JimmyVWine

Was not a decision made by Princess. Let's not blame the blameless.

I have never heard this before nor seen it in practice.

All food at the IC is included in your fare, regardless of whether one has a package or not. It is just like going up to the Buffet area on a ship. In fact, much of the food served at the IC is also served up at the buffets during certain times of the day. Just think of the IC as a "mini-buffet." Coffee drinks are another thing altogether. If you have any sort of Package, all of the coffee drinks served at the IC coffee station will be included for you. If you are sailing without a Package, coffee (and espresso, latte, cappuccino, and any other coffee-based drink that has an Italian name) is priced by the cup.

And by comparison, a randomly chosen "entry level" cabin on Regent Voyager appears to have a similar layout to, but ever so slightly more square feet than a typical Mini-Suite on Princess. So if one wants more elbow room for a comparable price, a mass-market suite would appear to grant that. So maybe the real difference is the sense of space one senses outside of the cabin, and the level of food and wine served in the Main Dining Areas.

Seems as if these are getting harder and harder to come by with the new ship designs. ☹️

So "entertainment" puts a checkmark in the column of the larger ships. Makes sense. How does the size of a Princess (or Celebrity) suite compare to a comparably priced cabin on a luxury line?

On non-formal nights, does he not wear pants? 😲

Princess is touting the "Good Spirits At Sea" on Sun Princess as being a leveled up experience and the artist's rendering makes it look a bit more like Vines than the walk-up bar on earlier builds. So my guess, (and it is just a guess) is that GSAS will be the closest thing to Vines that the Sphere Class ships will have, and perhaps, ...just perhaps...those venues will carry a selection of wines that other venues do not have.

Pretty much all escargot served in restaurants (and cruise ships) comes out of large cans, fully cooked. They place one piece of meat in each of the wells of the special serving dish, ladle in some butter, garlic and salt, and top with bread crumbs and parsley. Maybe add some Sherry. Then bake to heat the contents of the dish. It's pretty hard to mess up the preparation, and equally hard to elevate it when using the canned snails. In the end, escargot is a "butter and garlic delivery system" and how can that be bad? 🤣

Maybe this is a question that deserves its own thread instead of asking it here, but since a primary focus of this thread is about "Suite Life" on PCL as compared to X, as a non-suite guest myself, I have often wondered...If one is going to spend that much money on a cruise and wants to be treated and fed like royalty, why does one choose a suite on a mass-market ship instead of cruising on a more upscale line like Regent or Oceania? I've always imagined that if my finances could handle paying that much for a cruise, I would pick an upscale line instead of a more expensive cabin on a mass-market line. But clearly there are many here who routinely choose the latter, and I'd love to get a sense of why as I'd love to learn from your experiences.

But the a la carte people are spending new money so they get different rules. Package people have already paid their money, and in terms of net outlay, not very much at that. The Packages didn’t increase in price when the change was made, so from an accounting standpoint, little to no money is allocated to the dining venue’s bottom line. Princess wants to increase revenue so it doesn’t want a person using up a seat with draining a credit or draining their wallet. While you cannot see treating the two classes of guests differently, clearly Princess does. And it can’t be a decision made randomly or out of spite. It is financial.

As consumers, we are looking at this in terms of pizza(s) being the commodity. As the seller, Princess looks at the seat(s) as being the commodity. A seat being used by someone not using their credit and not ordering a la carte is a lost sales opportunity for the seller as that seat could be used by someone either burning a credit or spending cash. So if a person with a Package uses a seat, they have to either use a credit or spend cash.

You will. But those often aren't worth the cost of a Latte. Still, you are entitled to those fees and I have no doubt that you will see them appear on your account at some point.

Here is the forecast for Newport on Sunday: Sun 17 | Day 76° Precipitation Chance 3% W10 mph Sunny, along with a few afternoon clouds. High 76F. Winds W at 10 to 15 mph. Humidity58% UV Index6 of 11

What makes you certain of this? Of course things can change, but as of right now, were the ship to depart NY on time at 5:00 on Saturday, the center of the storm would already be just south of the coast of Maine. The current tracking shows it to be east of Cape Cod at 8:00 am on Saturday, so by 5:00 pm it will be well north of that. By the time you are scheduled to arrive in Newport at 7:00 am on Sunday, the storm will be at the northern tip of Maine, well past the point of affecting Newport. Being from NJ, you know that once a hurricane or tropical storm passes, the following weather is usually clear and calm. Almost eerily so. By the time you are schedule to arrive at Boston just before noon on Monday, the storm's center is predicted to be right at the Provincial border of Quebec and Newfoundland. And by your Tuesday arrival in Bar Harbor, the storm will be well out to sea. So as long as the weather behind the storm is as calm as it typically is, I can't see any reason why you cannot make all the ports as scheduled. I certainly don't see any "guarantee" that a tender port will be missed. Now, no one can predict right now whether the storm will do damage to the infrastructure of the ports that might prevent a normal arrival. But short of on-shore damage, I really don't see the current itinerary and the current storm track as intersecting. And maybe this is the reason why Princess has been silent. It is entirely possible that they don't see a problem...yet.

