snowmaiden

In the past month, I’ve started getting emails from NCL indicating that I’m a Latitudes rewards member.  There’s a member number given, at the rank of bronze.  The thing is that I’ve never taken an NCL cruise (although I have cruised in the past with Royal Caribbean, Celebrity, and Princess.)  I’d like to make sure there’s not a simple explanation for how I “joined” Latitudes before I take the trouble to call them and start investigating.  Does anybody have a possible answer for me?

The dining room upsell items are a *very* new thing.  We were on the Regal for the Oct. 13 sailing, and they weren't offered then.  Then again, your pictures of the MDR food look much better than what we experienced.  What a difference a week makes!

As of last week, they had not.

10 hours ago, apeller said:

I read the terms and conditions on cancelling excursions you book in advance.  

If a pre-paid shore excursion is cancelled during the voyage prior to the "Closing Time for Cancellation" listed for the particular excursion you wish to cancel, then the pre-paid amount will be refunded to the guest named on the pre-paid reservation as a shipboard credit on this guest's shipboard folio. Please note this is done regardless of which guest pre-paid for the shore excursion.

 

Does anyone know if this shipboard credit is refundable credit?  I would assume so, but it doesn't specify on the Princess site. 

We had to cancel an excursion on our cruise last week, and yes, it was refundable.

We ate in the main dining room in the evenings last week, but I often went to the buffet for supplementary eating.  (We were displeased with the MDR food on this sailing, but that's a subject for another thread!) I saved all my Patters, so I have the nightly themes as listed there.  They were: Mongolian BBQ, Soup, Tex-Mex, Soup, Soup, International (it seemed to be Brazilian to me that night), and Oktoberfest.  Now that I think about it, soup isn't really much of a theme, but that's what the Patter says for those nights.

1 minute ago, luckyinpa said:

 

were 'both sides' ever open at the same time. i guess i went in off hours but only front or back was ever open. never both at the same time

Yes, all of it was open most of the time on our cruise last week.  Occasionally one of the "lanes" would be closed for cleaning, but that was rare.

On our sailing last week, the earlier traditional dining times were 5:15 and 5:30.

8 hours ago, Colo Cruiser said:

Someone currently onboard the CB posted today that the internet is no longer free for Platinum/Elite.

 

I hope this is not the same for the Regal. Sailing in 2 weeks.

We talked to a platinum couple last night in the dining room.  They mentioned how much they loved the free internet.  So it is still a benefit as of right now.

We are on the Regal Princess right now.  We missed Bar Harbor on Tuesday due to high winds.  I don’t think this was due to a hurricane, but a local storm.  (Then again, we’ve been paying very little attention to the news while on board!) We were refunded the money for our shore excursion there, and I see they also refunded the $11 in port taxes.  It was disappointing, but the safety of everybody on board is the most important thing.

We are on the Regal right now and my husband, who refuses to even think about wearing a suit jacket, had no problem getting in with a tie and nice shirt.  In fact, the man in front of us in line on the first formal night was wearing a red fleece and jeans and also got in without comment from the staff.  As much as my husband likes to disregard the rules, even he was a little shocked to see that! 

1 hour ago, Colo Cruiser said:

Did you by chance partake in any internet packages?

If so how was it?

We hadn’t planned on getting an internet package, but when we missed Bar Harbor yesterday and got our shore excursion money refunded as onboard credit, we decided to splurge.  The $59.99 price is for one device.  The only other option is four devices, which costs roughly twice as much.  We wanted to use our two ipads at the same time, so we chose that one.  If you sign up for a package after the cruise has started, it gives you a prorated rate.  I remember ours was around $80 for the remaining four days.  The connection has been wonderful, and aside from a few hiccups when trying to watch streaming video, it has worked just as reliably as our connection at home.

2 minutes ago, Colo Cruiser said:

Anyone have the recent Regal embarkation day Patter with the current officers listed on the front page?   

Yes, here it is!

3 hours ago, CkCkHunt said:

Would love if you wanted to take photos of the menus and post them here!

 

I was afraid you’d say that.  We’re on night five and haven’t done it so far, so it might be late to start now!  Honestly, though, I’ve been looking at the menus posted by the dining rooms and then comparing them to these menus from 2016: http://www.cruisetipstv.com/star-princess-menus-download/  The format of the menus has changed a bit, and some of the fish choices are different, but otherwise they are almost exactly the same.  So far we have had nights 1, 3, 7, 8, and 9.

We are on the Regal right now.  I can say that there are definitely not new menus at present.  I also hope that changes soon!

Thank you for posting this! I feel that I know the two of you from reading all your wonderful reviews. We seem to share the same taste in destinations, so I often use your website as a sort of wishbook to see where I want to go next!

I notice that all your upcoming cruises are on Celebrity. For a while, it looked like you were making the leap to Oceania as your regular cruiseline. As someone who's often tempted by Oceania, especially by what I've heard about their food, I'm curious to hear more about your opinions of the two lines and what has brought you back to Celebrity.

I feel your pain. My husband and I had to cancel an Alaska cruise with Princess two years ago due to my own health problems. When we first realized we might need to cancel, we could have gotten 25% back from Princess, which didn't seem like much, so we decided to let it ride and see if my health improved. It didn't, and since we didn't have travel insurance we lost everything we'd paid for the cruise and flight. Fortunately, we were able to get some money back from shore excursions and our pre- and post-cruise hotels. We'd committed $6000 and got $2000 back, which means we lost $4000. It was a valuable lesson. I'd thought we were too young to need travel insurance, but I was wrong. Now we always get it, and we're hoping to be able to afford another try at Alaska one of these years.

