JimmyVWine

Things that disappear towards the end of the cruise: * My budgeted cash allowance. * My self-control * My patience * My judgment As for ship’s provisions, I haven’t noticed anything other than perhaps fresh fruit. But that is hit or miss. It’s not as if they provision the ship week to week. They might load up three weeks’ worth of pineapple at one time. At the end of week one and week two, there is no discernible depletion. But by luck of the draw you cruise on week three, you might see a change. Just depends when you board in relation to when a particular item was loaded on the ship.

Says $25 right at the top of the menu. I wonder if this is one of the changes taking place on 2/20.

At the rate being charged, wouldn't Passengers 3 and 4 do better by just booking their own cabin? 🤣

The logistics don’t call for more bartenders at the bars. If someone wants a drink delivered to their cabin or to the Piazza, it doesn’t need to be made (and shouldn’t be made) at a bar. Those drinks should be made behind the scenes. That’s part of the whole problem. The bartenders at the bars are fully occupied with making drinks for the people standing in front of them. Requiring them to also make drinks that will be transported to remote locations just doesn’t work. The introduction of the Packages calls for drinks being made efficiently in a back bar without any flair, and without the bartenders being distracted by customers in their face demanding service.

Impossible. They only sold Packages at $60 per day for cruises that departed on or after 2/20.

Exactly. There is a simple math/logistics issue at play here that Princess no doubt did not account for. When you push the Plus and Premier Packages as great deals, your hope and expectation is that people will bite on them. The more people who bite, the better for Princess' bottom line. But the corollary to that is, the more people who bite, the more drinks will be ordered. We used to be BYO only on Princess cruises with perhaps a single after dinner Scotch or Rum added to our consumption. One drink per person per day for us. With Plus, we skipped bringing our own wine and drank strictly from what Princess offered. We averaged 6 or 7 glasses of wine/cocktails per day. Granted, half of that was consumed at the dinner table, but the other half was not. So instead of one drink per day from the bars, we were up to 3 or 4 from the bars. Per person. Per day. Now, if 1,000 other people change their drinking habits the way we changed ours, that is 3,000-4,000 more bar drinks ordered per day. So what does that mean from a logistics standpoint? You need to hire more bartenders and more people to transport the drinks around the ship. And when you add in the convenience of mobile ordering where your drink will come to you anywhere on the ship, the "more people to transport the drinks around the ship" becomes an even greater need. So Princess probably needs twice as many bartenders as before the Packages were rolled out, and probably three times as many people to transport the drinks around the ship. Do you think that Princess hired a bigger staff to account for the behavioral change that the Packages would bring? I seriously doubt it.

I don't think this falls on the bartenders at all. Either iteration, (the one we are assuming will happen and the modified one that is suggested in kevey's email) have the bartenders doing the exact same thing. The difference runs to the desserts and health classes. The bartenders don't play a role there. Both the posted terms and conditions and the email in question show the drink portion of the package as being identical.

All literature up until today supports that. But kevey’s two posts cast some doubt on this.

Me too!

Still in a crib when that one came out!

I find the juxtaposition of the heralding of the Fitness Classes and the Unlimited Desserts offered under the Premier Plan to be priceless. And in all honesty, how many people are going to want/need more than two of those concoctions every day? Or any day? They act as if this is a big "give" when in fact, the number of people who will be ordering 3 or 4 or 5 Special Desserts per day can be counted on one hand. And if it is a 10-14 day cruise, even those people might not survive to see disembarkation.

Old enough to remember this lyric: Well I never been to heaven But I been to Oklahoma Well they tell me I was born there But I really don't remember In Oklahoma, not Arizona What does it matter What does it matter

Interesting. What I posted was pulled from the website just yesterday. It could be that as rollout draws near they are re-thinking the logistics of having two tiers of "Plus". Or, there could be Terms and Conditions referenced in your email that remove the last two items. Back when they first announced the "New" Plus, it was my firm belief that the people who paid for the "Old" Plus would be grandfathered into everything for logistical reasons. Then, as it became more clear that they intended to run the "Old" and "New" programs in tandem, I humbly admitted that I was wrong. But I would love it if it turns out that I was right all along!

