cruiseej

I don't know if distilled water is acceptable for what you need to drink, but I know you can get distilled water for a CPAP machine, so that might be an alternative. It comes in the same plastic bottles as the drinking water, but I imagine you could request a fresh bottle each day.

Just wondering why you (or anyone) is annoyed by this. I wouldn't think anyone would be up against their credit limit. It's routine at many hotels. It doesn't matter to me; I'm curious why it would make anyone unhappy.

TK Grill on Quest closed January 10, according to a passenger aboard — about as expected. They might be a little behind schedule, but Solis should open for business in about a week. This was the previously-posted schedule for Solis conversion plans:

@caledonmango This map shows the distance from the port to the airport is just over 3 miles, a 12-minute ride. If you get off the ship by 8:30, you should be at the airport before 9:00 in plenty of time.

AirTags don't do anything to help your luggage get to your destination with you. They give you peace of mind if your luggage is where it should be, and eliminate the concern and anxiety phase and get you straight to depression if it isn't. 🤣 In most cases, telling the airline "no, the bag is in Amsterdam, not Atlanta" doesn't bring about a faster reunion.

@Pre Eng When is your cruise? For the past two years, Seabourn has been emailing passengers with an assigned boarding time, a practice which started when cruising resumed after the pandemic shutdown in order to space out the arrival of passengers. We heard a few months ago that they were going to eliminate the assigned boarding times, but I don't know if this has taken place yet for 2024 cruises. (Does anyone know?) As Hank said, even with the assigned boarding times, there has generally been no problem with individuals arriving earlier and boarding around noon, plus or minus a little depending on the port staff's speed in getting passengers off and ready for boarding new ones. Of course, if everyone shows up at 11:30 seeking to get on early, there will be quite a queue and a wait to process everyone.

But what if the cask is carried by a dog? 🤣

@Sunprince I agree with you that I find some of Silversea's pricing nonsensical. In particular what you cited, where the air/transfer/limo cost goes up as you move up to higher ship suite categories. Why should the cost or credit for the non-ship travel be affected by what suite you select? That's just abusive pricing in my opinion, but Silversea loyalists don't seem to mind. Business class upgrades vary considerably, and can be a great deal or completely untenable. But for that, I don't really blame Silversea; it depends on their contracts and allocation with the airlines on specific routes. Availability of good business class upgrades has gotten worse post-pandemic because airlines have fewer flights and seats available. As for the nomenclature of things like "door-to-door without air", you just have to look past that it doesn't sound right. Some people like to book their own air, for control or to use frequent flyer miles, so they have to offer a carve-out for those who want all the other benefits of door-to-door but without included air. Keep in mind that port-to-port has some potentially big minuses which account for the difference in cost compared to door-to-door without air. From the moment you make port-to-port booking, 15% of your fare is non-refundable. Period. On an expensive cruise booked 2+ years in advance, that can be a big risk to take on if health, work, family could intercede in your plans, or simply you find a more preferable cruise you'd want to switch to. On the other hand, the P2P savings are significant if you're booking a cruise less than a year in advance and can be sure you're going. Also, if you become a Silvesea regular, they really dissuade you from doing port-to-port fares because several of their discounts are reduced or not applicable on P2P fares. (You can't get the 5% discount on select "venetian Society" cruises, nor the 5% or 10% savings regulars earn based on nights sailed.) For someone trying Silversea for the first time, this isn't an issue. To me, they've made their pricing unnecessarily complex in trying to offer options for those who want the lowest price and those who want all-in simple travel and steps in between. But as @markham suggests, working with a good luxury cruise specialist travel agent and/or Silversea consultant, they can easily run all the numbers for you so you can make an informed decision.

First, note that "Marina Day" — which is actually more like "Marina 2 Hours" — only happens when sea conditions in a port are pretty close to ideal; they won't take people out in kayaks and inflatables if there's significant wind or chop. I glanced at your itinerary and don't see a port I recognize as a regular location for a Marina Day, but others with more knowledge of these ports may chime in. The marina is only opened when the ship is at anchor (not docked), so your only chances appear to be in Rodney Bay (Saint Lucia), Charlotteville (Trinidad and Tobago), Isla Catalina (Dominican Republic). I've only been to Rodney Bay before, and it seems like a perfect location for the marina — but I can't remember if we had it offered on our two cruises which stopped there. I'm not a big fan of the Marina Day; but I know some people love it. I wish they ran zodiac shuttles to a quiet beach somewhere, as I'd rather sit on the warm sand and swim in the ocean than be towed around on a banana boat for a few minutes — but we all have our own ideas of an idyllic Caribbean day! 😀

