bluemarble

This is Cunard's page which I previously described as follows. "About all Cunard publishes on their website is a "Guest speakers on board" page which provides only a very limited list of speakers. That list is mostly the speakers for special event cruises such as the Literature Festival at Sea and some of the QE Alaska voyages." I took on the task of documenting which voyages are represented on that "Guest speakers on board" page. Here is the master list of the 17 voyages for the 29 speakers currently listed on that page, sorted by voyage number (here you are @techteach). M335 - Literature Festival at Sea - Yvonne Battle-Felton M335 - Literature Festival at Sea - Antony Beevor M335 - Literature Festival at Sea - Luigi Bonomi M335 - Literature Festival at Sea - Clare Chambers M335 - Literature Festival at Sea - Alex Clark M335 - Literature Festival at Sea - Artemis Cooper M335 - Literature Festival at Sea - Daniel Finkelstein M335 - Literature Festival at Sea - Alan Johnson M335 - Literature Festival at Sea - Clare Mackintosh M335 - Literature Festival at Sea - Val McDermid M335 - Literature Festival at Sea - Greg Mosse M335 - Literature Festival at Sea - Kate Mosse M335 - Literature Festival at Sea - Andrew Hunter Murray M335 - Literature Festival at Sea - Jamie Susskind M335 - Literature Festival at Sea - Alan Titchmarsh M335 - Literature Festival at Sea - Lynda La Plante CBE Q313 - Singapore-Tokyo (Sailed) - Sally Gunnell OBE Q315 - Beatles and Beyond (Sailed) - The Bootleg Beatles Q320 - Alaska - Joseph Frey Q321 - Alaska - Jill Heinerth Q322 - Alaska - John Geiger Q323 - Alaska - Philip Gray Q323 - Alaska - George Kourounis Q324 - Alaska - Philip Gray Q325 - Alaska - Lynn Moorman Q326B - Alaska - Mensun Bound Q329 - Eastbound Transatlantic Crossing - Philip Gray Q331 - Western Mediterranean Sherree - Valentine-Daines V310 - Southampton-Hamburg - Sally Gunnell OBE V312 - Canary Islands - Yuvi V318 - Iceland and British Isles - Sherree Valentine-Daines V324 - Western Mediterranean - Pip McGarry V327 - Central Mediterranean - John Waterhouse Now 17 voyages (two of which have recently sailed) represents about 10% of the remaining 177 voyages for 2023. And with only one speaker listed for most of these voyages, that makes this list even more incomplete. I wonder if this list is limited to the designated "celebrity" speakers for these voyages. Anyway, while better than nothing, I think you'll agree this list falls well short of the master lists of guest speakers Cunard used to provide.

Here's a link to a QV bar menu. It's apparently from August 2022 since the document name is "qv_main_bar_menu_aug_2022a.pdf". It shouldn't be too far off I would think. https://www.cunard.com/content/dam/cunard/my-voyage/pdfs/qv/qv_main_bar_menu_aug_2022a.pdf

Yeah, that's an old version of the Cunard World Club Benefits page which can still be found on the Cunard US website at https://www.cunard.com/en-us/the-cunard-experience/world-club-benefits. The updated Cunard World Club page, similar to what @Splice the mainbrace has indicated, is found on the Cunard US website at https://www.cunard.com/en-us/cunard-world-club. I'm not sure if there is still a link to that old page within the Cunard US website itself. I found it via a google search. When I do a google search for Cunard World Club Benefits (the title of the old page), that old page is the first search result I receive and the new page is the second result. When I just search for Cunard World Club (the title of the new page), that gives me the new page as the first search result and the old page as the second result.

