machineknitter

I have had problems signing in to Celebrity with some regularity since January 2023. For a few days in August I could sign in but it does not work today, Oct 28. This is so aggravating. 

Then there was the problem of them losing my loyalty points!! 

On 11/24/2022 at 10:27 AM, davekathy said:

If you want to change from TD to SD I would call whoever you booked with and request the dining change before the cruise. Then you can go into your CP and select the restaurant you want each evening and time for each evening. Or just walk up to the SD podium for no reservations. Or stick with TD and request what dining room you want for that evening and time and see if they can accommodate you. See post #10. 

What do all those initials mean....TD, SD, CP, SD podium?  Celebrity has Celebrity Select Dining at a set time and Celebrity Select Dining at Anytime. None of your initials have an A for Anytime. I and my group are totally confused. Celebrity website is not helpful. We had Select Dining at a set time, but heard that meant you always ate at the same table in the same MDR (yes initials, meaning main dining room) all the time and you could not go to one of the other dining rooms. We wanted to sample them all, so our group (now 3 couples with 2 different Travel Agents) switched to Anytime Dining. Now when we try to book our time and place to eat we are offered only 9 pm!! Are we trying to select our time too far away from our sail date (Jan.13)?  Do you have any ideas on how we can get through/around this problem? 

How sad. We really liked the 4 dining rooms with each having a specialty dinner. We will miss that!

Do NOT use The Florida Express Bus, civilized bus service. They book only online. There is NO customer service....only a recorded message. Once you click the submit button you are committed even if you have booked from Ft. Lauderdale to St. Petersburg.....it MEANS Ft. Lauderdale AIRPORT to ELLENTON, FL.....not even St. Pete!!! We are in dispute with our creditcard company over this billing. The website is hard to get around and hard to figure out what they MEAN, when what they SAY is not what they mean.

They have another service to the cruise terminals, but it is way down at the bottom of the page and hard to find.

We are hoping to find another bus service for May 2017>

Having a tablet or ipad is only useful if you're in a cabin that is connected to wifi. All of the cabins are supposed to be, but we all know that's not the case. Two out of five times this past year I've been able to get wifi in the cabin, but the other three, I haven't.

You are correct about not always having wifi in your room. In fact, most of the time we cannot get wifi in our room, or it fluctuates. I could get on for a while, then it disappeared and I could not sign off to stop the wifi charges!!

I was going to use my tablet (Kindle Fire) to read my downloaded books, because I like the backlight.

I've been on Princess twice and never saw a towel animal. Carnival and NCL --yes, but not Princess. Do they do it on some ships or itineraries and not others?

Having towel animals seems to depend on your room steward. If you get a towel animal and make a big deal of it, you will probably get more.

Some stewards do not do the animals at all. They have been assigned too many rooms to keep clean, or have too many demanding passengers.

3. Give me a printed TV guide or give me a function on the app to view the TV guide for the cruise. Make it accurate. If they can give us a very inefficient scrolling program guide on the TV, they can give us an interactive guide on the app to manually scroll through. They have the data. That would be much more convenient then spending so much time trying to find something on the scrolling guide on the TV. They can make the function selectable by date and time.

 

5. Give us back the log of the cruise. I don't always read it right away, but I almost always take it home.

6. And don't get ideas about eliminating printing of account information. I need to print it every couple of days to make sure everything on it is correct. I need to draw lines between debits and credits and make check marks to make sure I didn't miss anything.

I thought I still saw the printed tv guide in October when we last cruised with Princess. They were never super useful as I could not decide if it was day 12 or 13 of the cruise. Also the names of the channels were hard to match up with the channel numbers.

I never saw a scrolling program guide on the tv.

We always get a log of the cruise!

Yes, we frequently print out the account info. That's how we discovered when Princess double billed us!!

We need out printouts!

I don't own a smart phone and don't need one. If it is called a "phone" that is what it should be.... As for tablets and the like, I don't own one and don't need one. KEEP THE PATTERS !!!

Us too! Although I do finally have a tablet, as of this month, it is just for reading books!

We don't even text with our phones. AND our phones do not work out of the USA, and we travel to lots of foreign places!!

We too are home safe and sound but it's taking me a while to get caught up on everything.

 

I did do a 'blog' that I tried to keep up on board but because I couldn't access Shutterfly, I couldn't, so I did a lot of copy and pasting when I got home.

If anyone is interested in browsing through my long winded notes, I can post the link here.

https://ourhawaiiansouthpacificholiday.shutterfly.com/

 

I did take quite a few photos and I do have some with my C.C. folk in them.

 

I know we kind of got the reputation as Oh, ....'those Canadian sisters' :D

We wear it with pride! :p

Thanks so much for posting this blog and all the photos, too! I really enjoy re-living my cruise <G> through your eyes! I wish I had done the same tours you did (except for the Apia one, of course).

