CantanaLobo

why build a ship with no outside - just balc or better...

Simple - people are willing to pay more for a balcony. I'm sure Princess ran the numbers and they showed it would net more money. Only time will tell if the smaller balconies bother enough people that they don't sell as well as Princess expects.

My prediction - most people won't notice. And those that do will forget by the next time they go to book a cruise. Color me cynical.

... there also seem to be a lot of people who obviously don't care if the cruise companies honour their contracts or not...

It's not that we don't care, it's that the deck is stacked against us. We'd need to find a lawyer willing to argue the matter in court, and that would take money. The odds of winning given the contract language seems low. Note that these contracts require any proceedings to take place in Miami or LA, or some other place we probably don't live (at least the USA contracts do). It's not worth it to try and get some money out of the cruise line for our costs when they cancel a cruise.

To paraphrase RocketMan275: "We are screwed". We have to be thankful when the cruise line gives us something as a customer service gesture. Other than that, all we can really do is have insurance and/or make sure we book refundable.

I know the EU has protections for air travel (i.e. EU 261) that overrides limitations the airlines may put in their contracts of carriage. I hope there's something that covers you on your side of the pond for the cruise that you can use. But you'll need to talk to a lawyer and decide if its worthwhile. Good luck. I mean that. I wish the cruise lines would suffer our financial pain when they cancel a cruise. Maybe they'd do it less often. Although knowing the cruise lines, they'd simply make the charter groups indemnify the cruise lines for the cancellation costs.

Before one writes "breach of contract", one should read the contract. From a Princess contract:

Your non-refundable air and hotel are "consequential or other damages". You can find similar from any cruise line. EU may have protections that nullify the above verbiage in the contract, may not. I don't know much about EU consumer protections.

As RickEk mentioned, the cruise lines are quite happy to charter a ship without much regard for the booked passengers. The contract absolves them from any real cost of doing the charter. If you won't sail on any cruise line that has this practice, you won't be cruising.

If you are worried about the risk of the cruise line chartering the ship out from under you, you must either purchase refundable air/hotel/etc, or buy insurance that covers the possibility. You cannot rely on the cruise line doing any more than what the contract requires.

Bear in mind that even if you brought a ticket directly from the airlines, the airline reserves the right to change the schedule, equipment, or even cancel the flight. If you're lucky, they might deign to notify you before you try to check in.

Using EZAir lets someone in addition to the airlines mess with you.

Looks like a cruisetour -7-day cruise with 5 days in Alaska before or after the cruise (3 days in Denali). We did a cruisetour on Princess with our 2 children (18 & 22). They got the inside, we got the balcony :). We all enjoyed it. 7 days is the most I'd suggest for the cruise portion of a first cruise. The land portion can give you a more in-depth experience of Alaska.

You could book just the 7-day cruise and either skip the land portion, or arrange your own land tour. If you get the cruisetour you will be part of a group getting on/off trains and buses. Some people like having all the stuff taken care of, some prefer doing it themselves.

Regardless of how you do it, try to see more of Alaska than just the cruise ports.

(Haven't been on HAL before, so I can't speak to the smoking/vibration. Gonna find out in 73 days.)

Found a description of the min-bar setup here. Elite/suite get the same setup.

Depends on how much you want to drink. You get 1 minibar setup with 8 (IIRC) little bottles of various spirits and some mixers. For the elite/suite "lounge", drinks are not free, but at a reduced price, and only for a few hours each day.

Whether a package is worth it for any additional drinks is only something you can determine.

Welcome to Cruise Critic.

Royal Caribbean does not have self-service laundry. HAL has them except on Eurodam, Noordam, Oosterdam, Westerdam, and Zuiderdam. Princess has them.

There's this fairy that goes around waving her wand over random passengers. No one has been able to interview her to find out how she picks the passengers. :)

Seriously, no one has been able to determine why people get upgraded but theories abound. They give them to new cruisers to get them hooked. Or they give the to the cruisers with a lot days cruising as a reward.

Another theory is that revenue management decided they need another inside to sell, and knew they weren't likely to sell the Haven villa. So the computer picked one of the inside cabins at random, and upgraded them to a suite.

On the new United plan, for non-status members such as myself, I'd get 5 times the base fare plus carrier imposed surcharges such as the fuel charge. Nothing for the various government charges. For example, a DEN-SYD round trip under the old system might net me around 17,000 miles. That ticket costs me $1,492.50 of which $169.50 is fees, so $1,323.00. 1,323 * 5 = 6615 miles under the new system. Quite a difference.

As far as getting miles, United excludes "Unpublished or opaque fares, including but not limited to those booked through priceline.com and Hotwire". Good luck finding out if you bought an "Unpublished or opaque" fare before hand if you don't get the ticket from the United site.

Look at Silver Airways (3M). You can also book them as a United codeshare.

You can also get flights to Tampa from West Palm Beach (3M) or Miami (AA).

Sounds like for the first cancellation, they were "covered" by the Cancel For Any Reason waiver. This waiver is not insurance, but is a provided by Viking itself. You get vouchers if you exercise this.