You are correct about how the new Internet plans work along with the Cunard World Club Internet credits you receive now. For the Essential Plan, you either pay $24 for 24 hours of usage from the time of purchase, or you pay $18 per day for all the remaining days of your voyage at the time of purchase. If you don't need to use the Internet every day, your best bet might be to purchase individual 24-hour segments as you go for $24 each. Assuming you are a couple and you are both Platinum, your two $80 Internet credits will allow each of you to purchase three separate 24-hour packages as you go. That will cover a total of six days without having to pay extra for Internet access. They do give each Cunard World Club member separate Internet credits based on their individual Cunard World Club status. Each member has to purchase the plans separately in order to use their credits though. You couldn't purchase a full-voyage plan at $18 per day and expect your combined Internet credits to pay for $160 of that plan. Only one $80 credit would be applied in that case for whichever one of you purchased the full-voyage plan. If your Internet credits do not refresh each segment (as @TheOldBear has just indicated), then that's basically it. You'd get a combined total of six days for free. Naturally, if they ever decide to address that issue and refresh your credits each segment, that would give you quite a bit more benefit.

Same here. I've seen no mention of dinner in the Golden Lion in any of my QM2 daily programmes. The standard hours listed for "Pub Lunch" are 12:00pm-2:30pm. On the days when the clocks are moved ahead at noon on eastbound crossings, those hours were adjusted to 11:30am-2:30pm. Recently on embarkation day the hours were listed as 1:00pm-4:00pm. No other hours listed for meal service in the Golden Lion on QM2.

To see what the obstructed views look like, see this thread which is a sticky at the top of this board. They only show the portside cabins, so for the view from starboard cabin 5125, check the cabin opposite from it on the port side. That is cabin 5130. The view from 5125 will be the mirror image of the view shown for cabin 5130.

I think I've tracked down the identify of the other cruise ship in this image (to the right of center). That's probably Emerald Princess. She was on a British Isles cruise from Southampton with a call at St Peter Port scheduled for August 2, 2022. And that profile is a pretty good match to Emerald Princess.

Booking reference number perhaps, if you have them? I have a spreadsheet with just the ship and the start and end dates as input where I calculate the nights from the dates and total the number of cruises and nights. I may go back now and add cruise number, cabin and booking reference number if I can find all that information. Thanks for the suggestion.

I didn't record the other ships in the image at the time. That certainly does look like the Commodore Clipper.

That's correct. That image is from the Victoria Marina webcam found on Nest's webcam page for the Island of Guernsey (at "www.nest.gg"). It shows QV's call at St Peter Port last year on August 2, 2022.

Here's another webcam image from my archives showing a Cunard ship at a port we've seen before. There's more detail here than some of my more obscure webcam captures of beach scenes, so hopefully this one is identifiable without too much difficulty. No port cranes to work with this time though. 🙂

I have been neglecting my duties and hadn't been looking for a webcam image at this port! It's not a webcam I was familiar with until now. Looks like this may have been close to a real-time posting. This is Naha, Okinawa where QE departed about seven hours ago.

Ah, thanks for that clarification. I guess I never noticed Queen Mary 2 was written on the back of the Teddy Gilet bear for sale on QM2 (or more likely I just forgot). I'm not a collector myself. Just like to keep track of all the bears that have been on offer over the years.

Right. That's the generic Cunard bear known as the "Teddy Gilet". Over the years there have been other Cunard bears on offer including some that have the ship name written on them. And then there is the series of annual Cunard bears that have been for sale on board the ships. The 2022 bear was "Arthur". I'm waiting to hear if anyone has spotted a 2023 annual bear yet.

What's shown in that video does not match any of the bears I've seen offered on board QM2. I would expect the bears offered on board the Queen Mary in Long Beach to be specific to the Queen Mary. There is a photo for "Shopping Onboard The Queen Mary" on yelp which shows a different display of bears, but I think they are the same style of bears as seen in the video. Those bears appear to have "RMS Queen Mary" written on them. There are additional images of bears posted on the facebook page for "The Queen Mary Store". The bears on that page are different from those in the video, but they also have "RMS Queen Mary" written on their shirts.

If I had remembered to check your previous posts, which I usually do but didn't this time, I might have figured this one out sooner! It was actually the flagpole on the right with a red flag on it that got me thinking it could be Turkey and the Bosporus was a logical place to look as a cruise-by location in Turkey. Examination of other available images of the Bosporus at the entrance to the Black Sea is what eventually convinced me of the identification. There is just enough detail along the shoreline in your photo to make that possible.

I may have figured this one out. Is it a view of the Bosporus approaching the entrance to the Black Sea?

