MacMadame

Those premium cake slices remind me of the Motherlode cake from Claim Jumpers.

I have to say, I'm glad the blue bags are gone. Just what I need... another free bag! LOL (Seriously, I have *so many* of them as I seem to do a lot of things that result in a free bag.) But for the rest, I do think people who booked the $50/day Plus should get everything they had at booking. So that would include the 2 casual dining options that we $60/day people get but not the other stuff that wasn't free at the time.

Isn't email great? Remember the days when everything had to be snail-mailed? I love technology! Sometimes, anyway. 😉

I know. Makes me feel young!

On our upcoming cruise, we booked one non-Princess tour where the return time was 3 hours before the ship sailed. I figured, if we had to, we could walk back to the ship in that timeframe. 😉 For the others, the excursions were much farther away and much longer. To me, it makes sense to book with Princess if you have little leeway for things going wrong. Plus one of them combined two excursions into one and doing that with private tour operators was not possible in the time allotted. We still have one stop where we haven't booked anything. We are waiting to see what the Princess options are. (For some reason, they aren't available yet.) There is a private tour we may do that we're pretty sure Princess won't have but, again, the tour is over hours before the ship leaves. Hopefully, if we book that one, we won't be sorry. 😄

Wasn't that in the Before Times though? (Going by your signature. 😉 )

I used to work for a contract shop (never again) and they would wait until the last minute to tell the client we were going to slip a deadline. Do we know for sure who is developing the new app?

I heard it's been moved to February (for a non-joke answer)

42 To be fair, some guys have their backs to us or have their bodies mostly hidden. 😉 I thought it was a joke! 😄

They use contractors. That explains everything.

Haha. Someone is going on them. Millionaires? 😄

It's just one example. There are also those luxury cruises that are out of reach for a lot of younger people, especially ones with families. Different strokes and all.

Boomers have between 10 and 30 years of possible cruising left. Remember the youngest Boomers were born in 1964 and aren't even 60 yet. In a business that is traded on the stock market, short term is next quarter. 😄 Or maybe next year at most. Middle term is about 5 years and long term is 10. I've never worked for a publicly traded company that had plans beyond 10 years and most didn't have them past 5 years. Not real plans anyway. Stuff changes too fast for that. Exactly. It's always been true and it's not this dire thing right now where the cruise industry is going to fall off a cliff in a few years. Or even a decade. Right now business is booming and not all from older people. There are tons of lines each with their own flavor and Carnival owns a hefty chunk of them (9 in total last time I checked). Maybe their 5-year plan includes attracting a younger crowd to Princess or maybe they don't and that will be the plan for one of their other lines. Btw, Virgin Voyages caters to a younger crowd and they are an adult-only ship. So it's not all about attracting families with kids to your line. There is more than one way to filet a fish. It's both. Because gutting it or removing it would be political suicide. 😄 Especially when studies show that just removing the cap on earnings like they did with Medicare would be enough to make it 100% solvent. Even though this impacts me negatively now (I reach the cap each year before the end of the year), I am all for that.

I saw on the news that they set up a lounge for people who came early to hang out, if they didn't want to go touristing to fill the time.

Are they going to lower the cover charge to take the 17% gratuity out? 😉 Virgin Voyages and MSC will honor your Princess loyalty. If you want to branch out.

We used to always buy extra-large eggs. But these days, large is all they have from our delivery service so we get those. Which is good because I've been doing a lot of baking lately.

Speaking as someone on the tail of the Baby Boomers, I haven't even retired yet, let alone died. Stop trying to kill me off (in marketing)!!! Seriously, I've been hearing about how it's not worth it to market to me for decades. It's annoying. 😄

My understanding is that this line as formed from the Life at Sea people who quit over the "ship is/is not seaworthy" controversy. Not sure I'd give them money until they had at least a year of sailing.

There is a spreadsheet linked in the first post in the thread.

They should have left him like they do to the passengers. 😉 We have one stop on our upcoming cruise that has several excursions I wanted to do. Luckily, Prince had an excursion that combined them! It's one reason I went with their excursion instead of the cheaper versions from non-Princess providers. That may be why they got a refund too.

Because no response usually means no one is there? That said, this is pretty sketchy. I would follow up with GS to make sure they did something and you think whatever they did is acceptable.

I kind of figured. 😄 My parents have gone there at least once, maybe twice, but they did a very expensive National Geographic cruise. I was thinking about selling or transferring. I didn't want to seem like a scam though. I didn't think of asking people I know. Hopefully, I'll get a new job ASAP and it will all be moot because I'll be going on our cruise.

Panama only requires Yellow Fever vaccinations if you are coming from Brazil. (I looked it up as soon as I booked the Panama Canal cruise.)

How do you get that?

Good to know!