BazingAu

Looking forward to this live journal! We board in a few weeks!

Midnight in time zone of departure port. For example, we have a cruise upcoming in Barcelona. It opened at 6 pm EDT the day prior, which was midnight in Barcelona.

@JayBird7 Someone else posted about a cruisetour cancellation on this forum. You should search for it, but it sounds like only the land portion was cancelled due to a lack of local vendors available. Did they offer you a partial refund so you can do the land portion on your own? The cruise is still going, so you really don't have to scrap your vacation altogether if you can be flexible about the land portion. Good luck!

I love seeing vloggers! I have never seen them to be rude or disruptive. Do they sometimes take 30 seconds longer to do something? Sure, sometimes. But who cares? I find them much better than line cutters, chair hogs, show talkers, and whatever other annoying traveler/guest/passenger. I consume a lot of content when researching for cruises. Maybe all the people commenting negatively here has cruised so much that nothing is new to them so there's no value in additional information? However, for people starting to get into cruising or switching lines, I find the content on YouTube and Instagram to be invaluable. A lot of the vloggers give us a perspective that we can't find in commissioned marketing materials. It's literally the live blogs or cruise reviews on Cruise Critic, but shown in video format. They're great when you have 20-30 minutes of downtime and don't want to scroll on a computer screen all day. In fact @Chris Wong was the vlogger that got us to try out Royal Caribbean and now Celebrity. (We were a Princess family prior.)

Ship: Celebrity Reflection Length of Cruise: 9 Nights Cruise Sail Date: June 1, 2023 Date email offer received: 03/24/2023 Captain’s Club Tier [“PREVIEW” = first Celebrity Cruise]: Classic Booked through Celebrity Direct OR via TA: TA Current Cabin: Concierge Bid? Yes/No: No General Comments (offer details, etc.) Here are the minimum bids. These seem insane to me. Who would bid at these prices when you can buy the room for similar prices (some are actually MORE money using MoveUp when you add the original prices we paid per person) and get the tier points too? Royal Suite From $4,500 USD pp Signature Suite From $3,500 USD pp Celebrity Suite From $2,500 USD pp AquaClass Sky Suite From $1,500 USD pp Sunset Sky Suite From $1,500 USD pp Sky Suite From $1,500 USD pp

Is the French Onion on Celebrity the same as the one on Royal Caribbean? That one was quite good, except once where it was like someone tossed in a salt shaker. Maybe this will be an unpopular opinion in this thread, but I do prefer the mushroom soup though. If that was offered every night, I would get that instead.

No, from prior posts, that's only included because Aqua requires the "All Included" package at the time of booking. If you booked "Cruise Only" or similar package it doesn't change to "All Included" when you get upgraded.

That's not how Celebrity views it. If that's the case, then you can ask to switch to any Veranda as the booking is for a Veranda Guarantee. What actually happens is that they assign the passenger to a V3 or 2D (or whatever subcategory it is) and then the passenger cannot get out of that subcategory. A GTY booking is for whatever subcategory Celebrity puts them in.

Your cruise is next year? Everything might change from now until then. When I booked my 2023 cruise in 2022, everything was still included for free room services. Heck, I would even get an enhanced room service breakfast menu for booking concierge. Fast forward to now, and that's all gone except continental breakfast. Who knows what the policy will be in 2024?

@heatherkh Yep, the GTY cabins are super misleading. They don't tell you that "Veranda" isn't a category. It's the subcategories within the "Veranda" category that they consider a true "category". If you use a live person TA, they should have absolutely told you that, especially as a first time cruiser. If your TA isn't familiar with cruises, then you should switch to someone else (I believe you can change TAs once within 30 days of initial booking, but I'm not sure if that's from TA to TA or only from Celebrity to TA.) Is it too late to cancel and start over? I assume you already paid a nonrefundable deposit though. Maybe you can ask if you can switch to a better cabin and pay the price difference without losing your deposit?

@JustCruzin77 yes! It's so glitchy! But I think that's the other guy's feet. When I walked over there, I was actually looking through the inside of his face! But that's the towel to the upper part of the screen through his body. He's been there for 15 mins. He either thinks it's funny so no one can get the towel or he's stuck and don't know what to do.

I'm trying to get the stupid towel today and someone is STANDING on it. So I cannot click it! I just clicks on the other person!!

No servers available for the past hour. What are they trying to accomplish with this? The Wonderverse is a bigger bag of doodoo than the Metaverse.

While I fault Celebrity for many other things (mostly the great cost-cutting of 2023), I don't think viewing them from spring break/St. Patrick's Day lens is a fair assessment of "who" the line attracts. The spring break crowd is completely different than any other crowd all year, even factoring in summer or New Year crowds as you tend to get more families to balance it out. I personally never travel to anywhere warm during spring break (i.e. beaches, cruises, etc.) just because I don't like hanging around that crowd on my holidays - been there and done that decades ago! Let them have their fun, and you can travel elsewhere during that season. They are likely *not* going on Alaskan or Northern route cruises, so go north instead of south. You can go south any other time of year and avoid the spring break crowd.

Hi. A couple of Celebrity Excursions that we booked have gone down in price slightly (about $6-12/pp), but they are also sold out for the times we booked. The times remaining aren't ideal for us. If we cancelled to rebook, does our cancelled spots show back up on the options to book on the website? Also, we booked one of these excursions with OBC. I know there's usually a delay with credit cards, but does the OBC come back right away? Or is there a wait for that to show up? Thanks for the insight! (I did a search and didn't see anything directly on point.)

Absolutely will no longer book. If you bother to read, most people (myself included) are annoyed because we booked this last year for a 2023 cruise before all the changes were decided and it's now past final deposit.

Thank you! We booked this exact cabin for our upcoming cruise! @dv70 Any pros or cons about this specific cabin? Is that a fog horn in the balcony?? Yikes. (Was under a fog horn on a RC cruise in September. Did not get any sleep one night when it went off for hours at 3 am.)

You can find youtube videos of people filling the bag, but it's like 10 pieces of regular knit clothing or 5 pieces of thicker clothing (like a sweatshirt or jeans). It's not that big and sometimes the paper bag is prone to ripping if you stuff it too full - you might need to pre-compress/fold/roll your clothing to have it fit.

There's only 1 menu since 2023. They removed the one with filet/lobster.

Not seeing prime rib on the MDR menu for any day for Reflection in June.

Nooooooo... Literally every single reason why I booked concierge is getting taken away...

I think your best is to get on board early and speak with the Maître D. TBH, I don't think they will have any issues accommodating your group on board in any of the specialty restaurants. Or maybe request the on-board Maitre D contact you via email directly since the events group can't figure it out? (The events group seems very ineffective.)

The Chops on Oasis of the Seas looks like it has several large round tables on one side? Surely, they could fit 3-4 tables there for OP's group?

@dleahy4444 I'm curious who you spoke with? Can they accommodate your group in another restaurant? TBH, 27 people does not seem like a very large group, especially for an Oasis class ship.

Like many posting here, the enhanced breakfast was one of the biggest reasons we booked Concierge for our upcoming cruise. Sigh.