No Anytime Dining in Japan???

[Expat Cruise]

3 hours ago, memoak said:

The Pacific Princess also only has 1 MDR and only has traditional dining hours - still one of my favorite ships

The MDR on deck five is used for Traditional dinning and the MDR on Deck 6 was all MTD on the last three cruises we have done on the Sun.  But Club Class Dinning  is also found  in the Deck 6 Dinning Area. Also Deck 6 MDR is the one that will be open for breakfast and lunch. 

[Aus Traveller]

deleted for amendment

Edited April 13, 2019 by Aus Traveller

[Aus Traveller]

3 minutes ago, Expat Cruise said:

The MDR on deck five is used for Traditional dinning and the MDR on Deck 6 was all MTD on the last three cruises we have done on the Sun.  But Club Class Dinning  is also found  in the Deck 6 Dinning Area. Also Deck 6 MDR is the one that will be open for breakfast and lunch. 

Exactly. Two dining rooms. Anytime Dining in the evening is in the MDR on deck 6.

[Aus Traveller]

7 hours ago, sandyoftheseas said:

We were on our Australian cruise in 2012 so it was a while ago.  I am glad they offer anytime dinning in Australia at least on some ships. Anytime dining is our preference but, traditional dining can be interesting depending on your tablemates.

Unfortunately your previous post gave the impression that at the moment there is no Anytime Dining on the Aussie-based ships. Your cruise was seven years ago and a lot can change in that time - and it has.🙂

 

In the post I have quoted you say "I am glad they offer anytime dinning in Australia at least on some ships." Anytime Dining is available on ALL Australian-based Princess ships, something I am pleased about. 🙂

[Brisbane41]

On 4/12/2019 at 5:00 AM, cruzrbachoua said:

Perhaps it is a cultural thing... I know there a some differences in cabin set up and stuff when the ship is in Japan so I can see that maybe this is because of that as well.

Its nothing to do with a cultural thing. Princess is just trying to segregate passengers in to English speakers and Japanese speakers. It has been this way for years now. 

 

The problem Princess is having here is that they fail to realise that not all passengers want to eat in the dining room. Some go to the buffet and some go to speciality restaurants. What this is doing is leaving tables allocated where you may have a table for 8 and only 1 person turns up or a table for 6 and 2 people turn up and things like that. It is very rare to get a good dining room table on the Diamond Princess in Japan that does not have some sort of lack of people using the restaurant or changes due to people getting tired of the system and leaving.

 

What does work is anytime dining. When the Diamond Princess is in port of a night time and passengers are ashore like a late night departure the dining rooms will open of an evening for anytime dining and they will fill all the tables.

 

It is just a matter of the staff on the ship being lazy and putting anytime dining in the too hard basket and giving everyone a table number and forgetting about doing any hard work.

 

The Japanese are exactly the same as us when it comes to dining. Some will like fixed times and others would prefer flexible times.

 

It is the language barrier that is causing the problem because they are trying to put all the Japanese guests with waiters who have an understanding of the language.

 

I have done Diamond Princess in Japan for the past 5 years now and nothing has changed.

[Aloha 1]

On 4/12/2019 at 6:30 AM, newport dave said:

We did a Japan cruise on Celebrity and they had their version of Anytime Dining, so don't think it's a cultural thing. 

The Princess cruises based from Japan that only make one stop outside of Japan are about 55% Japanese. X usually stops at a couple Japanese ports and the rest are China, Taiwan, South Korea. Cliental largely North American/Euro.