This appears to be an expedition cruise on Pursuit. It's important to note that expedition cruises are quite different from traditional cruises on classic ships; there's much more get-out-and-go and much less entertainment. To your questions… 1. We are looking at Cabins V1 501 and V2 801. We are not bothered by rocking/rolling ship motion and don't use elevators. Any comments about either of these cabins? I'm personally not a huge fan of the very far forward suites. On classic ships, you'll get a lot of noise in the early morning hours when they drop anchor, but the Pursuit uses dynamic positioning (thrusters) to hold its place instead of dropping an ashore to the sea floor in some locations. I'd note that 801 is actually farther back than 501, and for that reason, I'd probably chose 801 over 501. Also, even if you're not bothered by rocking and rolling, the noise of the bow hitting waves in choppy seas can be significant, especially low down on deck 5, so for me that would be another vote for 801. And the suites on Deck 5 have verandas with metal at the bottom of the railings, so you have a more limited view of the sea from inside your suite than the all-glass railings on higher decks — some one more vote for 801 over 501. And 501 appears to have a slightly smaller balcony on the deck plan diagram duet the curvature near the front of the ship; I don't know if it's meaningful difference or not. I don't know if you've picked these two because you don't want the expense of a V3, but if the couple thousand extra dollars doesn't put you off, I'd pick V3 over either of these. Or I just punched up this sailing, and there are other V1 and V2 suites also available; why not 608 (V2)? I'd take that over 501 or 801. 2. I actually enjoy doing laundry/ironing when aboard (at home...not so much). Are the self-serve laundries normally accessible ie. not overly crowded or requiring lineups? I believe there is only one laundry room on the Pursuit (aft of suite 528). On the other hand, it's a small ship, so the contention for machines isn't huge. Yes, you may hit the laundry room at times when all the machines are in use, but if you're flexible with your timing, it's generally not a problem. 3. I read that The Restaurant (which I assume is the "premium" dining venue on board) must be reserved with one (1) reservation permitted per voyage. For a 38 day cruise this seems pretty limited. Is this correct? No! The Restaurant is the main restaurant, but there are no reservations needed or accepted, and no limit on the number of times you may dine there. Again, the Pursuit is a small ship, so there are primarily just two restaurants (the other is Colonnade), neither of which require reservations. (The Patio is outside the Colonnade, but I believe only open for lunch.) There is also Sushi in the Club in the evening, which may be an appetizer/hors d'oeuvre or a light dinner. 4. My wife and I enjoy interesting and knowledgeable speakers. Are the calibre and frequency of the speakers reasonable? Again, you have selected an expedition ship, which is significantly different than a classic cruise ship in this regard. The members of the expedition team are your guest speakers. The expedition teams typically have people with widely varied backgrounds, from sea life to bird life to history and culture or the region. Normally, there is a nightly recap and briefing in which members of the expedition team speak, and one some days, there are separate lectures by members of the team. I've never done an ocean crossing on an expedition ship, do I can't comment on how they vary the schedule when you have multiple sea days in a row crossing the Pacific. 5. We would normally bring a few bottles of wine with us (probably from visited Chilean wineries) but would not likely upgrade to Premium Spirits on board. Are the complimentary wines and beers on offer of reasonable quality? "Reasonable quality" is probably a fair description. Seabourn's included wines are not very high-end — typically $12-$20 in retail stores — but most people can find wines they're satisfied with to be happy. If you only drink much more expensive wines at home, you might not be thrilled with the selection. Beers offered vary depending on what they've purchased/shipped to the part of the world they're cruising; there's usually not a huge selection. 6. We are not heavy users of the internet while traveling. Is the available bandwidth satisfactory for dealing with limited emails (no streaming required)? Yes. 7. The Formal Attire requirement is understood to be about once per week (5 occasions over 38 days?). Is it possible to get away with a collared shirt and linen jacket without a tie? Post-retirement my neck has become very adverse to wearing one. Yes, jacket and no tie will be fine. But on the expedition ships, there are no formal nights at all. (Another difference between expedition and classic cruises.) You might still want a sport jacket to be a little more dressed on some nights, but it's not required. Others may offer different opinions; I hope that helps.

According to this website of their rental gear supplier, yes. $49 to rent.

