chengkp75

What "personal details"? The list has your name and whether you paid DSC or not. That is a simple record of a business transaction between you and the cruise line, and the cruise line is informing its employees about that transaction.

Not quite correct. What is guaranteed is a minimum wage (currently $666/month) of about 40-50% of what the crew sign their contract for. And, the DSC "fund" makes up about 80% of their total salary. So, if the "fund" falls short, the crew get less wages until it drops below the statutory minimum, and then the cruise line only makes up to the minimum. Have you worked with a cruise line to know how the compensation for crew is determined? I have.

Most of those "helipads" do not support enough weight to land a typical medium/long range SAR helicopter, plus the ship has no way of tying down the helo once it lands and the ship is pitching and rolling. Navy ships use a "bearclaw" trap device. So, it is safer for the flight crew and the ship that they don't land. Yes, not an aviator (especially not a rotary wing one), but I've spent a lot of time on helicopters, and a backwards moving hover with a large steel obstruction moving towards you is one of the most challenging flights a pilot can accomplish. For this reason, many do hoist rescues from the open upper decks, so the ship isn't in the pilot's face, but this has difficulties caused by the thermal updrafts from the ship's exhausts.

Sure. If anything goes sideways with a helicopter in a moving hover in front of the ship, where do you think the helicopter will end up? In your cabin, so they get you out of Dodge. Not just debris, either the helo itself or a rotor blade, which could cut its way right through your cabin, or even a jet fuel fire. As you mention, a secondary measure is to prevent folks from using flash photography pointed at the helicopter. Remember, the ship is still moving (unless the seas are actually glass smooth) to keep the rolling under control, so the pilot is hovering over the helipad, while backing the helicopter at the ship's forward speed. The pilot concentrates on the visual (i.e. how close is the ship, the deck, etc), while the co-pilot concentrates on the instruments. If you distract the pilot with a bright light (or god forbid a laser), he loses the spatial picture, and then if the co-pilot tries to take over, it takes him seconds to acquire the picture, during which things can go sideways real fast. This is such a dangerous maneuver that privacy of the patient is not really considered.

Actually, this is the main reason that the crew salary is from the DSC for the most part. This forces the crew into a "team" customer service effort, to keep the DSC pool up, while taking the blame for reduced salary when DSC is removed away from the cruise line and placing it on the passenger. And, it is not just RCI that does this.

Helicopter embark/disembark for harbor pilots is not all that uncommon when the weather turns rough, and it's not safe to bring the pilot boat alongside. Pilotage fees are a flat rate (based on ship size) for a given time period (the usual transit time), and after that the fee is hourly. If a pilot is retained onboard after the sea buoy, most commonly until the next port, the ship pays that hourly fee every hour the pilot is on the ship (even sleeping), and every hour it takes to get back to home port (as well as paying the transportation).

Google "biodegradable urn"

It's not that the OP doesn't understand, it's that they don't want to accept personal responsibility for their actions. A sad, but all too common, occurrence today.

Sorry, but this is just not correct. Each cabin has three ventilation systems. The first one is the one controlled by the cabin thermostat, and that one takes air from that one cabin, sends it over a cooling or heating coil, for that one cabin, and then returns the air to that one cabin, much like a window AC in your house. The second one is the bathroom exhaust vent, which takes air from a bank of cabin bathrooms, but delivers it to the outside, it does not recirculate that air. The third one is the fresh air supply system. This brings in outside air, cools it or heats it, and delivers the air to a bank of cabins, but again, there is no recirculation of air, nor of co-mingling of air between cabins. So, there is no transfer of air between cabins at any point in the system. The only place that air from one cabin mixes with air from another cabin is out in the hallway, but this air is kept at a slightly lower pressure than inside the cabins, so that air always flows from the cabins into the hallways, and not the other way. "Cruise crud" is mainly caused by the low humidity AC air drying out your sinus membranes, which are the first, and most effective, barrier against airborne pathogens. Daily use of a saline nasal spray will typically prevent this. As for surfaces in the cabin, cruise ship cabins are no less sanitary, or sanitized than hotel rooms, and governmental requirements tend to make them cleaner than hotels.

