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Maybe Princess is trying out new start/end ports for the Sun? I noticed that there are several Med cruises that start/end in Istanbul.

I personally don't bid, but I manage my parents bids... All communication up to winning an upgrade will come from PlusGrade, the third party operating the bidding system. Nothing will appear in your Cruise Personalizer until you have won, at which point your booking will show the new category and new cabin assigned. You can access the PlusGrade site with your bids at anytime in the process; the site will show you category bids that have been declined and allows you to modify bids for bids that you have placed and are still in the running. When you win an upgrade bid, you will be e-mailed an Upgrade Notification from Princess. Sometimes you will receive an e-mail from PlusGrade notifying you that your bid(s) have been declined, other times not. It has been reported on this board that sometimes PlusGrade will send a counter offer for slightly more on a higher category that will guarantee an upgrade to a higher category. Not sure if Australians receive Booking Confirmation e-mails from Princess, but if you do, a new Booking Confirmation will be e-mailed and the upgrade from category x to y will be noted in the comments section.

Nope. Ask anyone who lives in a tropical climate. They're always there; the question is do they come out when you're looking? I had roaches pop out when I was staying at the Sheraton Waikiki and at Disney's Boardwalk Hotel. If they rear, kill it, take a picture, show the picture to the front desk, and ask for a discount on the room. If you feel like it ask to be moved. The tropics harbors all sorts of pests.

I've stayed at almost all of the properties listed and they are fine. I've always gone with the one that had the most reasonable rate. It's just one night after all. None of the Port Everglades hotels are new. They are a decade old or older. TBH, the Holiday Inn Express was my favorite for the price. The Marriott Harbor Beach Resort and Spa, which is on the beach, is newly renovated and very clean. It's also very expensive. We went to a wedding held at one of their ballrooms and stayed a few nights before our cruise. A cab to Celebrity's terminal was $15, probably cheaper to Princess' Terminal 2. It's the tropics so if there are roaches, don't be surprised; nothing a shoe or a slipper can't kill.

We just got back from a land trip to Turkey, including Cappadocia. Turkish folks are friendly. As with most tourist spots, the locals want your money and can be aggressive; price haggling is expected. We were on the Enchanted last November and stopped in Kusadasi, no problems at all. The place we felt most uncomfortable was the carpet shop that our Princess excursion ended at. We took off halfway through the "presentation." Stuff happens, not just in Turkey. TBH, I felt more unsafe in Nassau, Bahamas, and Jamaica.

If one had a lobster, one could boil it and serve it with drawn butter. To put a little more effort, one could make lobster rolls. To put in extra ordinary effort and add to the cost, one could make lobster thermidor. When you're serving hundreds of people as is the MDR on a cruise ship on formal night, boiled lobster it is. When serving a few people, the chef can make lobster thermidor, which often makes an appearance on the Reserve Collection Menu. Auguste Escoffier's (the renowned French chef) basic principle of adding on or tweaking recipes to suit the audience. You can take flour and butter and cook it in a pot...if you add chicken stock, it's a veloute...if you add cream (which is more expensive than stock presuming you're using the carcasses of the deboned meat already in use), you get a bechamel...if you add a mirepoix, tomatoes, and veal stock (all adding to cost), you get a espagnole. Depending on the crowd and budget will dictate what you use.

Even if you did nothing to check in on the App, you can still be checked in by the port agents and allowed to board so long as you can produce valid ID, whether that be a passport or DL/birth certificate combo. Princess by default will create a Medallion for port pick up if you didn’t place an order through the App.

Once an order is placed, OceanNow has a status bar that shows the progress of the order. It ranges from Order Received, Preparing, to Delivered. Many times the order will show Delivered despite you being empty handed. Sometimes it shows up shortly after; many times it doesn’t show up at all.

I honestly don’t think that there will be any further delays with the Star. Princess has delayed the launch by 3 months and scrapped the summer cruises to the Med. There will be 2 inaugural Med cruises (a 10 and a 7 day) and a Transatlantic before the Caribbean season starts. Transatlantics can be hard to fill because of the few ports and many sea days. If Princess delays the launch even more, they might have to sail the repositioning TA empty or at very low capacity because of the above mentioned and the high prices of last minute flights. Princess doesn’t really cruise the Med in the Winter, so I don’t see them keeping the ship in Europe. What I would be worried about is the teething troubles that come with a new ship that has just launched. If you can live with that, then by all means, book the Star.

EZCheck is a service where you disembark the ship without your checked luggage and they appear at your destination airport’s baggage carousel. A company is contracted to take them to FLL drop them off at the appropriate airline.