Baby Boomers are 60 to 78 years old. Are you suggesting this is a youth movement, and that "classic customers" are aged 80 and older?? 🤣

To be fair comparing apples to apples… Seabourn has selected voyages which qualify for a Seabourn Club 5% discount — exactly the same as Silversea. And booking a future cruise on board Seabourn offers a 5% booking discount, similar to Silversea. (With Silversea, lower-cost Port-to-Port advance bookings qualified for only a 2.5% discount rather than 5%, but looking at the current T&C's it may be 5% now? But Port-to-Port fares don't get the 5% Venetian sailing discount, nor the 5% or 10% Venetian Society discounts.) With Seabourn, you get a free 7-day cruise at 140 days or a 14-day cruise at 250 days — versus 7 days for 250 and 14 days for 500 on Silversea. That's a pretty significant advantage of Seabourn cruisers. On the flip side, Silversea offers 5% off after 100 days and 10% off after 250 days, so that's a significant advantage for Silversea cruisers. Seabourn's tiered Club program provides discounts on all excursions and premium wines, something Silveursea's no-tier Venetian Society program. (But many excursions on Silversea are included, so Silversea travelers probably purchase fewer excursions.) A Seabourn Future Cruise deposit for 5% savings is good for a generous four years until it must be used; if not used in that time, it will be refunded. A Silversea floating booking gives you only six months; you can book any future cruise and then transfer it to a different cruise, thus giving a longer timeframe to use the discount — but it's not as simple as Seabourn's 4 year timeframe. So there are some pros and cons on both sides; neither is a slam dunk.

On every Seabourn ship, identical size cabins go up in price as you move to higher floors. (I think this is true on most, if not all, cruise lines.) In this case, 610 is pretty close to the bow of the ship. 828 is about as far from the back of the ship as 610 is to the front, so both are susceptible to motion if the ship is rocking up and down around the center (like a see-saw) — but you feel the motion more at the front than the back. And there's more noise up front if the ship is crashing into wave after wave hitting the bow. On the other hand, if there's a lot of motion, especially side-to-side, lower is better than higher. with a suite near the bow, you will potentially have early morning loud noise when the anchor is dropped. But the Venture often doesn't drop its anchor and uses its thrusters for dynamic positioning to remain in one spot rather (because an anchor can damage the sea bed). The rear elevators near 828 place you close to the Restaurant, Colonnade, Seabourn Square, and the spa, which are all at the rear of the ship. (But it's not such a big ship that you can't easily get form anywhere to anywhere pretty quickly!) That all said, I wouldn't worry too much about the location; either one should be fine.

I'm curious if the winery at Cloudy Bay is a very special experience? Many wine tasting experiences are pretty similar — nice grounds/gardens, some background on the winery, tanks and barrels and bottles, and of course tasting several wines. In the case of Cloudy Bay, many of us have undoubtedly tasted their wine, and anyone can do so in most of the world (including aboard a Seabourn ship). So my question is what's extra special about visiting this winery which would make deciding on a$300/per person excursions a go versus no-go decision. (Just to be clear; I'm not critiquing/criticizing/disagreeing in any way; I'm genuinely interested, because we will make it to New Zealand one of these years!)

I think @stan01 pretty much nailed it. If you're cruising in the Caribbean, there will certainly be some men wearing a polo/gold shirt, but most will wear collared, button-down shirts (tucked or untucked "Tommy Bahama"-type). Seabourn's dress code language calls for "collared dress shirt or sweater" on Elegant Casual nights. I don't think polo/golf shirts are "dress shirts". Will you feel out of place wearing a polo shirt? You'll be in the minority, but not the only one; whether that makes you feel out of place or not is something only you can answer. 😀

Yes! It may depend on what month you're visiting Antarctica, though. We were there in late December last year, and there were landings where we were walking up icy steps cut by the crew, walking on paths in snow which was nearly knee deep in places. I'm sure there's less of that if you're going late in the season. I was glad to have poles. I'm 65 in good health and with good mobility, but the poles made me more confident/comfortable in walking on the slippery surfaces, and prevented a few falls. On Silversea, they were available to rent for a nominal amount (maybe $40?). (I'm not current on whether Seabourn offers them for rental; I'm sure someone else will jump in with current information.) For me, the small cost was easier than carrying them to and from our cruise. We own our own boots from a prior expedition cruise, so we lugged those; I was glad not to have to deal with packing poles as well!