I don't do notifications, so not to worry. For dry dock dates, I go to the DNV register database (for NCL ships) and look for the "bottom survey" dates. I wanted to know where POA did her last docking, to see where she might go next time, and that is when I found the April info. Not sure if it was a pod issue, but that makes sense. New dry dock in Pearl should make more availability for commercial ships.

First off, you were booked on two cruises, not one. One ended, and one began in Reykjavik. Second, this is like saying "I got on a city bus, and paid the fare (which allows me to travel to any stop anywhere along the route, and re-enter the bus at any stop along the route), but I got off after two stops, walked around the corner, and got hit by a car. Since I was "still a paying customer" of the bus line, they should be responsible for my medical bills. SMH.

Here's the biggest misconception you have. When you were off the ship, you were not still paying customers. You did a downstream disembark from your first cruise. Cruise over. You had a second cruise booked, and you were given the okay to downstream board this cruise. Until you reboarded, you were not a passenger of NCL's. And, I can guarantee (yes, I have worked for NCL, about 16 years ago, in a shipboard capacity) that NCL told you that there was a possibility of them not making your requested re-embarkation port. This is standard language, that has been used for these situation for decades. This is correct, but you were not on a ship sponsored excursion. You keep saying that the cruise line has a responsibility to allow you to safely re-embark. No, they don't. Passengers who go ashore, and do not partake in a ship sponsored excursion (meaning they have no official contact between excursion provider and ship), and who miss the ship departing, are left on their own, as this was their decision. It happens all the time. Are they supposed to be texting every passenger every hour to make sure they know when to return to the ship? And, as I've said, while a passenger is on a ship sponsored excursion, yes, they are still "paying customers", since they have no intention of leaving the ship at that port. You, on the other hand, ended your first cruise early (whether you think of a B2B as one cruise, it isn't in the cruise line's view), and you were no longer a passenger, but a customer who had permission to join a second cruise late, and as I've said, this always has the caveat that you may not be able to join at the later port. To answer your question directly, no one has had any success getting a refund in your situation, because you don't have any reason to get a refund.

A ship can only turn their AIS off, if directed to by a national agency if a threat is identified. AIS signal is just a radio signal, that goes out in all directions. The ship's AIS transmitter doesn't care whether the station that picks up the signal is a land based station or a satellite, or even another ship (which is really what AIS was designed for, to allow ships to identify each other).

Yes, it will be a dry dock. While POA apparently completed a bottom survey in April of this year, that didn't align with the main class certificate survey date (maybe offset due to Covid shutdown, and may also have been an underwater survey) (and this was done in Pearl Harbor and was a 42 hour long docking, very unusual), so the DNV main class survey, which is essentially a renewal of all class certificates (machinery, hull, safety construction, automation, load line, etc, etc) is due between Mar 2025 and Jun 2025. So, it appears they got a dry dock slot in May. This involves taking thickness measurements of hull plating all around the ship, so it has to be out of the water to do this. And, yes, all cruise lines will do this, as dry dock time has to be booked long in advance, and you take what comes up, when it comes up, so they likely only got notification of the dry dock availability a day or two before you received the email. They knew it had to be in the Mar - Jun timeframe, but wouldn't cancel any cruises until a definite date was set.

There is nothing in the SOLAS construction requirements that would disallow wood paneling, as long as there is sufficient fire suppression available (sprinklers). Actually, no. Changes in IMO conventions like SOLAS are never retroactive, so ships built before the enactment of the changes do not need to meet the changes. This is why the retirement announcement came as a surprise to many.