For me personally, the Insights Guest Lecture series is the activity I most look forward to on a Cunard voyage. As the situation is now where Cunard no longer posts full the lists of speakers up to a year ahead of time, knowing who the speakers will be is mostly a matter of curiosity although it does also increase the anticipation. I was disappointed to learn after the fact about recent voyages where Stephen Payne was one of the speakers. I haven't yet had the opportunity to hear him speak. If had known the schedule with sufficient lead time, I might have tried to book one of those voyages. Imagine my excitement when I learned he may be a speaker during one of the legs of our upcoming voyage. In the past, having the list of speakers available ahead of time has influenced my choice of voyage. Since we have several choices for transatlantic crossings each year, knowing who the speakers were going to be has been a deciding factor for me in choosing one crossing over another. One year there was a 21-night roundtrip from New York including Norway which looked interesting. When I found out Bill Miller was a scheduled speaker for the entire voyage, that sealed the deal for me to book it.

That's a futile exercise indeed. The speakers listed on the "Guest speakers on board" page will also be listed within a "Guest speakers on board" section at the bottom of the pages for each of the individual voyages. If there is no "Guest speakers on board" section on the page for your voyage (which is the case for voyage M318), then none of the speakers on that master list are assigned to your voyage. That's the case for the vast majority of voyages.

I used "General inquiries" for the topic. Also check the "I have a booking" box so that you can supply all the detail to identify which voyage you are asking about the speakers.

Sorry, no joy here I'm afraid. When you say you are seeing your loyalty tier on your details home page, where exactly are you seeing it? I've been expecting to see it on the "Before you sail", "Personal Details" page after the "Emergency contact details" section and before the "Marketing options" section. Is that where you are seeing it? Nothing at all appears for me in that area.

Oh, yes, it's coming back to me now! Thanks for that reminder. Here's your post from last September on page 2 of the "How to verify our CWC level (in the US)" thread along with my follow-up. The upshot of that discussion is that the Cunard World Club status is actually embedded within the HTML code found within My Cunard, but the CSS code is apparently causing that information to be hidden. I took another look at the code within My Cunard for my current booking. It's a bit different from what we discussed earlier, but the end result is the same. Here is what I'm seeing today. <div class="passenger-option-section"> <h3 class="form-title">Cunard World Club</h3> <div class="passenger-option-content"> <div class="loyaltyTierSlot"> <span class="loyaltyTierSlot__txt">Your loyalty tier :</span> <span class="emp loyaltyTierSlot__type">Diamond tier</span> </div> <div class="option-row"> <p class="option-text">For more details about our loyalty program please <a href="https://www.cunard.com/en-us/cunard-world-club" class="cta-link" data-linktext="click here." data-componentname="userDetails">click here.</a> </p> </div> </div> </div> When I look at the code for "loyaltyTierSlot", it is applying "display: none !important" which effectively hides the loyalty tier information. And when I look further, the code for "passenger-option-section" appears to be hiding the entire section for "Cunard World Club" which explains why I can't see any of that section for my booking in My Cunard. I have no clue why they have chosen to populate the web page code with the Cunard World Club information but then hide it from us. All rather peculiar I must say.

Yeah, I'm afraid it's too much of a stretch to unconditionally count calls by ships when they weren't owned by Cunard. The entry for Richards Bay, South Africa is a similar case. I can place Saga Rose, (ex Sagafjord), there but not when she was owned by Cunard. Hence the asterisk relating to the photo that was submitted for Richards Bay as well.

Correct. That's a capture from the "LCT Shipside 4" webcam found on the Lyttelton Port Company's website (lpc.co.nz). It's from QE's call there earlier this year on January 12th.

I have never found the Cunard World Club status level listed anywhere within the US version of My Cunard. A while ago I recall a discussion about there being a Cunard World Club section within the UK version of My Cunard showing their status levels. The reply from @TheOldBear indicates it may have have been in the US version at some point but is no longer there. And as @TheOldBear has mentioned, the status level is listed in the top right corner of various email correspondence from Cunard related to the booking. It is also listed on the boarding pass after completing online check-in at 21 days prior to the voyage.