Whatever the cost, what I don't like is that it creates the class distinctions Seabourn pretty well avoids elsewhere. There is limited space around the pool, resulting in lounge hogs, while a limited few who pay more get access to space off-limits to to everyone else. What if Seabourn started selling, for an additional fee, the ability for a limited number of passengers to reserve a window table of your choosing in the Restaurant, along with upgraded foods and wine?

I think it's somewhat of an issue, just like with restaurant workers in the US. If you know your server is being paid under $3/hour, you're more likely to tip them than if they were paid a regular (at least minimum) wage. In this case, customers might feel differently about asking for an automatic 18% gratuity to be removed from their bill if they knew this was the only pay the person serving them was receiving. Otherwise, no, we don't need to know the annual pay of anyone on board. Yes, fun fact: $25,000 in pay in 1952 is now equivalent to about $290,000. But what's that got to do with anything in this discussion? Making jokes about low-paid service workers doesn't strike me as funny.

All the beds are twin beds, pushed together will a mattress topper to make them feel like one bed. So splitting them apart into two beds is no problem; just a change of sheets and blankets.

We went to Antartica and South Georgia Island last winter on a Silversea expedition ship. It's correct that the cruise lines book their landing spots for each morning and afternoon well in advance in a central database used by all the cruise lines, which does a good job of having only one cruise ship at each landing site at a time. But the bookings are most definitely changeable and are in fact ever-changing. Our expedition leader said she switched more than half our pre-planned landing sites as weather allowed, and as our planed itinerary changed and other ships changed their plans. For instance, we made a fast passage from the Falklands to South Georgia to beat a storm, so we were day ahead of schedule for the next several days, and arrived on the Antarctic Peninsula a day earlier. (We were incredibly fortunate to have two landings every day in South Georgia and Antarctica, with none canceled due to weather.) The expedition leaders and captains spend a lot of time mapping out their Plan A, Plan B, Plan C, etc. and then revising the bookings in the database. Our expedition leader was almost giddy with delight at a few of the landing spots they were able to swoop in and grab as other ships changed their plans.

I think that glosses over that the new flights would need to be on the same airline to use the credits. It might work out — but it's also very possible that the airline doesn't fly to the new city. Or doesn't have a good connecting time, requiring an extra night's stay somewhere, or an extra connection, and two days of travel to get to the destination or home versus the originally-booked flights.

Hmmm… Multiply what amount by 5 times a day to get to "not a bad gig"? I guess the question is what one would consider to be a decent annual salary for working on a cruise ship? Let's assume someone on a ship works approximately the same number of days as a worker on land, e.g. 5 days a week x 49 weeks a year = 245 work days. But on a cruise ship, that would be working 7 days a week for 35 weeks: a contact of 18 weeks (4.5 months) of working every day, followed by 9 weeks off, 17 weeks on, 8 weeks off, or something close to that. So in those 245 working days, how much do a spa workers earn? If the nail technician does $100 treatments for 5 times a day, they get 18% of $500, or $90 per day. For 245 work days, that's $22,000 a year. For being away from home for 4-5 months at a time, working more than 100 days in a row without days off or holidays. To me, that sounds like pretty bad gig. 😉

@SLSD Sorry I wasn't clear in my earlier post. I was suggesting that if you were on a laptop/desktop instead of a phone, you could log into your Seabourn.com account in a web browser — not the Source app — to get to see (and optionally print) your full itinerary, which shows all your bookings. That's what I did earlier today; it shows me exactly what I want on a single 2-sided sheet of paper. If you want to do it in the Source app, at the bottom click on Plan, and then in the pop-up menu, click My Itinerary. Except that doesn't work for me currently; it just says "Oops, page not found." I don't know if this is one of Seabourn's temporary glitches or an ongoing one; I haven't opened the Source app since my last cruise! To do it in a browser: • Go to Seabourn.com • Click Booked Guests • Login to you account • Locate your upcoming cruise on the Upcoming Cruises page • Click "Manage My Cruise" • Click the Itinerary link, and then the Itinerary picture which shows up below That brings you to a page listing your daily itinerary showing daily arrival and departure times and anything you have booked each day. Hope that helps!

@SLSD If you can do it on a computer rather than your phone, log into your account and go to Manage My Booking. Click on Itinerary and you can just print that page, which will show your ports, excursions, dinner reservations, spa reservations. (I just did it this morning for our upcoming cruise, so I know it currently works! 🤣)