kd202

Even if your health insurance covers you adequately for urgent treatment outside the US, you may want to consider travel medical insurance for the additional benefits it can provide -- your travel partner's hotel  while you are hospitalized, airline charges for itinerary changes or seat upgrades to accommodate a leg cast, for example, and for the hotline to the insurance company and the expertise of its staff in connecting you with  the help you need.

We have been able to get comprehensive travel insurance for a small initial fee at the time of booking (for the pre-existing condition coverage) , with a policy revision and additional premium paid at the time of final payment. These have been Travel Guard policies purchased through our travel agent. 

I'll echo so many above re SPB in Baltic ports -- we had absolutely fantastic guides in Berlin and Stockholm, and very good tours in St.P and Helsinki. Even with a StP guide whose English was not quite as fluent as our guides in the other ports, the 2-day tour  there was still spectacular, with adjustments to the usual itinerary to avoid huge crowds on a busy local holiday weekend.

Shipmates who used Alla or TJ reported similar experiences, so you should be fine with any of those three.

Another option is room service breakfast, which we enjoy on early port excursion days. It is a much more limited menu, but the value of a pot of coffee while we dress is worth the trade-off.

We get moving too late for MDR on most days, but we do enjoy the menu and waiter service when we manage to get there.

I see that nothing much has changed since our disappointing stay at the Anchorage Westmark in 2013. We were on a Yukon-Denali land and sea trip, so were in Westmark properties for the entire land portion. Anchorage was terrible,  Whitehorse kinda shabby,  the rest (Denali, Fairbanks, Skagway) were fine, and  Dawson City, Yukon, was our favorite. I have much higher expectations for the hotel in Alaska's commercial capital than I do for the remote Yukon locations. I complained to HAL that we were put in the Anchorage Westmark, despite having booked the Hilton through them, but all I got was a form letter non-apology. The trip was otherwise fantastic, though, and I had forgotten about that miserable hotel until  I saw this  discussion!