The second cancellation went to the insurance company, which since the vouchers had no cash value, refused to pay.

A sad sequence of events. I might have expected they could get vouchers again from Viking for the second cancellation, but not cash from the travel insurance.

My interpretation: If you don't got to one of the "elite" providers you'll have to cough up cash.

...And always the best prices.

Going DEN-FLL, non-stop on United was $146 PP one way. Non-stop on Southwest was $166 PP one way. First piece of luggage free free for us on United due to a credit card perk, so that's not a concern. Spirit nonstop was $114 PP non-stop. Spirit left at 11:40 PM, so I didn't even try to find out what the baggage fees were.

Southwest was offering up a connection for $133 PP, but that left at 5:30 AM. As always, you pay for convenience.

Hmmm...here in California we have an extension for our DLs. However, DW just renewed hers in the last two weeks. No gold star. I don't see any problem as the HSA/TSA are not going to suddenly say 32 million Californians can't fly domestically. The extensions will go on for quite a while, or California DLs will be approved as is.

Found this for California:

Google around and a lot of states are not implementing REAL ID in any sort of time frame the feds would like. There's a lot of concern related to privacy and a national id card. Unless the fed does something like requiring the states to implement REAL ID to receive highway funding, it's not happening soon. Until a majority of flyers have a gold star, they can't realistically require it for a flying ID. 2020 is probably optimistic.

If some one is worried about it, they can get a passport book/card, Global Entry, or move to a state that gives you a gold star DL. Me, I'll worry about it when I hear about people getting denied at the airport because their DL isn't REAL ID compliant.

For those that live in a state that has not implemented REAL ID compliant drivers licenses by 2016 (or whenever) and don't want to use a passport book, a passport card can be used for domestic air identification purposes.

Most states are compliant or have an extension. If you have a gold star on your DL, you are okay. If not, you'll likely get one when you renew.

...except our last cruise was on Oceania, and we couldn't believe how many people were horrified by the idea of cruising on Royal Caribbean, Celebrity or HAL!!

NCL shirts should be OK on Oceania now :)

Some people care what others wear, and some don't. I'm in the "don't care" camp.

I'll wear whatever I threw in the suitcase, which has a fair chance of being another cruise lines' shirt. Hmm, I wonder if the Canadians will think I'm rude and weird for wearing a Cabo shirt? ;)

For the flight to the port, I'm at the computer doing the checkin. Kinda part of that whole get-ready-for-the-cruise excitement.

For the disembarkation flight, we'll do EB. I'm still in vacation mode and don't want to think about having to be on the computer 24 hours before the flight. It's enough of a buzz-kill to get the luggage out the night before.

Welcome to Cruise Critic.

You might want to ask this on the honeymoon and wedding forum here.

Another thing to think about is taking ViaRail from Montreal to Toronto, tour Toronto for a couple of days, and then fly from Toronto. Porter has nonstops between Newark and Toronto (YTZ). I see ViaRail Escape fares for CAN$51.

We like to amortize the airfare over as much vacation as we can. After our upcoming cruise we're going to go from Montreal to Niagara Falls and spend a few days there. Then back to Toronto and onto a plane.

ontheweb, I see you have a location "Monticello, NY". If you don't require a nonstop, look at Stewart Airport (SWF) in Newburgh. If you want a nonstop, I think the NYC Airports are your closest.

(When I was first hired out of college, they flew me from Sullivan County International airport. A little propeller plane, eight or 10 seats, from MSV to one of the NYC airports. It had a curtain separating the cabin from the cockpit. We hit a rough spot of weather - the plane was bouncing all around the sky. You could various beeps and buzzes and bings coming from the cockpit. DW and I refer to that flight as White Knuckle Express. Sadly, there's no more commercial traffic from MSV.)

If the ship is heading back to Boston, you could do a B2B. :)

You really do need to look at the fare rules to find out how much. No one on here can tell you how much. Once purchased, United does not make the rules available to mere mortals. You need to call. I've had United TATL business class tickets with a $450 fee. I did look at the fare rules before purchase, so I would know beforehand if I needed to cancel.

If your tickets are normal United tickets, you call to cancel (or do it online). You can then use the value of those tickets for another flight. The "administrative fee" is charged on top of that when you do so. I understand some other airlines subtract the fee from the value and let you use the remainder, but United does not. The fee is new money.

Flyer Friendly :rolleyes:

My $0.02

I can believe Princess has an internal threshold for initiating a deep cleaning. That number would be less than that required to report to the CDC so they can head off making some official report.

They need to deep clean between cruises. If they do it with passengers onboard, the passengers will just contaminate the cleaned area. So the deep clean will introduce a delay.

Can they use contractors to reduce that delay even if they felt the cost was justified? They may need to get cleared by the port, TSA, or who knows. They generally don't let just anyone on the ship. I don't know.

If the cruise was 72 hours, and was shortened by 4 hours due to deep cleaning, would it be fair to refund 5.6% (4/72) of the fare? (fair being different than required. Of course they are not required to). So a $300 fare (no idea what OP paid) would get back $16. Hardly seems worth the trouble.