lx200gps

Any idea when this started? I ask because there was a thread here on CC from last year, where some folks actually parked at this very convenient covered garage and had no problems at all. They even asked the management at the garage whether it was OK to park for a cruise and were told no problem, just to park on an upper floor. We're planning on using this garage in July, otherwise one of the surface lots like C-1 nearby.

I've been researching the best options for our mid-July trip, and as the others have mentioned, Boston hotel prices, particularly mid-summer, are massively expensive. The two hotels right next to the pier, for example, are over $800/night for our dates. You may want to investigate a Park and Fly package from a Logan area hotel, as they do offer the option of staying one or two nights but leaving your car parked at their facility. From what I am seeing, the incremental cost of the extra week's parking isn't bad at all. The problem with those hotels is that they are far from the tourist areas and would require an Uber ride. That being said, I can't speak to the quality of the airport hotels and the relative safety of their parking lots. In our case, we are planning to stay up north in Burlington, where hotel prices are less than half of downtown, then drive down and park at one of the parking lots near the terminal, probably the covered garage one block north. Best of luck, have a great cruise (and welcome to Cruise Critic ;o) https://www.parksleephotels.com/Park-and-Fly-Hotel-Packages-Near-Boston-Airport-BOS.html

Heads up for the new cruiser, but there are a very few ports where a photo ID is actually needed to get back to the ship, i.e. past the port security gate. It's a local port requirement, not a Princess requirement, as once you are back to the ship, all you will need is the Medallion to get back on board and go through the scanner.

Uber would probably be easiest and cheapest. There are always a herd of them circling around 17th St waiting for calls on embarkation mornings, we've never waited more a a minute or two while watching the driver approach our hotel. No sitting in a crowded van while the driver visits all the terminals before dropping you off because yours was his last stop ;o)

As others have stated, it's almost guaranteed that the trip will leave from and return to Brooklyn. Generally, Princess only uses the MCT as an intermediate stop on a longer voyage. It's hard to understand why Princess keeps up that (Manhattan or Brooklyn) wording, but they do. In 2022, when we left from Brooklyn on the Enchanted, we also saw that confusing wording, but noticed something change within a few weeks of departure. When I went into the Personalizer to look at the booking, on the "Itinerary" tab, it still said "New York City (Manhattan or Brooklyn), New York" for the departure port, but then right underneath, very clearly listed the address of the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal, 72 Bowne Street etc.

Folks will chime in soon with lots of options, but one of our favorites is the Boatyard, just across and down 17th street from the HP, literally next to the big Renaissance. We like it because of its outdoor patio right on the canal for the yacht watching. https://boatyard.restaurant/

As stated, you definitely don't have to go to Guest Services to do the upgrade, there will be plenty of crew waiting in the Piazza just as you board who are there to help with just that purchase. Yes, the only way to use OBC for the upgrade is to do it once on board. The upgrade goes live instantly so you can enjoy the benefits right away. Every time we have done this, including last month, the price was identical to what we saw online before the cruise. As to paying with both OBC and credit card, that should be done easily. If you don't have enough OBC to cover the whole charge, then I expect the OBC would be used up first then the rest would come off your card which is already on file. If you want to do something different, such as only using a portion of the OBC for the purchase, then you would probably have to go to GS to make the special arrangement.

A very quick search on the Uber estimator site shows the fare between MCO and the Tampa cruise port would start around $100, taking between 90 minutes to 2 hours depending on route.

I literally just called in to Princess this afternoon to upgrade from Plus to Premier for one of our upcoming trips, in July. As soon as I hung up from talking to her, I went onto our account under that sailing and the upgrade was already in effect, with the Travel Summary showing our Premier package. Interesting that the rep actually admitted that they only release a certain percentage of dining slots in advance. That has always been our understanding, certainly from our personal experience, I've just never heard of Princess admitting it. As to booking SD restaurants on board, we usually eat in the SDRs, hardly ever in the MDRs. We never book on line in advance and always prefer to book once we board. We rarely have any problem, and calling the DINE line is one of our first actions upon boarding, though we also will just walk up to each of the venues and book in person.

Our on-line account on the Air Canada site already has all this information loaded in and it is applied to every booking we make automatically, so I never have to bother entering the info myself. When we check in on line the day before the flight (or at the check in counter), our NEXUS/Global Entry info is already loaded into the system and our boarding passes are automatically tagged with TSA-Pre-Check.

is there a particular reason why you aren't including the other two big hotels on 17th St, the Renaissance and the Hilton Marina? Depending on the time of year, and therefore the hotel pricing, these two can be excellent alternatives to the three you have referenced. We have stayed at the Renaissance a number of times when it has been lower priced than the Hyatt Place, and it is a large, full service hotel, even closer to the port, and IMHO better than the Hyatt Place and Holiday Inn. We haven't yet stayed at the ES, given all the reviews here on CC. Taxi from FLL to the 17th hotel strip is around $20 =/-

I'm sure it can be done over the phone, even though we always work through our TA. The first, last, and only time I ever called Princess I was on hold for 45 minutes. When I finally connected, I was talking to what I assume was a home-based rep who answered the phone with me while yelling at her kids in the background. Before she even acknowledged me, I was disconnected. Obviously your experiences have been fine, but I'm disinclined to call Princess. Next time I'm talking to our TA I'll ask her if this is something she would normally handle, but realistically I'd rather not bother her with it and we'll just wait until we board. Especially if she has to call Princess to do it.

