, good luck there's not a lot of advice.

Burger is great, if you're on a ship with a Shaq's chicken the fries there are INSANELY better. I recommend getting some tenders with fries from one and the burger from the other, then just going to town. Yeah it's a lot, you're on a cruise. Stick $20 in a slot machine afterwards with an old fashioned in your hand to just hit all the feel-good highlights at once.

If you're on the larger ships like Mardi Gras, you are pretty much forced into your time dining because of the nature of the different restaurants that are included for dinner. We only went to the MDR once the entire cruise for that reason. However I don't really like it because the service is inconsistent and with YTD the servers don't try to be friendly or get to know you because they know they'll likely never see you the rest of the cruise. Additionally the waits on the larger ships can be absolutely absurd. 60-75 minutes on formal nights, or for the popular restaurants are not out of the norm. On smaller ships waits are less of an issues, but I enjoy the consistent staff and true cruising feel of set dining. I also like to eat early and so do tons of cruisers with families and older groups so those times would get jammed up if I was on YTD.

One of the reasons I pick Carnival is the food relative to the price. I do think they have the best complementary options on a cruise ship of the four major lines CCL, NCL, RCL, MSC. My biggest takeaway from every fan of every major line is that food took a hit in quality post covid. The difference I've found in carnival is the complementary variety has increased, while other lines pushed to higher cost specialty options.

Great review! I'm actually most shocked by how bad your steward was. I've always had great ones on Carnival, much better than RC or NCL

I would just get a different white top tbh. But you can wear whatever you like. White shows up better in the lights on deck so it'll look cooler imo

I would absolutely avoid the Vista until the propulsion issues are proven to be dealt with by repairs.

I would do the Celebration. I've done the Mardi Gras and liked the food choices. If food is important to you, I think it's the way to go given the variety over the Venezia. If the layout and style of a different type of ship is more important, I'd go with Venezia as it's the more unique one.

No the age doesn't bother me at all. I went on Mardi Gras in Feb and honestly didn't like it at all. The layout felt bizarre, and the Central Atrium idea sounds like a good idea but in execution isn't a nightmare to sit in or walk through when shows are going on. Also just too...freaking...huge. Too many people competing for not enough spaces. I enjoy the smaller ship feel without it being Fantasy class small, so I booked on Liberty next year and I'm considering Valor as well.

I think if you apples to apples everything right now, MSC and Carnival are going to come out ahead of all the other lines on price without much question. Vacations to go gives you a good rundown of where the budget is and it's on those.

Just remember, if you see the casino heavily promoting something, especially as you are about to take money from them at the cashier desk, they are trying to screw you out of what you have left.

What's your favorite and least favorite things about the Conquest Class of Ship (Conquest, Glory, Valor, Liberty, Freedom)? Would you sail on this class again, or is there something about them that makes you pass them over?

There are lots of deals on most lines except RCL right now if you're willing to travel outside of summer and spring break. I used to always go in February because they had the best deals then, but I've also found good ones in late April.

They are already driving record revenue. All they need to do is operate at capacity now. The debt service on TTM is $2B and their EBITDA is $4B. And again they are paying down the excess debt so they don't have to get to zero debt, they just need to get back to debt position from 2019 which was their normal operating debt point. Also if the fed drops rates in 2024-2025 as we anticipate, they look to refinance the debt that is outstanding in 2 years, which depending on market may help reduce the higher number they had to secure when they had no income.

Yep but the good news is issued more equity to pay down debt and have been plowing back the cash flow into the debt as well. Also there aren't any new ships in the hopper which means depreciation will slow as assets begin to age. So I would expect them to get out of debt and into a cash plus position in 3 years.

This is just them price comping to the other lines. As stated RCL charges twice the price. NCL about 3x. They figured they could still be the cheapest and gain $2 per package, which probably nets over $10m in revenue.

In Q4 they recorded a $900m EBITDA gain, which is all the investors and bankers will care about. The interest and depreciation skew the results, so when anybody values the company they are looking at EBITDA multiples.