It appears that all of this is true for regular Mini-Suites. But for the Cabana Mini-Suites, the bedf and sofa do get swapped as those cabins do not have the center stoarge unit. So using the deck plan grab used in the example earlier, if those cabins were Cabana Mini-Suites, 12626 would have the sofa near the cabana and 12624 would have the bed near the cabana. Edit to add: While PCL is touting these new, remarkable innovations, P&O has been using this design for quite a while now and there are dozens of cabin tours on YouTube of the Conservatory Suites. If you look at enough of them, (I have...), you will see that the bed and sofa get swapped. Once you know the cabin number and then go to a deck plan for the ship in question, it is pretty easy to figure out the pattern. I was looking for a Cabana Mini-Suite where the sofa was next to the cabana, and the direction of the bed as well as the sofa in the cabin and the sitting area in the cabana all allowed the users to lie down or sit facing the direction of travel. Wife hates traveling "backwards". I was able to find what I wanted on Sun.

WINNER! Lost in much of this back and forth is that these features cost NOTHING to the people who are buying packages. They had all of these features a month ago, and they will have these features a month from now, all at no cost.

I'm not sure that one can draw a straight line between pushing people to paid restaurants, serving poor quality food and passenger numbers. Ever hear of "in spite of, not because of"?

Perhaps. But you can only fool these people once. On Day One they might be excited to make use of this feature. But when they receive cold French Fries an hour after ordering them, will they go back to that well?

100%. Seemed like a good idea during social distancing. Keep people seated where they are and bring the food to them rather than have hordes of people gather shoulder to shoulder in a dining venue. And with ships sailing at half capacity, it probably worked. But with full ships of 4,000 people, the system is collapsing on itself, killed by its own popularity. Frankly, Princess should probably bite the bullet, announce that ON delivery was a pandemic strategy that served its purpose, but now that ships are full again, it is unsustainable and sunset the program. It generates no income for them and produces nothing but headaches. They are clearly trying to push people off of the program by charging the one-time charge, but only for the 25% of people who don't have a Package leaving the other 75% thinking that this is still a viable feature for them, and those people will be sorely disappointed. There are two ways to reduce demand--one is to charge a fee and the other is to make the system so frustrating that people give up and stop using the feature. Princess is doing both.

That's sort of the point. Not only does it not affect me, it doesn't affect many people at all. Princess is simply not going to move mountains over a change that affects so few people, and over which an even smaller number find unacceptable. And those it does affect have an easy fix--move into a Package and get everything included. This is the goal and it is going to work. No doubt Princess is going to up its Package numbers. It's not complicated. And if you are one of the few who will say: "I don't want a Package", then Princess is willing to have you move along, or pay by the feature. We have now seen what the future of cruising is going to look like. Embrace it or reject it. Your choice. But Princess is not going to disrupt its larger objective because 30 people complained to them. Look. If I were king for a day, I would do it differently. I would require EVERY guest to have a Package. Instead of "Standard", "Plus" and "Premier", it would be "Relax", "Plus" and "Premier" with "Relax" being the entry level that includes gratuities, wifi, coffee, soft drinks, room service, Casual Dining and Ocean Now delivery. Would this mean that people would pay extra for things that they used to get for free? Sure. But airlines got away with it years ago. We are all old enough to remember the days when checking bags and selecting seats was free. Then came the change, followed by copious complaining, and here we are, still paying for checked bags and seats. Remember when hotels let guests use the pool, hot tub and gym for free? Now we pay $40 per day for "Resort Fees" whether we use those features or not. Did people complain? Sure. Did that change anything? No. This is it, plain and simple. No need to overthink this. Raise revenue and smooth out the bookkeeping. Much easier to have each guest walk off the ship with a one line invoice than to keep track of and charge for every drink, pizza and cup of coffee.

I'm pretty sure that ships are staffed with fewer crew members than the ships sailed with in 2019 and January 2020. Purely an observation of how many cabins the stewards were responsible for and how many tables the DR servers were attending to. Seemed like fewer pool attendants and Buffet workers we saw. But I don't know for sure.

This, exactly. 75% of passengers are getting on board with a Package. To them these "enhancements" are a big yawn. For the remaining 25%, only a small percentage of those will even be aware of the changes or care. Raise your hand if you are outside of the Final Payment Date and plan to cancel your cruise because of these changes. And for those of you inside of the Final Payment Date, how many of you would now cancel if Princess gave you that option due to the late-breaking changes? Crickets. Or as Shakespeare wrote: "...full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." Princess is planning for the future, keeping up with its competition, and making adjustments on the fly as a result of a clear understaffing situation. In trying to adjust, it can either hire more staff which would increase costs thereby decreasing revenue, or it can increase revenue by holding steady on staffing and implementing new fees. Yes, this will anger some current customers. But Princess understands mortality better than its guests. Princess is trying very had to still be around 20 years from now. A very high percentage of current Princess cruises will not be, no matter how hard they try.

Agree. We sailed on Sapphire before Club Class/Reserve dining was a thing so all dining rooms were an option. We liked the decor of Savoy the best as it gave us the feel of being on a luxury, old school ocean liner. We liked Santa Fe the least because it just seemed so fake and out of place on a ship. But keep in mind that these are all just aesthetic opinions. I’d dine at any restaurant with no wait over waiting 20 minutes to get in to one wit decor I like better.

Having the room steward bring glasses of warm carbonated beverages at no additional cost over what I have already paid is “nice”. Bringing back properly chilled glasses of actual Champagne from Vines at no additional cost is even better. Yup.