donaldsc

I go against the glow w regard to wheels. The four wheel cases are only good if you are on completely smooth surfaces. Anything irregular, carpeted surfaces or if you have to pull the suitcase over an edge and the 4 wheel cases w tiny wheels fo not work. Give me a suitcase with big wheels any day. Obviously suitcase opinions vary. DON

We did an AK cruise this year that started on late April. We had no problem w Glacier Bay. Note to the OP - is your April cruise date a firm date and why did you pick that date? DON

How old are the children. That info might be helpful. Also have you tried a Google search? DON

If you are certain that this will be one-and-done and most one-and-dones end up being one-of-many remember that the until they finish the bridge construction inside Denali you will not be able to go very far into the park. DON

My next cruise will be my 1st Atlas Cruise and I certainly hope that once we get onto the ship it meets our expectations since the cruise login has been awful. Very few cruise companies have a user friendly booking site but the Atlas site is more difficult to use, is less organized and less passenger friendly than any I have ever used. Their WEB site designer probably flunked out of coding school and almost certainly did not pass their database design classes. All databases have a field that lets you find a specific record. For a cruise company this would normally be the booking number which is unique to all the people in the booking group. If you enter the booking number into the record all of the data in this record for all the people in the group should be available. If you are entering passenger data into your record typing the booking number should let you enter or modify every passenger in your group with the same booking number. Every other cruise ship WEB site does it this way EXCEPT for Atlas. Atlas does things differently. They assign a booking number that applies to EVERY passenger in the group and then a different loyalty number to EACH of the passengers in the group. Here is the way it works in practice. I had to enter then passenger data for my wife and I. I logged into Atlas to create my cruise account and had to create a password and username for the account which is normal. As part of this process I also had to enter my personal loyalty number. However and this is the kicker because the account included MY loyalty number this meant that anything I entered applied ONLY to me and not also to my wife. Now this is where the Atlas stupidity starts. Unless I missed something it was impossible to for me to enter any of my wife's data into this record at this point. I had to set up a completely new account with a new user name, password and loyalty # for my wife. Two passengers; 2 accounts; 2 passwords; 2 loyalty numbers. Imagine if a family of 5 or 6 people were traveling with the same booking # - 6 people; 6 accounts; 6 passwords, etc. To make it worse unless I missed something I couldn't even do this on my computer since when I opened the the Atlas App it automatically went to my account and I could not figure out how I could tell it that I wanted to set up a new account for my wife. I had to do it on her computer. Not surprisingly the common data that I put into my account did not carry over to her account. Before I set up her separate account I called Atlas customer service. The person who answered understood the issue and asked for my wife's passport data and said that I did indeed have to set up 2 accounts but she would take care of it. She asked for my wife's passport data and said that the rest of our common data would be imported from my account. Five days later I get an e-mail for Atlas saying the my account was OK but I hadn't created my wife's account yet. This idiocy has not occurred with any other cruise line I have sailed on. They have you enter all of your passengers into the cruise account as long s have the same booking number. Can you imagine what is going to happen when I try to book excursions on the Atlas cruise, I will have to do each reservation twice. What about dinner reservations - do you think that they will assign us to the same table? Sorry for this ranting and if I just missed something that definitely not obvious to me I apologize to Atlas. However this is one hell of a way to make a good impression on avery experienced but new Atlas passenger. DON

This is the best and most useful response of any that you have gotten so far. !! DON

Look at the deck plan. There does not appear to be any self service laundry. DON

This does not answer the OP's question but we took the train Bergen to Oslo during the winter when there was lots of snow on the ground. I am not a train person but this one was absolutely great. I can see why it is considered one of the great train rides in the world. You will enjoy it. DON

Please provide a reference on this. It seems so unlikely that this is true that I did an extensive internet search on it and I could not find any reference to this way of controlling a bear. DON

You can use Google maps to find the answer to that questions. To the person who asked "Would it be better/safer to take a taxi or is it okay to walk if we are careful?" - Bergen is a very safe city. DON

Most of the people wear smart casual on formal night. However some but not all of the people who wear normally their baseball caps backward in the MDR turn them forward on formal night. DON

+1. We did a cruise that went to just the Falklands for 3 days and S Georgia for 8 days. Not sure of the current impact of avian flu but imagine being on a beach in S Georgia with 300,000 nesting pairs of penguins on just one of the many beaches we stopped at, many many fur seals and a ton (literally and figuratively) of elephant seals. It was far and above the most wonderful trip I have ever taken. DON

Just make sure that you know the difference between black bears and brown bears and what to do if you are attacked by one of them. The responses are different. As others have told you make lots of noise while you are hiking. If you accidentally get between a mother and her cubs all bets are off. If you need more info check out this site - https://www.adfg.alaska.gov/index.cfm?adfg=livingwithbears.bearcountry DON

Try Google Maps or contact them using the address on their WEB site. DON

Of course it is. You just will have to go outside on a deck to sit outside and watch the world go by instead of doing it in your own room.

If I remember correctly we did that tour w the grandkids off one of the Princess ships. We and they enjoyed it. You get to go into the mine which was different from most of the gold tours where they never actually did any mining. DON

We are doing a B2B 18 day cruise with 7 days on the 1st cruise and 11 on the 2nd. I did a search here and people talked about a good deal for a large bag of laundry either every 7 days or or every 9 days. How have they handled this for you on a B2B. If all the days count I should get either 1 or 2 bags of laundry. If each of the B2B counts as a separate cruise I will not get any laundry done at all on the 1st cruise and will have to wait until almost the end of the 2nd cruise to get my laundry done. DON

There is one possible advantage for an on-your-own tour to a location that is not close to the ship. That is that as long as you are back to the bus pickup on time you do not have to worry about missing the ship. DON

Do I interpret your post seriously or was it a joke. You actually showed the steward a print-out of all the suite benefits that you expected to get and because you did not get 100% of them you did not tip him. Please tell me that you were joking. DON

I see it as a way of NCLof trying to extort money from passengers after they madea horrible decision of parking their ship out of town in Ward Cove. Instead of just walking off your ship into town as you can do with most of the lines you get to pay $100 to get there. Paying $100 for "free" donuts, coffee and beer seems a bit much to me. DON

InsureMYTrip and Trip Insurance Store are both good brokers. DON

Not unusual at this time of the year. The next time you do AK book a cruise pick one that goes to Glacier Bay. You can be fairly certain of making it into GB as opposed to the other glaciers visited on AK cruises. DON

Try the Rome2Rio site. DON

One example on the AK cruise tours that say that you have 2 days in Denali. This is what actually happens. Your train arrives in about noon on day 1. By the time you get into your room it is probably about 2 in the afternoon. On day 2 your train leaves shortly after 1 PM in the afternoon. That means that you have maybe 25 hours in Denali including your sleep time. I can come up with other examples of cruise company misrepresentations if you wish, DON

Do they offer free cabins to officiants of every religion that request them. Again - I have absolutely no problem with providing space in the theater or in a meeting room to a member of the crew or to a passenger to do a service but I have a very big problem to providing a free cabin to an officiant. I do wonder if an officiant from a small religion or an unpopular one would be accorded the same privileges accorded to a large religion such as catholics or a large protestant sect. I really think that cruise lines should just stay out of the religion business and stick to the cruising business. It would make it much easier for them. DON