Thanks for sharing your photos and insight.

Some of us did other sea day activities.

As you might guess from my nickname (machineknitter) I do love to knit. Every sea day (and some port days too) a large group of ladies met in Skywalkers in the morning to do various needlework projects, which we had brought from home. We did knitting, crocheting, needlepoint, and any other needlework we could think of. As expected, we are a group of independent thinkers......some of us came early for our scheduled 9 am Knitters and Natters group. Others came at any time during the morning up until noon (and beyond that I think). We all enjoyed chatting and doing our "work" for family or charity. There were sometimes up to 20 of us present. The last sea day we held an organized "show and tell" where each of us was spotlighted to describe and show what we had made on the cruise. It was lots of fun.

Every sea day a group met at 9 am for the Bible reading (nondenominational) and then some stayed for the Rosary praying. This gave a spiritual start to our day.

On Sundays at sea there were church services, provided by passenger volunteers as Princess no longer provides a minister or priest or rabbi, except on big religious holidays. On Fridays there were Sabbath eve services for those who wanted this, also. The last Sunday there was a nondenominational service at 9 a.m. (lead by a Salvation Army person...I don't know if he is called a minister or what but he lead a great service). There was also a Catholic service lead by a deacon at 9 in the Chapel. At 10 in the Chapel was a service for LDS (Latter Day Saints).

I found it interesting how much the passengers seemed to feel the need for religious services. I also found it interesting how polite and respectful the various denominations were to each other, just as it should be.:)

And, of course, there were those lectures. I loved the destination lectures by Sharon and also the forensics lectures by the man who had worked in the LA prosecutor's office for many years.

Frank took part in the ukulele classes and performances. It was fun to see so many participate. Some had even brought their own ukuleles from home!

Thanks to Traveling 1969 and CCRain for posting lots of info to this list. I have saved a few of the postings to remind myself of the great tours and things we saw.

The Wings over Kaui was a great choice. We had a minor disappointment, as the cameras on our plane did not function, which we did not know about until we got home and got the video they sent. So, we have a video of someone else's flight. We enjoyed the flight and the company did refund the extra we had paid to get the personal video.

I really enjoyed CCRAIN's report of the tour with Patrick on Bora Bora. We were on the catamaran too!

Wish I could have gotten on the internet more often when we were on the ship. I should have carried my laptop to the Internet Cafe for better reception. I just tried to use it in my cabin, where the reception was poor. ...Maybe next time? (Hey, we did this cruise also in 2013 and loved it then too!!)

......

 

With 800+ elites on this cruise it is taking about 3 days for laundry to come back. I should have packed a couple of extra t-shirts and an extra pair of slacks. ..........

That’s it from near the South Pacific. Later.

WOW ccrain. I WISH my laundry had taken only 3 days to come back. Twice it took 6-7 days. Once I washed it myself in the laundromat and it took only 2 hours!! Our final try, when we threatened to sign it with our home address so they could ship it to us, it took only 3 days!!!

With this slow service I had to hand wash the small items in the bathroom sink. At least they dried almost overnight. (I should have packed more undies..... or if I had known the service would be so slow, I would have bought more at Walmart in Honolulu!!!)

We had to resort to re-wearing clothes without washing them......sprayed them with Lysol......air dried the sweaty things.....hoped for the best. :o:eek: This was NOT the way to treat Elite travelers with close to 500 days with Princess. I was in frequent contact with Riz, our Circle Representative.

Princess, don't give me that line about "there are over 800 Elite wanting laundry service." Princess knew the number before we ever sailed. They should have planned better, limited number of items sent in, or reimbursed us for money spent in the laundromat (perhaps up to a certain amount). This will be an increasing problem with future cruises as everyone's number of days on Princess will continue to increase.

At least we did not do as others appeared to have done......used plenty of aftershave or cologne/perfume. Some people seemed to be surrounded in a cloud of fragrance, which made it hard for the rest of us to breathe. This was a real problem when we were seated in the crowded Princess Theater.

Thanks, Harry, for arranging the Prime Time Shuttle. Sorry we made you wait for us.....it was extremely hard to catch an elevator down from 14th floor with our luggage. Glad you made it to your plane on time! Getting to the airport early made it a breeze for us to get through check-in and security. I heard from others that getting there by 10 or later meant they had long lines to get through.

I started the laundry this morning. As I held the laundry basket I said to Frank,"I have a job for you. Itemize these and put them in the paper bag for the laundry!"

He said, "But I am Elite!"

I said, "It will take many days, as 100% of the passengers on this ship are Elite!" <G>

Oh, well. It's great to be home. We are looking at the ads to plan our next cruise.

