omahabob

We did a vow renewal on our 40th a few years ago. I secretly bought my wife a custom made three diamond ring representing past, present and future. Beside our hotel was a tourist gift shop with a billboard advertising $29.95 wedding sets, and I kept joking we should buy one for our ceremony. At the chapel, I got down on one knee, presented her the ring and asked her to marry me again. Her response was, "Is it real?" She thought maybe I'd snuck off for the $29.95 special.

1 hour ago, bEwAbG said:

Waxed cardboard cannot be recycled so that's just a bit of green-washing...

It's not a recycling issue. It's a plastic in the ocean issue. Waxed cardboard supposedly degrades fairly easily, without leaving harmful waste. Plastic doesn't.

15 hours ago, leaveitallbehind said:

Our most recent experience was also with plastic.  Have seen aluminum cans by Dasani a few years ago (RCCL for sure), but I think that has been discontinued.  Never seen waxed carboard.

NCL uses the cardboard cartons. Plastic and glass are prohibited for safety/environmental reasons. Wouldn’t surprise me to see Celebrity go the same way someday. We use our own insulated, refillable water bottles. Lots of places/ways to refill them onboard, and the liquids stay cooler on excursions.

10 hours ago, DaisyGoldberg said:

... they can provide other items like shower chairs/toilet seat boosters, etc. that might be helpful....

Beware the handicap seat boosters. I can tell you from personal experience, major accidents can easily occur without proper aiming technique. Thank God I don't have to use those anymore.

Give it 10 minutes. It'll be back up, then down, then up, then down.....

You'll need your seasick pills.

You're not one of those football players who talks in toddler voices on TV, are you? If you are, you're not allowed on board.

On 5/27/2024 at 8:56 PM, Dunchues said:

To each his own, and good luck to those that think door decoration is fun.

I think its plain tacky, and I'd put it on the same "amusing " level as those hilarious people who fill old toilets with plants and give them a prominent space in the front yard. I blame my parents for indoctrinating me with standards from a young age. And taste of course.

Ducks are a different matter, they're not forced on anyone and are inoffensive things whether real or plastic, they are tasty and also fun for kids of all ages.

There are standards, and there are standards. Some are low. Some are high. Every single one is open to interpretation, context, medium, location, etc., and all are subject to personal opinion. Same with taste. I hate 'modern' architecture and interior design. There's nothing modern about it. It's 70 years old, which is probably why I hate it. I was there when it went out of style. But I don't consider others tasteless or classless for liking it, and I certainly wouldn't criticize or insult them for it. That would be hypocritical, since doing so would make me the tasteless, low class person. And as long as no one is getting hurt, I never begrudge anyone having fun. Isn't that what cruising is all about?

I do like ducks though. Had a pet Mallard when I was a kid. His name was George. He left us when he decided we weren't as wild as those other ducks out on the lake. We put up an old toilet in his honor and taped a magnet to it because magnets don't stick to toilets. Just kidding (it was a sticker). 

On 5/17/2024 at 12:55 PM, Octavias said:

Not your door, not your problem. To each their own.

Maybe he's worried the property value on his cabin will go down if the neighborhood gets tacky.

I don't do them, but I don't mind them. Some are entertaining. Never understood why anyone needed them to find their cabin though. They're all numbered. I guess when they're drunk, they think can remember their magnet better than the cabin number. But, what if someone else has the same magnet, or if someone moves it? That happens too.

It was on Encore outside Juneau. He attacked one passenger and four crew members, but only the passenger and two crew members were reportedly stabbed. I'm guessing the medical clinic wasn't using trauma shears, which usually have a safety tip on the end to prevent them from stabbing.

I just pack my multi-tool and trauma shears in my suitcase. No problems yet.

I go nude on every cruise, but only the wife sees it. I'd consider going on one of these cruises, but they'd probably never have another again after seeing me.

1 hour ago, markeb said:

 

Is it a large portion of their customer base? I don't know.

I don't know either. But iOS 17 has about a 60% market share on iOS devices worldwide, so that seems to indicate a lot of people could be out of luck. But again, we obviously aren't privy to all the facts. That's why I keep saying this doesn't "seem" to make sense. And, as a long time tech geek, although I find this topic interesting, it isn't greatly related to cruising. So, since we're short on facts here, I won't continue to belabor the point.

On 4/26/2024 at 2:24 PM, gatour said:

Sure they can afford to test, but on the bean counters hat.  It is a cost center so a possibility for an expense reduction which increases net revenue....

Alienating a large portion of your customer base does not increase net revenue. Quite the contrary. I lost count of the number of times I did version testing of software upgrades. It usually took a few seconds at most. Whatever their reasoning, and I freely admit they may have reasons that are not glaringly obvious here, it just seems counterproductive to alienate a large portion of your customer base. 