Small sample size, but I’ve never experienced the Princess deck plan being wrong (on this subject).

We were recently in C426 on Regal and it was definitely connecting. And we have also been on Club Class B409 on Regal and it was also connecting. And our May cruise is in one of the largest (not accessible) balcony cabins on Caribe and it also connects. Somewhere along the way they changed this as the more recent ships do not show any of these cabins as connecting.

$15. On February 20 Princess is rolling out the new Packages that it began selling in December when the price of Plus went up to $60 per day. Once the new Packages rollout, and until the last of the "$50 per day Plus Packages cycle through (which is what you have), Plus will be treated as follows. Everything that is NOT preceded by the word "NEW" will be available to everyone with Plus, whether you paid $50 per day or $60 per day. Items that are preceded by the word "NEW" are only available to the people who paid $60 per day. If you paid $50 but want the "NEW" stuff, you can contact Princess or your travel agent and pay the difference for the change: Princess® dining, accommodations and entertainment MedallionClass® experience Plus Beverage Package (drinks up to $15 each) Wi-Fi (1 device per guest) Crew appreciation NEW Premium desserts (2 per day) NEW Fitness classes (2 per cruise) NEW Unlimited juice bar All that said, don't get too excited about the bump up in allowance until we see how drink prices change on 2/20. It may be that the $15 allowance will get you exactly the same thing you would have had without any change.

I thought that the title of this thread pertained to a character from The Mandalorian.

Like Pub Quizzes. Assemble a team and compete for prizes that the Prize Patrol obtains from the deepest, darkest depths, the descent to which would give most normal people the bends.

First of all, even under the old plan, you will be permitted to order drinks up to $15 as long as your cruise is after February 19. If you are leaving this week or next, then yes, the limit is $12. As far as room delivery, I don't really know anything about "specialty tea" so I don't know how that is treated. But as far as everything else is concerned, if the drink is included in the package and can be ordered on the app, the place of delivery is irrelevant. You can have your drink handed to you at the bar, delivered to you by the pool, or sent to your cabin and there is no additional charge for any of these.

You may not have an issue. I just checked the Enchanted deck plan and the cabin(s) we prefer have connecting cabins on Royal, Regal and Majestic, but not on Discovery or Enchanted. So maybe your extended balcony cabin isn't a connecting room.

A number of years ago Princess was notifying people that they would be boarding by Deck (not sure if it was specific departure ports or all of them). To my knowledge, this was never, ever implemented or enforced. Can you imagine the fainting and clutching of pearls if a newbie on the first deck to board got on the ship before someone who is Elite? Probably what happened is that in practice, Princess figured out that out of 3,400 people, if there were 1,000 Suite, Elite, Platinum and Club Class passengers spread all over the ship who got to board early, trying to stratify the remaining passengers by deck was rather pointless. Whatever benefit they thought that they would derive by boarding by deck (more orderly and efficient elevator operation) got blown up when the early boarders got to board early irrespective of location. Boarding by deck also probably looks good on paper when it comes to getting cabins ready. If they clean and prepare the cabins in a particular deck order, then people are more likely to be able to go straight to their cabins upon boarding. But again, the fact that early boarders are spread all over the ship makes this irrelevant. Bottom line is I can't recall anyone ever reporting back here that they were on the 2:00-3:00 boarding deck and were denied boarding at noon.

An impossible generalization to prove. You’d have to interview a large representative percentage of that group of locals to know what they do and do not do.

I don’t have the answer off the top of my head but I don’t think that the outlet situation is any different than the other Royal Class ships. So if you find any discussion or YouTube videos pertaining to the other ships, I think you can extrapolate that information over to Enchanted.

Wow. I don’t doubt or question any of the reports here. What they experienced is what they experienced. But our favorite cabin is the largest extended balcony mid-ship Mini-Suite on the Royal Class ships and it happens to be a connecting cabin, and we have never experienced anything like what is described here. I guess our luck may run out, but so far so good. Have that same cabin in May. Fingers crossed. (Of course, I suppose it could be that the people in the adjoining cabin are the ones complaining about US, rather than the other way around, but I don’t think so.)

If you can really get the Princess transfer for $29 per person, grab it and don’t look back. But I don’t think that is the current going rate.