Same here, I detest using a smart phone as a PC. In this case, even the web version of the "app" did not allow the upgrade either. And yes, I'm pretty sure it's a new thing, up until pretty recently, when I clicked on the "Upgrade Now" button, it did open up a table that showed what I currently had (Plus), the upgrade price, and a way to select the upgrade immediately. This change, where this was eliminated, seems to have happened very recently. Given the world-class skill of Princess's IT consultants/web site managers, I can only assume this is a conscious change and not an error ;o)

Thanks for feedback every one. This sailing is July 14 on the Emerald out of Boston, final payment is next month. I suspect we will simply wait and do it after boarding as usual, there's obviously no shortage of staff waiting by the gangway to help with the upgrade ;o). You would think that Princess would want to offer a pre-cruise upgrade path as a way to take our money ahead of time, but they don't make it easy.

I'm in the process of trying to upgrade the "package" for our next trip from Plus to our usual Premier. Yes, I well know that we can very easily upgrade upon boarding, as we usually do, however I want to do the upgrade now rather than waiting until we board, as we have very little OBC for that specific trip to use for the on board upgrade. Up until recently, when I went to the Personalizer and signed in to the specific trip, I was presented with a loud blue banner which had an "Upgrade Now" button, which opened a window showing all three packages, the one we already had booked (Plus) and a button against Premier which would allow us to upgrade on the spot and pay the delta. Now, when I click the Upgrade Now button a window flashes past too quickly to read then another window opens up saying "You’ve purchased Princess Plus, great choice", listing the perqs that come with Plus, but with absolutely no apparent way to buy the upgrade. Beyond messaging our TA and asking her to do the upgrade, is there any way for me to buy the upgrade now? Calling Princess is a non-starter, won't happen, and I'd rather not try to do this on a cell phone with the App. Thanks in advance.

The last time were "shut out" of having the pre-boarding lounge was at PE early last year. I suspect that in that particular case, they knew in advance that they would start boarding so early (which they did, not much past 10AM), that they decided to save a few bucks and help out the overworked staff by ditching the PES lounge altogether

I think that's heavily dependent on the port. On one of our sailings last year, at PE T2, there was no lounge at all, all passengers herded into the big lower level waiting room for a very early boarding. On our other sailings from PE there has been a fully equipped lounge. This past October, and again a month ago, at San Pedro, there was a full lounge set up. Why do you say they're disappearing? Which port and when? Thx.

Certain credit cards, such as my wife's TD Visa Infinite and my TD Visa Infinite Privilege (and there are almost certainly others) include a paid NEXUS renewal every 5 years. Her card was refunded the $CAD69.74 as a "NEXUS Rebate" within a day or two of us submitting her renewal application.

There are actually two steps in the process. The first step in the embarkation process is check-in, where the Green and Blue lines happen. Those who have their Medallions in hand before arrival are in the Green lane, those without their Medallions are in the Blue lane. Once checked-in, if boarding has not yet started, you can sit in the appropriate "boarding" area waiting to start loading. Elites, Suite guests, Platinum usually have a dedicated area they can sit in and get to board first. Note that the very first to board, ahead of everyone else, are the back to back returning passengers

It's been a number of years since I last flew through YYZ, but I can guarantee that YUL is absolutely dreadful in that regard. We have waited every bit as long for our bags here as you do. More annoying is the fact that the baggage handlers here do not recognize the bright orange PRIORITY tags that AC put on luggage and our bags often come out much later than those without priority. Most airports in the US do seem to try and get our bags out to the carousel first, but not here in Montreal.

NEXUS is a huge no-brainer and the best freebie I can think of, we can only hope that it doesn't get so popular that the usually empty NEXUS lines start to get crowded ;o) We just renewed my wife's card and the full refund to the charge was automatically credited back to her credit card within two days.

This ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ I too have never seen this popup when signed on to CC

Interesting idea, and theoretically possible but probably unlikely. In October and again last month, we Uber'd from our hotels in Torrance and LAX to San Pedro, and both times, our driver already had a confirmed booking from passengers getting off the Princess ship were arriving to. I suspect it would be tough to find an Uber driver just sitting there trying to bag a fare on speculation. That being said, one other option if you don't want to use your cell phone data, would be to use the ship's wifi before arrival, even the day before, and pre-book the Uber to have them arrive at the pickup area at a certain time. I can't speak to pre-booking Ubers but I know people do it all the time. The only problem with that is that without an active data line/cell phone, i don't know how you would know which Uber is yours, so finding your specific vehicle may be tough. One of the things I love about using the system is the ability to track, in detail, the arrival of your ride and to know in advance the specific details of the vehicle, its color and license plate, the name and photo of the driver etc. I don't know how that would work without a cell phone. Perhaps some real Uber experts can chime in...

We're with Bell and US roaming is a hefty $13/day. That being said, I still regard it as worthwhile for no other reason than Ubering between LAX and San Pedro. The $13CAD plus the much lower Uber cost still works out a lot less than the taxi from San Pedro all the way up to LAX. Also, an elevated Uber, like XL or Comfort usually means a higher rated driver, and we've had some maniac taxi drivers before we started using Uber. For our other usual port, Port Everglades, it's not worth it since FLL is about 30 feet from PE and so taxis are cheap, so I don't usually use the cell phone there.

We departed SP for LAX in October and again last month. Tons of taxis and Ubers available. Wasn't looking for shuttles.