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First timers on O and celebrating a big anniversary so we really wanted a nice table for 2 at Jacques on a specific night. Our O rep volunteered to make the reservations but I just felt better staying up to make them myself - we are in an A3 cabin on Marina in late August. So my report for other newbies is that it was very easy to make all the dinner reservations online with one small exception. Dining reservations became active for me right on time and opened without any problems - and was pretty easy to navigate. My one issue is that one must select either dine alone or share prior to and separately from selecting a specific restaurant and date. (There are buttons at the top of the dining reservation page that are quite separate from the actual act of making a dining reservation.) If you want all alone tables or shared tables it isn't much of an issue - but we wanted a mix and you have to remember to make the change at the top of the page for table type before moving on to the next desired reservation. But, even though I made a mistake on table type - it was easy to correct and I was all done by 12:15AM EDT. So overall - very easy and we got all the restaurants, dates and times we wanted.

Us too - this is a big cruise for us (50th anniversary) and our first on O. We used up our SM credit plus quite a bit more on a 20+ day BTB cruise. We have been X Retreat cruisers in the past and one thing X did was refund cancelled excursions whether the port was cancelled or not.

We also booked a 20+ day cruise back in July for August 2024 (our first on O) and we got $1600 credit - looks like that that went down more than $200. Good for us on this trip - but not so good for future travel. (Its technically two ~10 day B2B cruises but is also sold as a single 20+ day cruise.) We are a little worried about our first O cruise which we booked based on the itinerary and lots of recommendations from people in our community. Seems like all the cruise lines are cutting amenities and raising prices.

It has been a while since I have cruised on Celebrity but we have one coming up in 2023 with lots of onboard credit. It is my understanding that if we are to use it to book specialty restaurants or excursions, we have to wait until we are onboard to use onboard credit to do so. Purchasing an excursion or specialty restaurant package before the cruise means paying for it with a credit card. Is my previous recollection of this policy still correct?