I don't think it is dishonest, somewhat deceptive marketing, perhaps. Under the old pricing model, it benefited the cruise lines to push as much as possible into the "port taxes and fees" as possible, in order to keep the advertised fare as low as possible. This went to an extreme, and a lawsuit resulted in them being regulated as to what could be included in the "port taxes and fees", which were allowed to be broken out of the fare as they constitute a "pass through" expense (passed from passenger to third party). Under the new model, there is no longer a benefit of stuffing all kinds of fees into the "port taxes and fees", so you now see a "port taxes", that is still refundable if a port is canceled, as this is paid directly to a port, while the rest of the fees are paid to third party entities (pilot's association, tug company, etc), and so these are now pushed to the new "required fees and expenses", and are no longer refundable (note that the new category does not mention "port" anywhere in the name, so it is no longer tied to any port). Carnival created this new category of charges so that the base fare is maintained as low as possible, even though it is included in the advertised fare. So, my point is, that under the old pricing model, they were giving back more than they needed to, because they were inflating the "port taxes and fees", so if they hadn't inflated those taxes and fees, as separate broken out charges, you would have paid twice for them as a solo anyway, because it would have been in the fare. It was a marketing decision that they would garner more money from lower advertised fares (increased occupancy) than from possible refunds of inflated "port taxes and fees".

While I have personally researched power strips at the request of CC posters, and having found ones that claim to be non-surge protected, while in fact being surge protected, the wording is very important to understand what you are buying. For instance, a quick look at Amazon found one that states "the power strip can prevent your electric devices from over-current/over-charge/short circuit/over-heated." That unit is not surge protected. None of those terms used to describe the safety features of the electronics is in any way connected to what a surge protector does. The best way to determine if a power strip is surge protected or not, is to look at any marketing photo that shows the back of the unit, and the specifications molded into the label there. If there is a "VPN" rating, then the unit is surge protected, but if not, then it is not.

Unless there is a massive breakthrough in technology, solar panels will never be cost effective on ships, especially cruise ships. Solar panels are "low density" power producers, meaning it takes a large area or volume to generate a specific amount of energy. Meanwhile, cruise ships are "high density" power consumers, meaning you suck up a whole lot of power in a small volume. A solar panel today generates around 180 watts/square meter, so to generate the amount of power that a diesel generator on a cruise ship can generate (in a volume smaller than a semi-trailer truck) would require over 80,000 square meters of panels. Add in that solar panels are at best 25-30% efficient in converting the solar energy, while the diesel engine is around 80% efficient due to waste heat usage (evaporators and fuel heating as noted in the above, aged, thread) and waste heat boilers, the cost/benefit of solar panels on a ship just are not there. Solar panel efficiency has only improved from about 15% to the current 25% over the last 40 years.

Well, not quite. First off, even on land, the neutral wire carries current (it has to to complete the circuit for current to flow), however, since it is at ground potential (0 volts above ground), there is no danger from that current. Next, what you describe as a surge protector function is a bit of misleading information from the USCG Safety Notice regarding surge protectors. The Safety Notice unfortunately conflates a problem with a surge protector along with a problem caused by a "US type consumer power strip". It is the power strip's circuit breaker that will only trip the "hot" leg, letting the neutral leg continue to carry current at a voltage higher than ground, that causes the risk for fire from a normal, non-surge protected, US consumer power strip. The risk of fire from a surge protector is a whole different animal, and deals more with voltage than current, in that surge protectors used in "floating ground" systems can fail, and cause a fire, with an extremely low current level, but with small voltage fluctuations that happen full time on a ship. These voltage fluctuations are not damaging to electronics, but a surge protector is only rated for its nominal voltage (like 120 volts) for a long period, but subjecting it to voltage swings above that nominal voltage takes away some life expectancy of the semi-conductors each time the voltage swings high.

Let's just say that Meyer Werft doesn't even crack the top 20 largest shipbuilders in the world.

Lots and lots of companies depend on the "pride of workmanship" from their employees to maintain their business, and then repay those employees for their pride.

That would be the person who didn't foresee a global pandemic with a worldwide economic shutdown, and subsequent dislocation of the supply chain and spiking costs. Don't think a lot of companies have CEO's that are that prescient. All companies that rely on long term contracts got hosed by Covid, the fact that the shipbuilding industry works almost exclusively on long term, future contracts just makes the problem worse, and I would not be surprised to find other yards have been scrambling for outside financing due to the pandemic.

First, nothing is "cruise approved", no cruise line approves third party products, and even if it says it is, that is no guarantee that it is not surge protected.

I believe the point @dexddd was making was that the Triumph was not a "plumbing issue".

What next? The face palm meme?