We're back from our cruise on the Summit, and I'm happy to report that there was absolutely no noise from overhead in 9007. The ceiling seemed to be made of extra-thick noise-reducing tiles. I'm not sure if this is the norm in all cabins on the Summit or not, but in any case, they did their job and we didn't hear a thing from above.

That being said, there were two (very) slight issues with noise in this cabin. First of all, since the cabin has a connecting door, you could sometimes hear the people next door more than normal. They seemed to be pretty quiet most of the time, so it wasn't really an issue, but on a different kind of cruise, it might have been.

Second, there's a crew door at the end of the hallway. We would often see officers in the hallway as we left or returned to our room, so we speculated that the door led to the bridge. Most of the time there wasn't too much noise from this door, but at certain times (shift changes?) many people would pass through within the space of a few minutes, and we got to hear the door slam each time! We're sound sleepers, so it didn't bother us, but if a slamming door would rouse you from your sleep, you would want to consider this, since the bridge is a 24/7 operation.

Our one cruise on RCCL was two years ago. It said the same thing on the website before our cruise, but none of the nights were actually designated smart casual. We had our two formal nights (which were not actually very formal in practice) and the rest were all casual. (One night was also designated "Caribbean night," which was odd as we weren't even in the Caribbean. I wore a skirt with flowers on it and my husband wore his brightest colored shirt. Most people seemed to ignore it.)

Northern Aurora, I wish they had a "like" button here so I could like your post! I've also seen it said many places that there is a 14-day cycle or that the menus are in exactly the same order on every cruise, and it simply isn't true. I look at menus because I have a lot of food intolerances, so I like to do advance thinking about which dishes sound the safest for me. This means order isn't important to me at all, but I do look at a lot of people's menu pictures to get a sense of all the possibilities, and I've figured out that aside from embarkation night, which is always the same, and the last night, which almost always involves roast turkey, there isn't a set menu order.

curiouscat, since you said you wanted to see current menus for the Silhouette, I assumed it was Europe you were interested in. If you want to see standard North American/Caribbean menus, another of the Preismans recent cruises is probably the best to look at: http://www.thepreismans.com/pan_can_menus.htm#mdr. (As you can tell, I just love the Preismans' site because they're so thorough. They only have one Celebrity cruise scheduled for 2016, though, as they've started making the switch to Oceania.) There are also tons of reviews here on the Celebrity board that have pictures of menus embedded in them, but in a very quick search, I couldn't find any for the Silhouette last winter.

As far as the coffee prices go, the Cafe al Bacio menu with the $6 pricing was from a Spain/Canary Islands cruise in October 2014. Only a month later, on the Preisman's Panama Canal cruise, the menu showed $5 pricing. I'm assuming that prices are higher in Europe, unless someone else has a better explanation.

The Silhouette menus on that site are ancient. (I'm not sure exactly how old, but they mention Jacques van Staden, and was with Celebrity from 2009 to 2012.) Celebrity's menus are the same across ships and change very gradually over time, but they do vary somewhat by region. Since the Silhouette is in Europe, these menus from a Spain and Canary islands cruise last winter will probably be fairly close: http://www.thepreismans.com/spain14_menus.htm#dining.

Here's the official U.S. government rules on passport photos: http://travel.state.gov/content/passports/en/passports/photos/photos.html. Hair isn't mentioned at all. It does say you need a plain white background and a "neutral facial expression." I think that's why passport photos usually look so strange. My attempt at a neutral expression actually looks vaguely peeved.

I'm having this problem from the other side. I've been getting someone else's emails from Celebrity for several months now. After I got an invoice for a cruise that I hadn't booked, I called the phone number for website concerns. They put me on hold for quite a while, then said they couldn't see my email address anywhere on this person's record and didn't know why I was getting them. They said that there was nothing they could do to help me and I should just delete the emails when I got them in the future.

Eventually I did get a message that included the person's full name, which confirmed that it wasn't anyone I know, but a complete stranger. Through the magic of Google, I've figured out how I could get in contact with him, but I'm not sure if I should. Perhaps I should try contacting Celebrity again? I'm quite confused at this point, especially since I have an upcoming cruise as well, and sometimes it takes some digging to figure out which emails actually are meant for me.

Update: I've continued to get emails directed at this person almost every day, for what seem to be several different cruises. Today I finally had a breakthrough. It seems he's just about to leave on another cruise, and I got a "final details" message for him that included his full name. Of course, I ran right to Google, and I found out that he's a well-known travel agent. Now I'm not sure if these are all his personal cruises or for his clients. I've also found out he's known for having a nasty temper and somewhat shady business practices, so I'm not sure if I want to ask for his help in getting this cleared up or if that would be opening a huge can of worms. I also am a little bit worried that this could turn out to be some kind of a fraud/identity theft thing after all.

Thoughts?

So if everyone got their interview invitations at the same time and I didn't get one, I guess I'm off the hook. Oh, well, it's nice to know that for sure already. :p

Having just gone through the whole application process with Needle, I feel like there are some misconceptions floating around about what being an advocate entails. From what I understand at this point, advocates will chat with people who are on the Celebrity website and request help in finding the right cruise or with using the interface. (And we all know that everyone using the Celebrity site can use help sometimes! :D) I didn't see anything about writing positive reviews or blog posts about Celebrity in other online venues. (It's true that they did ask to see examples of product reviews I've written in the past, but I assumed it was just to get a sense of my writing style and how nice I am.) As I understand it, advocates will be paid by the hour for time they actually spend on chat, not for anything else.

I'd like to thank Host Andy for starting this thread, by the way, even if it has veered somewhat off course. I was an academic librarian until a few years ago, and one of the things I loved most about my job was chatting with library users who were stuck on our website. If I can combine that with my love of cruising, all the better!