jeff74

I’m having a hard time getting a straight answer from Princess of what can be purchased pre cruise using the gift cards. I’ve been told 4 different answers ranging from “everything but specialty dinners” to “only the cruise fare”. I know that it’s not like Holland America where I can apply them to purchases straight from the website but I hoped that I could instead call Princess to have them manually apply them.

He is an authorized user. Good luck!

Thanks for the heads up! I had already used this offer for my amex and my wife's the other month when we booked our 2025 New England cruise but the offer didn't show up on my 14 year old's amex. After reading the updates yesterday I had him check again and there it was :). We used it to pay down another $1k. Normally I am not in any hurry to pay the balance owed until the last minute because there's no reason to give anyone an interest free loan but for 30% off that changes things. Since our cruise isn't for another 19 months it's quite possible that we'll be able to see this offer come around next year to further pay off the balance.

I’m guessing there were at least 100 kids on the Christmas cruise last year. It’s true that there are very few kid amenities but these days a lot of kids are just on their laptops playing online or locally networked games against each other.

We were on the Volendam last year for Christmas and thought that it was fun being on the ship during that time. We didn't have any issues with the number of kids being on the ship but we're biased having a son who was 13 over the holidays. The only time we really noticed the magnitude of kids was at the "Meet Santa" event during Christmas which of course should have been expected.

@frogfish12, the charter flight is included for my wife and I but not our son. The cruise we are on is from Tromso to Longyearbyen. I know there is the option to not take the charter flight but I’m not sure what that involves. I hear you about Germany and that is partially why we are flying into Amsterdam.

I will say that one huge plus for Hapag with us having a kid in tow is the added cost was just 1,600 EUR including the charter flight to bring him along as a 12-15 year old. 11 year old kids and younger only have to pay the charter flight cost which was 700 EUR for our particular flight. We were limited to choosing either the of the two types of suites which bumped up the cost but it's still cheaper than the alternative of getting 2 separate rooms. Compared to the Galapagos cruise on the Celebrity Flora that we got back from earlier this month where we had to get a 2nd cabin with zero single supplement discount it feels like a great deal. A piece of advice that I'd give anyone stateside that is booking on Hapag is to request to pay in euros. At least at the time when I booked, the conversion rate to USD that the cruise line was using was 1.2 USD per EUR which was at the time and still is a fair amount over the spot rate. Going this route will end up costing us about $2600 less and I've bought a EUR/USD ETF to hedge FX risk for my remaining amount that is due next year. If you don't want to go through the trouble of hedging you can always "let it ride" and go ahead and pay the balance early if the fx rate starts moving adversely.

@frogfish12, I was told that it was more like 6 months ahead of time. Even this is less than ideal but I went ahead and booked flights that bookend the cruise by a day or two on each end in Amsterdam as a placeholder. I can decide at a later date to either keep the flight and tour around the city we fly into before taking a train to the Chester l charter flight city or rebook to fly into the city where the charter flight is.

@frogfish12, it might be worth even trying to get a hold of Gary as well.

@frogfish12, we are booked on the inspiration since we don’t speak German at all. I thought that all the lectures would be in English but I could be mistaken. Hopefully any limitations on excursions would just be by timeframe at worst and not scope. I just assumed that since Hapag is trying to make a push into broader markets that the not understanding German won’t be too much of a hassle on their bilingual cruise. This one blogger named Gary Bembridge is currently on the inspiration so ideally he will post some good info on this topic.

@frogfish12, yes we are booked for next summer😀.

We are booked for June/July 2024 on Hapag-Lloyd for a 10 day Svalbard cruise. I'm only hazarding a guess but I think that maybe small ships wouldn't work as well up there since they need to have some ability to break the ice. We considered Hurtigruten and Silversea but decided to roll the dice on Hapag-Lloyd despite not being able to find much at all in the way of reviews for their arctic sailings.

Thanks! I’ll definitely post a review after the cruise. It feels forever away at this point.

I can’t help but think about that one Seinfeld episode with all this talk about the Drake.