JimmyVWine

This is correct. Though with recent issues involving the ethics of foie, the pâté is not nearly as common as it once was. As for the Parma ham, I have to say that I’ve never seen that. Lousy weather this weekend so maybe I’ll spend some time with my cookbook collection.

This is the traditional way of making it. I know of no other way even if it is being scaled up for a crowd. Could be that the tenderloin is blasted in a really hot oven or broiler in large quantities instead of pan seared before being encased in the pastry.

It is a mixture called duxelles which is a minced mixture of mushrooms or mushroom stems, onions or shallots, herbs such as thyme or parsley, and black pepper, sautéed in butter and reduced to a paste. Cream is sometimes used as well, and some recipes add a dash of madeira or sherry. The cooled paste is laid on the rolled out pastry and then the seared beef tenderloin is placed on the duxelles. The pastry gets wrapped and folded around the meat and baked. The Italians??? Hmmmm. Who else frequently uses pork in cooking? Portuguese. Spaniards. Germans. Chinese. Hawaiians. Vietnamese. Nigerians. Go anywhere in the world and you will find pork used for cookings. “The Italians” aren’t trying to slip anything past you.

Also, while not a full blown meal, the International Cafe will have some savory foods available. Maybe a panini or two. Or shrimp salad or chef’s salad. Avocado toast. Stuff like that.

Depends from whose perspective you are evaluating the good/bad idea. Great idea for Princess. Bad idea for customers. Provide people with grats, drinks and WiFi for $50 per day—good for Princess. Provide grats, drinks, WiFi and toadstool sandwiches with arsenic sauce coupled with root canals for $60 per day—even better. It looks like the customer is getting even MORE for their money, but if no one partakes in the sandwiches and dental treatments, there is no overhead and the return on investment for Princess is pure profit. Now, more people will bite on the desserts and fitness classes than they would the toadstool sandwiches and root canals. But not by much.

Maybe you did this, but we found that you have to put in some steps to get what you desire. Where many bars reported being “out” of certain brands, other bars had what we were looking for. (Regal 10/22). The Wheelhouse Bar always had Hendricks. In fact, when looking for higher level spirits, the WH was always the best place to check. Followed by Vines. The outdoor bars were the worst.

I don’t spend any time reading any other cruise line boards on CC but out of curiosity, are there any lines where the loyalists are routinely posting: “I’m so happy that there haven’t been any cutbacks since the restart”? It might be that you will have to pay luxury cruise line prices to get what the mass market cruise lines used to provide. For some that will be a good trade. For others, paying mass market prices still works even if the Fettuccine Alfredo has now transmogrified into Lasagna.

Heading to a "Gentleman's Club"? 😁🤸‍♀️

The Great Sushi Caper lives entirely outside of the Plus Package. Apples and oranges. Er.....Fish and Grapes.

Well...the post to which I was responding specifically mentioned balcony size as the valued perk. So there's that.

But can you book that in advance on the app? I thought you had to make arrangements for that once on the ship.

The Plus Package does not include Specialty Dining. But the Premiere Package does. If you do that math and you think that Premier will be better for you, you can cancel your dining reservations on the app and you will get a full refund fairly quickly. Then you can call to upgrade from Plus to Premier and then make new reservations. Once you do that, you should see that you are not being charged for them.

I have always placed a hold on a cruise which gives you three days to put down a down payment. The very next day, someone will call my home and tell me that they are my current Princess Vacation Planner and I use them to apply my FCC or otherwise put down my down payment. I have never, ever not gotten a call once I place the cruise on Hold. I answer the call and let them finish the booking. That way someone gets credit for the booking and earns a few shekels. Rarely is the person who calls me the same person who last booked a cruise for me. In fact, I think I have only had the same PVP twice in a row and that was 6 or more years ago. Since then, it has always been someone who introduces themselves as my "current PVP." But the merry-go-round of PVPs has been so bad as of late that I feel no burning need to do this and will just book myself.

Sorry. I accidentally included "excursions" in my sentence above. I actually think that you can use OBC for excursions. But I don't think you can for services or dining.