If what you're seeing on your Travel Summary reads as the screenshot below, it means that there was a promotion at the time you booked that allowed you to secure a location upgrade at no cost. For example, you could have booked and chosen a cabin in Category BB at the Category BE fare. The only free upgrade promotions at the time of booking I've seen from Princess since the restart are location upgrades. You should confirm that your booking is marked "no upgrades" so that there is a higher chance that you won't get an unwanted upgrade moving you away from your group. As you are aware and is stated in your Travel Summary, you can be moved at Princess' discretion and with no compensation.

It's in your Travel Summary as stated above in the Flights section.

Right, but are they actually being taken apart and recycled? The Medallion is fused together unlike other electronics which are easy to breakdown into individual components.

Not reusable because the ship and embarkation date are engraved on the Medallion. Exception is B#B cruises, where you are expected to use the same Medallion for all segments; if the Medallion battery dies, and you are given a new one, the embarkation date of the first segment is still the date printed on the replacement Medallion. Once you are done with all segments, the Medallion is theoretically garbage. Personally, don't like a lot of clutter so I toss mine at the end of each cruise. Princess can give their spiel about how much they care for the environment but the Medallions aren't recyclable because of the battery. Trying to dissect one to remove the battery can be quite dangerous as both halves are fused together and it can't be easily taken apart. You're likely to cut yourself using something to pry the halves apart.

I don't think you have a full understanding of EZAir. EZAir doesn't guarantee the lowest price. Sometimes they do have the lowest, other times not. No where in EZAir's terms does it say that they will match or undercut direct to airline fares. There are piece of mind protections that come along with booking EZAir. Aside from the travel assistance in the event of flight or cruise snafus, EZAir allows for full cancellation 45 days prior to the date of the first flight segment with no penalty if booking Flexible Fares. In your case, had you booked with the Air Canada directly from the get go instead of EZAir, you would NOT have been able to avail of the penalty free cancelation and you would have been stuck paying the higher fare because canceling would have incurred more penalties than it was worth. No airline will give the difference in fare in the event of a fare decrease when booking direct; maybe if you booked a refundable fare, but as you have said you are after the lowest fare, you wouldn't have opted for a refundable fare to begin with because those fares are always higher. You still got a benefit by booking with EZAir because you were able to avail of the penalty free cancelation period of 45 days, even though in the end they couldn't provide you with the lowest price, provided that you cancel and book with directly with Air Canada. In your case, the best thing to do is to request for cancellation of EZAir. You can do it yourself through the Cruise Personalizer under the Flights tab. The system will generate the penalties that you owe (which in your case should be none) and deduct that refund amount before you proceed with the cancelation. Your booking balance will reflect a negative balance, meaning Princess owes you a refund. Then you will have to call your TA or Princess, depending on the method you booked the cruise, and have them initiate a refund to the method you paid for your cruise. Once you see the negative amount on your Princess booking balance in the amount of the EZAir that you paid, you are in the clear. It's just a matter of someone triggering the refund back to your card from Princess' accounting department, which could take a few days, and it has to be you to tell them to initiate the refund via a rep; there is no one on Princess' end actively checking bookings for owed refunds. You can then book your air directly with Air Canada.

Princess' demographic trends towards retired. Said demographic doesn't have to work. As some one who does work while cruising, speed isn't everything. Latency is a problem with contributes to there being lag and the circle of death pops up when trying to get my work apps to load. ALL cruise line Internet have high ping metrics onboard when speed tests are conducted.

Again, business's have to operate based on trends and statistics. Those in the thousands of days aren't going anywhere. I can say the same of the those who are part of RC's Crown & Anchor Society and are at the Pinnacle Club level. I'm in your boat. I been invited to MTG luncheons a few times and am only the the hundreds. The only reason I got into the hundreds was because I started young when I didn't have a choice when my grandparents took me on cruises with them. Went once, and never again--not because of the food but because of the crowd. I'm part of a younger generation that isn't a majority on Princess, and my generation realizes that loyalty means nothing. Anyone can basically buy their way up a loyalty program. Most travel loyalty programs award points based on the amount. Airlines, for example, now award points based on the price paid rather than actual miles flown. Princess is going this way with the loyalty accelerator. If you spend more on Plus/Premier fares, you get more days even though you didn't actually sail them. As has been mentioned before, the regular Captain's Circle Party most times is so swamped with people, that attaining Platinum or Elite doesn't really mean anything, except that it changes the color of your cruise card/Medallion.