We have had both good and bad experiences with assigned seating on Pacific Princess. Mostly we all at the table settled in and became friends. Once two couples got into squabbles trying to outdo each other....this was on a very long world cruise. I then wanted to avoid dinner.

The latest difficulty we had was when we had two other couples at our table, and they were quite fine to talk with, we even had a lot in common. However they each decided they did not want to be tied down to dressing (and it was not very hard to "dress" for dinner) and showing up on time for dinner. We spent 3 nights sitting all alone at a table for 6....looking like we did not bathe! We wanted a group table so we could talk!! We switched to another table and eventually caught up with the missing couples to explain that we liked talking with them but wanted to share dinner with someone!

When we had dinner companions, we always made the effort to let them know if we were not going to show up for dinner. After all, it is only polite to do this in an assigned situation such as this.

I love the discussion on this list and the varied opinions of small ship cruising. We have done 3 world cruises on Pacific Princess, plus a back to back Amazon cruise. We do love the small ship cruising and keep ourselves entertained. The lectures on the world cruises are amazing, about the upcoming ports.

I read a lot and do my knitting. Usually I find others who do some sort of needlework so we get together on sea days to do our craft and talk (okay, as some might say, gossip).

The traditional dining can be good or bad. Our first time we had late dining, which meant I had a snack or nap before dinner and we saw the show at 10 pm. The good part about that was that the show was not crowded and we could sit in the second row and see everything. After a few nights of our dinner companions trying to outdo each other, we settled in to enjoy each other. Our stateroom was one of the sideways ones on deck 6 overlooking the lifeboats. Our "balcony" was the lovely lounge chairs on Promenade deck 5, where our new and old friends walked by.

The second world cruise we made close friends with one of the couples at our table, but the other two couples sometimes squabbled. There was a language difference which could have made for some of the problems. But overall we enjoyed ourselves. We had an oceanview room on deck 4 and called the public area on deck 4 our "living room" where we could sit and have new friends and old friends visit us.

On our third world cruise we had a balcony room and did not spend as much time sitting out on deck 5 or in the living room on deck 4. But we still loved sitting outside near the buffet. We were again at first seating for dinner and liked our dinner companions, but for some reason both couples did not like to come to dinner, so we were left sitting all alone at a table for 6.....looked like we had BO! After a while of this, we connected with some people we knew and some we did not know and had our table assignment changed. It was no big deal and we enjoyed dining with other people. When we saw others in the lonely position we had been in, which happened occasionally, we would invite them to join us for the evening. It worked. We were all happy. Rules are not quite so rigid on a small ship, and on a long cruise. Be pleasant and sometimes good things happen.

We will be on Pacific Princess again in April for the last leg of the world cruise. We are looking forward to it. Because we have stayed in a variety of rooms, and visited in other levels of luxury, we have decided to play the "room lottery" game. It is officially called a "guaranteed room" at a certain level....or maybe a higher level if we really luck out <G>

This little ship does roll when the seas are very rough. They even board up the windows of the rooms on deck 3! Once we had to change course in the Pacific Ocean on our way to New Zealand because of a typhoon. The ship rolled a lot (things fell off the dinner table, bottles clanked in our room, etc.). In fact it was so rough that the elevators were damaged and two remained out of order for weeks.(The staff could be seen using the passenger elevators to take the laundry down for cleaning or up for restocking the rooms.) One night they had to announce that all handicapped people had to return to their room or deck by 8 pm because the remaining working elevators would be shut down to protect the elevators!

We really had a feeling of family for the staff who watched over us.

This closeness is a definite positive for small ship sailing. We could recognize the staff when we were on shore. We could ask them for help, or offer help to them as needed.

I can't wait for my next cruise.

Yes, we have sailed on larger ships and they have good food venues, and larger shows, but we love the coziness of Pacific Princess. And we get to meet the entertainers in a closer, less formal way!

They take coins. You can get coins at guest services (used to be called purser's desk).

There are no chairs to wait in while the machines wash. It is very hot and noisy in there too.

Thanks to the person who took photos of the laundry room and published them so we could see or be reminded of what it looks like!

I have never stayed in the owners suites, but I have visited different ones on different cruises. I do not remember the person in the owners suite on deck 6 ever complaining about the room or noise.

I do remember the person staying in the owners suite on deck 8 complaining that because it was below the buffet area, there was noise and water dripping down early in the morning as the area was cleaned for the day.

I would think either side would be okay on deck 6 or deck 7. I'd take an upgrade to any of them, even deck 8 <G>

We're from Raleigh and cruise mostly on Princess cruises, although we have done 2 on Royal Carribean and 1 on Carnival. Our kids are grown and we love to travel.