Knights on the Beach

Covington Brewhouse never reopened, did it? I loved their Strawberry Ale.

Better safe than sorry, right? LOL Maybe we can get @pirate4me2 to ask one of her favorite bartenders about this during her 4/6 cruise!

My husband sometimes grabs a coffee using Cheers on debarkation mornings. On Celebration in December we went to Bar 820 early for his coffee and my Pepsi Zero. There were other people there getting shots/drinks at the time however we had a delayed arrival due to the port being closed due to weather so I'm not sure if that's normal.

Well that stinks, you might see me mimosaless and pouting then. LOL I was hoping Ocean Plaza Bar would be open for coffee that morning and we could grab a couple mimosas there. Sounds like I need a plan b. 😂

We're looking forward to our first B2B in a couple weeks. I'm a little sad they aren't doing the mimosas anymore - seems like that would be something that adds to the celebratory feel. But we'll have Cheers so we'll just get our own. 🙂 On that note, I have a Cheers question for B2B. When we reboard the ship, will bars still or already be open? And/or can we use Cheers (from cruise #1) the morning of turnover day to get mimosas (to put in our fridge for after we reboard)? Then does the count for Cheers start over with the new card/new cruise? Not that we're likely to hit 15 in a day, but who knows. 😂

Ditto - word for word! Although I do wish Pirate had waited a few days to cruise with us! 😍

That's awesome, what a great place to stay for a wedding weekend! The first time we stayed there was in 2015 for the final chapter in my cancer treatment. We were upgraded to that fantastic suite and I fell in love with New Orleans and Bourbon Orleans during that trip. A couple visits later they again upgraded us to the same suite - we couldn't believe it! In 2022 we had a regular room booked for November and they had gone through either an ownership or brand change and lost our reservation in the transition. Fortunately I realized it had gone missing and called to check on it. They had no regular rooms but gave us a nice loft suite for the same price. We've stayed at a couple other hotels in the Quarter and each time we said we should have stayed at Bourbon Orleans.

https://www.cocoabeachhelicopters.com/helicopter-tour/index We did the "see it all" tour in 2020 on a beautiful clear day and it was amazing.

Several years ago a local told us to walk on the opposite side of the street from where cars are parked at night. We never feel unsafe there either, but we've taken that advice to heart. Our absolute favorite place to stay is Bourbon Orleans. They have some unique rooms and we love the attached Bourbon O bar. Twice we've lucked into staying in the Governor's Suite (now called DeLille Suite). The pictures on their website don't do it justice. The bathroom in that suite is bigger than most of our cruise ship cabins have been. 😂 The hotel is located on the corner of Bourbon & Orleans and we don't hang out on Bourbon at all. We usually walk along Royal Street instead of Bourbon to avoid all that mess. https://www.bourbonorleans.com/

Nice, glad to hear all this! We're doing our first B2B on Vista in 19 days.

She's in the port now, the below picture is from a few minutes ago.

Freedom will be heading back to Port Canaveral which is its home port. I'll be watching for Freedom from our balcony.

It's going to be about 45 minutes from Terminal 1 to MCO in normal traffic. We live 2 miles from the port and drove that route 5 days a week for several years (I work from home now).

What on earth ...... poor Freedom! Maybe it just wanted to go on another TA. 🤷‍♀️

Last week I got an upsell offer to upgrade to a suite on Vista for $3200. They must not really want my Lido inside for that price. A few days prior to that, I got an offer for an ocean view for $26 - on deck 1. No thanks, I'm happy with our Lido inside. For our next Mardi Gras cruise we upgraded on our own from Lido inside to Lido balcony for about $500. We decided we should have booked the balcony to start with and went ahead and made the switch before prices go up. On Vista, the difference between inside & balcony were much greater than that.

We love Mardi Gras - we've been on it 4 times and September will be our 5th. Most of the things I see people complaining about don't bother us. We weren't crazy about the food in the MDR but there are so many other good options. Other than the first day, we've never found Mardi Gras to be overly crowded. We don't usually need to stand in long lines because we quickly learned what times are best to avoid them.

Maybe my post wasn't clear enough but I was assuming they will apply the gift card to their S&S account once onboard.

So so sorry about the crappy ending to your vacation! I loved following along on your cruise and my heart sank when I saw the pictures of your car. 😭

Just paid our gratuities for the 4/20 cruise and it worked perfectly.

It's all the same anyway. If you apply the $500 gift card (or whatever balance you have on it if you buy bottomless bubbles now), any charges made on the ship will come out of that amount. You will need to either go to guest services and have them add the card to your S&S account or you can do it at a kiosk onboard. We usually have everything paid for ahead of time and still have OBC so we've never applied a gift card onboard.

I got the same message yesterday when I applied $45.77 from a card that had $500 on it. However, just above that message in red, it showed the $45.77 as the payment. I was paying gratuities for our 4/14 cruise and had 2 cards with small amounts and I applied those first then used the $500 card for the $45.77 balance. Since it looked like (to me) it was going to just use the $45.77 needed to complete the purchase even though I saw the message in red, I held my breath and submitted the payment. It went through just fine - our gratuities are paid and I have a $454.23 balance left on my $500 gift card (you bet I double checked that). 🙂 I figured if it did something crazy and applied the whole $500 to that cruise (showing $454.23 as a credit), I would just go ahead and buy Cheers. We plan to do that anyway, but usually do it the week before a cruise. Anyway, that was not the case. The transaction went through and I still have the correct balance on the gift card. Now I think I'll go ahead and pay the gratuities for the second leg of our B2B (4/20) with that same gift card since it seems to be working correctly (though that red message is confusing).

You said you were able to see the gift card option for bottomless bubbles so why don't you go ahead and pay for that with a gift card? Although if you can pay for that with the gift card, I don't see why don't have the option to do the same for gratuities. BUT will your TA not handle the transaction for you? You shouldn't have to buy cruise cash to cover gratuities, you should be able to pay them outright. You can always leave the gratuities to be paid onboard and apply a gift card to your Sail & Sign account once on the ship.

Looks like I have the same option to do it this way for our September Mardi Gras cruise. Yes, through my Carnival PVP.

See my reply to this in the other thread.

I was just able to pay our gratuities for our 4/14 cruise using 3 AARP gift cards. From Booking & Order Details, I clicked on View Invoice Details, then next to Prepaid Gratuities, I clicked on Add which took me to the payment screen showing the Gift Card option.