Right, but we're talking about the "Most Travelled." If these people wanted to switch allegiances, they would have done so a long time ago. They have multiple hundred or thousands of days with Princess. They are going anywhere unless, like I said, illness or mortality gets the best of them. Given the sheer number of days alone, many times reaching into the thousands, Princess has this base wrapped around their fingers. This group is worried about losing their mini bars and how the loyalty accelerator will dilute their status. As the saying goes, "it's hard to teach old dogs new tricks."

They have to. They don't have any other choice. It's all about maximizing the budget and giving bang for the passengers' buck. At best, cruise ship food can be compared to hotel/banquet food on land.

The cruise line didn't pre order special provisions for the MTG luncheon. The galley uses the provisions that have been loaded on the ship. According to a F&B Manage I spoke to, they really can't order what they want. Their options for provisions are preloaded into a system and they just check boxes and input quantities. They might "borrow" lobster tails or langostinos from The Catch or Crown Grill, but that's about it. As for Prime beef, I really doubt it. The beef served onboard has a unique flavor, not in a a good way (as in it doesn't taste like beef I've tasted on land), which has made be avoid steaks on Princess in general. They chef might tweak a recipe to make it seem different, but the basic recipe is already in the ship's recipe repertoire. As a restaurant partner, we can take more care in prepping a meal for a smaller crowd and prepare items a la minute as compared to cooking for a large crowd where we have no choice but to cook in large batches and leave them in hotel pans on steam tables. The same can be applied to ships. People can rave about cruise ship food all they want but there's a reason why no cruise line has ever received an award from a gastronomical body.

The question corporate is thinking of is, will replacing MTG luncheons with MTG cocktail parties deter the most traveled from cruising with Princess? Given that they've had they're loyalty for years, decades, the answer is no. It's only illness or mortality that will end their loyalty with Princess. Might as well save the crew resources so they can divert it to the new unlimited specialty dining for those with Premier fares and selling Princess Promotions packages, which actually generate revenue for the company.

I try and mitigate risk when I travel. I can't control what the airline does to my luggage once it leaves my hands at check-in, but if I'm the one checking it in at the airport counter, I know that it's tagged to the correct destination because I watch the agent affixing the tag onto my suitcase or I'm the one to do it myself. There was one time in Hong Kong that Cathay Pacific agents were sharing a luggage tag printer. I caught the agent affixing a tag that read SGN (Saigon, Vietnam) instead of SFO (San Francisco), which was my destination. You better believe I stopped the agent in her tracks.

Not every one has the same good experience. There was a complaint a few weeks ago on Princess' X page regarding Port Valet in Seattle where some employee dropped the ball and affixed someone's baggage tag to someone else's suitcase. I blocked out the full names in the photo, but the names on the official airline tags do not match. Glad the person who received the luggage was honest and returned the piece of luggage to the airline so it could be sent to the rightful owner. Personally, I won't let anyone check in my luggage except for me. Heck I get nervous leaving my luggage to the porters. I always do self walk off. Not sure what happened to the questions from the 90s by the airline check in agents which went something along the lines of, "has your luggage been in you possession at all times?"

Princess is very transparent with their ability to make cabin changes at their discretion without having to provide for any compensation. It's among one of the first statements made in the Travel Summary. I know many on here have their cabin preferences. As someone who always books guarantee, the way I look at it is I can never be disappointed because I never chose my cabin number to begin with. You can choose your cabin all you want, but if you have bad neighbors that slam doors, slam drawers, turn up the volume of the TV too loud, etc., choosing your cabin isn't really going to help you.

First and foremost, the ship's onboard currency will be USD. (It's safe to surmise the that ship's onboard currency will not be AUD because the Sun Princess will not be cruising ex Australia.) It's possible, but you will have to pay in USD. No other currency will be accepted as tender for your onboard folio. There have been conflicting stories on this board about Guest Service's ability to perform FOREX transactions and even if they could, I'd imagine the rate woudn't be that great. It would be best to bring along USD. Because the onboard currency is the USD, the charges will be charged in USD. It's up to your bank to do the conversion once the charges are processed on their end. I don't recommend using debit cards as the card on file for you folio. There's a pre-authorization hold that's put on your card every day to make sure that it's still active and funds available. If the account doesn't have the proper balance, you could be cut off. From, your profile, it looks like you're from Wales. Our ex-pat friends that live in London have told us that there's only a few credit cards that have no foreign transaction fees in the UK. Maybe look into opening one of those instead if opting to use plastic instead of paper? Otherwise, a cash tab in USD might be the better way to go, instead of a debit card.