This isn't really true at all. At least the part about the larger balconies. If you are on a Grand Class Ship, all of the Mini-Suites have the same size balcony. If you move "up" to Club Class/Reserve, you are simply sliding over from Uncovered Deck 9 Forward, Mid-Forward, Mid-Aft or Aft to Uncovered Deck 9 Middle. Your balcony configuration does not change whatsoever. Or you might be moving from Covered Deck 8 Aft to Uncovered Deck 9 Middle, in which case only the covering changes, and not the balcony size (with the very small exception of the wrap-around balconies that the very last cabins have, in which case upgrading gets you a smaller balcony.) On a Royal Class ship, you get placed in a Middle Mini-Site, which may or may not have a larger balcony, and you may have already been in the Middle to start. The middle bump-out certainly does have some larger balconies, but the bowing in and bowing out of the middle cabins means that only some of them have bigger balconies. You could very well already have a Regular Middle Mini-Suite with a larger balcony (for example, on Caribe where the middle cabins are not CC/Reserve) and then get moved to one of the smaller balconies once you upgrade. By way of example, on Regal, you could go from A414 (Regular Mini-Suite) to A420 (CC/Reserve). You are literally moving down two cabins. Take a look and tell me if you think that is better situated with a larger balcony. That is my exact situation for my next cruise. I keep getting emails urging me to bid for an upgrade, but I already have the largest Mini-Suite balcony (that isn't forward facing) and I am already in the Middle. It is almost a 100% sure thing that if I upgrade, I will downgrade my cabin, but in return have the option to order Lobster Thermidor one night. That certainly isn't worth $1,000 to me! 🤑

If the rep allows you to use it, jump at the chance. Typically, that is not the case. You have to pay in advance for items, services and excursions that you pre-book and you have to use a credit card (or PayPal) to do that. The OBC really is for "OB".

Thanks. But until hold times decrease (if ever), going unicorn hunting seems like a losing proposition. It is very odd. For my prior cruise in October, I made two calls to have two GCs used as OBC and I was two for two in success. Maybe I just got really, really lucky, because it seems that the reps who can do this are few and far between.

No. Because the changes apply to cruises that DEPART on or after 2/20 and the 20th was a Monday. Most cruises were already underway on Monday and they aren't going to raise prices in the middle of an existing cruise. And assuming that prices are in fact raised, (that seems to be an assumption and not a known fact), they are going to do so fleetwide all at the same time. So if we see any price increases, expect that to happen this coming Saturday.

Thanks for the info. Though I am where you are now. “Honey. Can you order me a double espresso at the International Cafe? I’m going over to Guest Services right next door and will be back in 5 minutes.”

When I do that, it shows that I have "Plus 50" which is the $50 per day version, and nowhere does it show what you are seeing. I think your assumption about the casino comp is on the money. (Pun intended.)

This is what Princess missed on when it introduced the Packages. They market the heck out of them and want everyone to buy one. And once people have the Packages, it is human nature to: Order more Specialty Coffees since they are now unlimited Order more drinks from the bars Dine more often in Specialty Restaurants since these meals are included in the higher Package All of this downward pressure on the finite services should have required allocating more square footage to the coffee venues, the bars and the Specialty Restaurants, and should have also necessitated allocating more crew members to meet the heightened demand. And Princess has done neither. It's not complicated. If you used to sell lollipops for $1 each and on average you'd sell 100 per cruise, you'd provision the ship with 115 lollipops and have one crew member sell them in one location. But if you start charging people $2 more for their cruise and tell them that they can now have as many "free" lollipops as they want, you had better provision the ship with way more than 115 and you had better have more than one crew member selling them in one location. It's pretty simple stuff, but Princess seems to have overlooked this and has not adapted to the downward pressure on services that the Packages are bringing. And it is only going to get worse now that 2/20 is upon us.

See above in red.

Are the balconies on Sun Deck larger than elsewhere on the ship?

How many people did you try to cram into the mini-suite? 😁

Just got off the phone with a Princess Rep and this was a "no go". I had done this a number of times in the past by calling, since the website only allows payment by credit card or PayPal. In the past, the customer service rep has been able to process my cards over the phone with no problem. But today, he said that when he tries to make payment, he gets the same screen that you see on the website with the only two options being credit card and PayPal and no space to input a GC number and PIN. He confirmed that I could apply the amount to my onboard account once on the ship by bringing a printout of the e-card. If anyone has been able to complete this transaction on the phone, let us know. However, it is probably faster to walk up to the Guest Services Desk than it is to wait on hold for 30 minutes only to find out that they can't accomplish what you are trying to achieve.