Rogueperson

Here's my live thread on Adventure back in late September of last year. Lots of pictures and impressions.

Ooooh, whipped cream. Good idea!!! I don't normally have this at home, but the few times I did, and coincided with my 1/2 and 1/2 going bad, I used this and it worked great in a pinch.

I did the UDP once. It was only a 5 night cruise, but it was the 5 night leg of a total of 14 night b2b. Nice comparison between the two. Here are my takeaways. Even 5 nights, i started to get sick of it. I was on Adventure of the Seas, there were 3 specialty restaurants plus Johnny Rockets (I don't really count them because i'm not really a fan). The menus obviously don't change. Because my wife and I would never get the same things, we pretty much tried most of the menu pretty quickly. The menus after a couple visits easily become stale. Some lunch venues were not available due to special events on sea days, so i ate at Chops more times than I did at the others. You have to like every specialty restaurant, or your choices get even more limited. I found Izumi's to be lacking, so I ended up bouncing back and forth between Chops and Giovanni's. By the 1st day of the 2nd leg, I could not eat steak anymore and it probably wasn't until my 4th night, I could eat it again because i got tired of it. The sweet spot for the UDP, in my opinion, double the number of days to specialty restaurants you're willing to eat at. Adventure had 3, so the sweet spot for the UDP, would be a 6 night cruise. So anything on the Radiance, Vision and some Voyager classes would be wasted if longer than 6 nights. Enchantment, I would not bother unless you wanted to eat Chops for the entire cruise to get your money worth. So anything on Oasis or Quantum Class would be worth it., but smaller, i wouldn't do it for more than 6 nights

I did not know this. I'm questioning everything now. Like someone said, you don't mess with someone's coffee like this. I already bring my own coffee onboard because the coffee onboard stinks. With my luck, the "fridge" in the cabins won't be cold enough and my 1/2 and 1/2 will go bad before the cruise ends. Fortunately, in a pinch, i can use whole milk, but i'm not happy. And now that I think about it, i think that's what's been happening because the coffee isn't the same. I thought it was because the water is not hot enough, but maybe this is it.

For @firefly333's itinerary, he has 3 sea days, and can eat lunch with the UDP. The 3 specialty restaurant deal is for dinner only, but I suspect they'll be fine if you use one of those credits for lunch, but its not to your benefit. I did not count embarkation day and only counted his sea days as specialty restaurants are usually not open during port days. That drops the per meal price a little as well. All in all, Its still not a good deal at that price. I was counting all the meals he could have with the UDP, which includes lunch on his sea days, and forgot embarkation day.

That is high for the UDP. The 3 night is a much better offer. 373.99 comes out to 53/person while the 3 night dining package comes to 43.99 per person. If you throw in lunch at all the 3 days at sea, you're down to 37.39 per meal, but Lunch is only worth like 20-25 bucks depending where you eat (not to mention their $20.00 credit deal they tacked on) That really isn't much of a deal. I'm not even including tip as its going to be 18% off the top anyways. Dynamic pricing hard at work squeezing the most it can.

Only the premium drink package with booze is the one that "requires" all adults in the cabin to get it. Other non-alcoholic packages do not have that same requirement.

I was on Enchantment last year in March and they surprised me by opening the MDR for Lunch on embarkation day. However, I have heard that they have discontinued it as it was a limited time offering. I was on a B2B in September of last year, and we were given the same menu in the MDR as the lunch offered for Key Members boarding. In fact, we were allowed to sit with the Key People, as we had friends who had the Key for the 2nd leg of our cruise and we were allowed to join them. It appears that it is ship dependent and some ships do, and some ships don't.

Its not likely you will be pulled aside for an additional security screening. If you are pulled aside, your family will not be hovering over you as the security checks. Think like airport security. Chances are, the offending item won't look like a prescription container. I just had the bad luck of security going "I'm looking for a round thing". 😒

Not a 100% true. If there is a reason for them to search your bag like they see something, they might pull it out. I got stopped and pulled aside at Security in Baltimore for my Enchantment cruise because they saw something that was flagged. I literally pulled everything out because they said "yeah, its round." and everything in the bag was round. That included my meds in the round container. It ended up being the cap for my Aeropress as they thought it was drug paraphernalia.

The best answer for us is both. Now that being said, we generally avoid the Oasis class because we feel its too big. Yeah, its got the best stuff on it, but at the same time, their itinerary is fairly limited to the same ports. I saw limited Oasis class ships going to ABC Islands I think, but thats not often. It generally sticks with 7 nights to eastern or western Caribbean. We try to combine the best, and if we can't, we at least try to go on a ship we haven't been on as oppose to the same ones we do go on. As a last resort, we try other cruise lines to get different flavors of ships as well as different ports.