Come Sail With Celebrity! Unless You Don't Have the Latest iPhone!

The Bird is the word. You shouldn't have any problems.

And I just noticed the chart only depicts iOS 17.2, not 17.3 or 17.4. I used the chart. That's probably why our numbers don't match. Mea culpa. Nevertheless, it still seems to make no sense to deliberately exclude a large number of your customers when there's no reason to. The only possible reason I could see is if using a new feature of 17 required them to delete 16 functionality. But that doesn't seem to make much sense either. I've seen no other iOS upgrade that requires anything like that.

https://gs.statcounter.com/ios-version-market-share/

3 hours ago, NutsAboutGolf said:

It’s the same with RCI, requires iOS 17.  They simply don’t want to spend the money to support iOS 16 or older.

 

This is the part that gets me. They already supported iOS 16, so there was no expenditure necessary to support it. They spent money to exclude it. I can see it if it was a really old OS that gets very little use among customers, but it isn't. More people use 16 than use 17, so that simply isn't the case.

On 4/19/2024 at 7:52 PM, PinkSandGirl said:

Captain Kate said the airport runway is only 400m long!

 

The world's shortest commercial runway.

On 4/20/2024 at 9:19 AM, countess5 said:

This reminds me of landing on St Barts, they go between two mountains and then cut the engines so the plane glides down onto a very short runway with a beach at the end of it. Very Cool!

St. Barts is actually considered very safe by pilots, unless the wind is bad. The descent profile isn't much different from any other airport. It's just the proximity of terrain that makes many people think it's hairy. That, plus the fact that many folks visiting there have never flown in a small plane before, and that alone scares some of them.

On 4/6/2024 at 7:38 AM, graphicguy said:

I take pics of the name tags to fill in their names when I fill out "Hero Cards" to award them for great service.

I take pictures of my left index finger. Doesn't help with memory or Hero cards, but I'm getting pretty good at it.

On 4/16/2024 at 2:40 PM, psuboater said:

Your next cruise, you should tell people "DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM? I AM SO IMPORTANT I HAVE PEOPLE PRETENDING TO BE ME ON CRUISE CRITIC" 😄

That's why I carry the American Express card.

That's the part that doesn't make sense to me. Moving forward is a good thing. But deliberately excluding a large amount of customers seems foolhardy.

4 hours ago, DaKahuna said:

 

 For a normal everyday email and web browsing user I agree.  However, there are some of us that work/worked in the IT industry and may have unique requirements.  I have active computers running Windows, Linux, and Mac OS.  Three laptops, two desktops, and two tablets.  

 

 Yes, I just retired and will be eliminating some of those buy in the mean time, I find uses for each one in my daily life. 

 

I worked IT almost exclusively in the Windows world, and the same still applied. A desktop will do things a laptop cannot do, and a laptop can go places a desktop can't, so you need both. Now that I'm retired, the laptop has been replaced by tablets, but each still has it's own place, and it's own unique capabilities.

57 minutes ago, Jeremiah1212 said:

...the Royal Caribbean suite product varies significantly from ship to ship and class to class...

That's true of NCL Haven too, as well as the presence of kids. The season and itinerary affects that as well.

I don't speak from extensive personal experience, but based on posts here, it seems all lines are experiencing a reduction in service and the 'luxury experience'. I would imagine that would make a comparison at least somewhat more difficult unless you've sailed all of them very recently. Obviously price would be an exception to that.

1 hour ago, Nikita4 said:

....This will be our first and last NCL cruise, also the pax are special, many drunken elderly people on the ship. We never see things like this on a cruise.

Our  teen son was shoked after the first night after a old lady invited him to come with her in her cabin….

Yeah, problems like these never happen on other cruise lines. LOL! I wish I had a dollar for every time someone made the 'never again' statement here, for all cruise lines. I could afford to cruise whenever I wanted. All cruise lines/ships/itineraries have such problems. Just because this is the first time you personally experienced it in no way means it's limited to NCL. You've been a member here long enough that you should know that very well by now.

2 hours ago, DaKahuna said:

 

  Really?  i thought the issue was that the phone hardware on the old phones can no longer support the requirements of the operating system and application...

 

No, the age of the phone doesn't matter, other than the fact that older phones often won't run a new OS. The new app only works on iOS 17, even though it worked fine on the older versions before, so it's the app supporting the OS version that's an issue. As of last month, iOS 17.2 has a 4.03% share of global market usage (all OSs). iOS 16.6 has a 5.06% market share. So by developing an app that only woks on iOS 17, Celebrity has just eliminated more potential Apple users from it's customer base than it could cater to by supporting only the newest version. That's not a smart decision.