The only real disadvantage is if your limit is reached by say, someone not logging out of their device to use another one, it will randomly kick someone else off to accommodate the new login. *sometimes*, logging out doesn't log out and you have this phantom login, which may prevent someone from logging into a new device because your device limit has been reached. I've had that happen to me on the multiple device plan a couple of times. It does sort itself out after a while though.

I'm probably the only one losing his mind that the cruise ship has a copy of Betrayal at House on the Hill. Now if there are just people who know how to play....You need at least 3 people, but preferably 4-6

Well, there's your problem (see highlighted) 😁. There's a restaurant I order from near my house, they have 6 levels of spiciness. American Mild, American Medium, American Spicy, Indian Mild Indian Medium, and Indian Spicy. I asked what the difference between Indian Mild and American Spicy was, they said "none its the same spicy level".

I just made Diamond Plus on my last cruise and will enjoy my first Diamond Plus cruise this September. I squeaked over using the double point promotion, but now that I'm at 176, the daunting road to Pinnacle is 524 points, almost TRIPLE what took me 14 years to accumulated. Now, granted, 80 of those points was earned after covid thanks to double points, if i were to earn 40/year at that high rate (for me), it would still take me more than 7 years to make it and ONLY if i sailed nothing but Royal, which is unlikely.

I may do that, but i'm a little scared to. Why? My TA took over two weeks to get me my invoice. Why? Virgin's site wasn't cooperating with her 😆

The opposite. I get the menu where i can click for login details and all the other menus. Just no information comes up. I can click dashboard, but it says Ahoy Undefined. I suspect my name is supposed to be there. I can even ask it to send me a verification link, which it does. Then when i verify, it says gotcha. And then, same problem.

I just recently booked my first cruise with Virgin and just got my booking number from my TA. I set up an account online and for some reason, it won't let me log in. Or better yet, when i try to log in, it goes "Aw Dang" please try again. I tried to log in on my phone, and it gives me the same error. I called Customer support and they just kind of directed me to download the app, but I still can't access my account online. I can log into the app with my password, just not online. I'm probably going to wait a few days and see what happens, but I was wondering if anyone else has had this problem and if so, was it ever solved? Thanks

Also, be careful with guarantees. If a ship has an open studio in that category, you will probably get put into that cabin. A friend of mine and I before the pandemic were shopping around for cheap solo cruises for specifically this reason. We ran into a Brilliance guarantee that was really low. We had almost decided to book, but only ONE of us got the price. We concluded that the reason only one of us could get that price was because Brilliance had 3 studio interiors and only 1 was available and that low price was without a solo supplement. If he had booked that price, he would have been assigned that studio and no double points. The solo supplement also is not an indicator whether or not you get bonus points. I sailed on two solos with no solo supplement and not only got the bonus points, got the promo double points they were offering at the time too (x4).

You sound like a friend of mine @death_star. He's been trying to game the system to get to Diamond and he finally made it last March (I think). I did the same thing. I took 2 cheap 9 night cruises to garner 36 points to jump to Diamond. And then in the first year after the restart after covid, I took 4 cruises that got me 80 points with a combination of the double point promo and solo cruising, to jump from Diamond to Diamond plus, with my first Diamond plus cruise coming in the fall.

This is exactly why we jumped on it. Our first TA, but not the longest cruise we've been on. We were hesitant to book a new cruise line (to us) for such a long cruise, but that price could not be beat. I'm hoping that they will extend the loyalty match, as we're Diamond Plus on Royal, but even they didn't, they're giving us a $600.00 bar tab already!!!

I have found Chef's table is more often bundled into a package onboard more than being discounted by itself. Like I see Chef's table and chops for like 110/person. Not much of a discount, but discounted from what was on the cruise planner. Also, I rarely if ever see Chef's table's price change much on the planner, its almost always around 90 bucks/person total. *edit* Price went up on my Jewel cruise to $84.99/person, which puts it at 200.40 for 2 with tip.

Just last night, I was hammer out my next trip up to Bayonne and pricing it out. The most expensive option surprisingly, was driving up day of and parking, because parking by itself at the port would be $420.00 for my 14 night this fall.

Be glad Royal doesn't sail out of New York City. That's $45.00/night. Bayonne recently raised theirs to $30.00/night.

Life long resident. Born in 20901, moved from there to Gaithersburg for a couple years, went to UMD, came back, bought a house in 20906 which is still considered Silver Spring, though Rockville and Olney are actually closer than downtown Silver Spring for me.