Apparently, the Millennium is scheduled to travel through a time warp

[Bruin Steve]

Groundhog Day alert!

 

I recently booked a "Transpacific" cruise on Millennium in April/May 2021--Tokyo to Vancouver.  We cross the International Date Line on "Day 9" of the cruise.  Now, Tokyo is 17 hours ahead of Pacific time...or 7 hours behind, but the next day... My assumption, since Celebrity is selling this as a "15 night cruise" is that on 7 of those 15 nights, we move our clock ahead one hour...and, as it appears to read on the Celebrity website itinerary, we merely repeat May 3, the day we cross the International Date Line...and we actually do have 15 dinners, 15 main shows, etc.

 

Being in Select Dining, one thing I always do way in advance is to make reservations for dinner--generally every night at 7:00--since that is typically the hardest time to get (I'll adjust later if there's a late port tour)...and they always seem to let me show up a little early or a little late.

 

Well, I just did that for this one...and the system only allowed me to book 14 nights...

 

So, I called Celebrity...and the agent I got, "Wendy" was even more confused than I was.  The website itinerary shows us repeating "Day 9"...but she kept insisting we LOSE a day!  Now, I've never cruised across the Pacific before, but I have flown across it a few times and I can pretty well remember losing a day flying to Asia and gaining it back coming home.

 

Well, Wendy put me on hold for a long time while she looked for someone who knew the answer.  40 minutes into the phone call (mostly hold time), she finally came back and insists that it's really a 14 night cruise! AND, she insists, that, when we get to Vancouver on Sunday, May 9, that it's really SATURDAY!

 

So, I again tried to explain to her how we lose a day flying to Asia.  I told her that you can board a plane in Los Angeles on Noon Thursday and you won't arrive in Tokyo until 4:00 pm on Friday...but, when you return, you can board a flight in Tokyo on Noon the following Thursday and be back in Los Angeles around noon the same day...because you lose an entire day flying to Asia and gain it back coming back to North America...

 

Wendy was utterly confused.  She took my phone number and said she'll get back to me...In any event, I still only have dinner reservations for one of the Day 9s.  I believe it's a glitch in the program where the reservation system won't allow for two day 9s...

 

...or, maybe we go through a time warp...

Edited February 18, 2020 by Bruin Steve

[luckyinpa]

i just saw an episode of star trek voyager and the plot was exactly as confusing as this with time travel

[shay1076]

That's because you booked on the Millennium Falcon. Han Solo is the captain 😉

[mkcurran]

It's still the Day 9--maybe you they will just repeat everything? Like your own personal Ground Hog's day. 

[jalves]

We sailed from Sydney to Honolulu several years ago on Royal.  We crossed the International Date Line on April 15th and did indeed have two April 15th's.  

 

[Quo Vadis?]

Sounds like Groundhog Day to me..

[zitsky]

Sounds like this movie.

 

 

[cruising teacher]

58 minutes ago, jalves said:

We sailed from Sydney to Honolulu several years ago on Royal.  We crossed the International Date Line on April 15th and did indeed have two April 15th's.  

 

We experienced this and the fun part was there was a little who had a birthday on that date. His parents brought two sets of presents 🎁 

[Fouremco]

Wendy might have been a bit less confused had the IT team called the second May 3 sea day "Day 10", and carried the numbering on so that the final day would accurately be numbered Day 16, not Day 15 as the website now shows. 

 

On the positive side, maybe they'll charge you one less day's gratuities. 

[Muffinz]

we're on Solstice in April 1st and it crosses the date line twice to we get 2 days the same, then skip a day or something like that - it's confusing!

[BEAV]

We sailed this route in April/May last year and had the same issue w/Celebrity. It provided some comical discussion on the roll call with half the people thinking we’d arrive Vancouver one day and the other half thought it would be the following day. People were even booking flights home on the wrong day. 
 

Poor Wendy. If I was stuck in Wichita I’d probably be just as confused! 🤣

[waterbug123]

19 hours ago, Bruin Steve said:

 she insists, that, when we get to Vancouver on Sunday, May 9, that it's really SATURDAY!

 

So, I again tried to explain to her how we lose a day flying to Asia.

 

Wendy was utterly confused. 

 

Bless her heart.  Imagine if she ever takes a flight from Atlanta to Pensacola and tries to figure out how she can depart at noon, be on the plane for an hour, but it's still only noon when she lands, LOL.  Poor thing....

[cruisestitch]

Not only can Celebrity put it ships through a time warp, it can also move bridges

 

Edited February 19, 2020 by cruisestitch

[mpk]

18 hours ago, Fouremco said:

On the positive side, maybe they'll charge you one less day's gratuities. 

 

Gratuities are small potatoes.  If they can package this up as a ship activity, maybe I can buy 365 of them and become a year younger!

[Jim_Iain]

Make sure you check your Captain's Club Points.     On our Westbound Vancouver to Tokyo we received an additional day of points but I have heard some on the Eastbound actually lost a day of point and had to call to have them applied.   I'm sure IT just use start date and end date without taking dateline into consideration.

 

I was checking closely on my points as originally we were going to be 1/2 day short of hitting Zenith so we added on an Alaska Land Tour tour our B2B and later found we would have qualified anyway.  

[Muffinz]

6 hours ago, cruisestitch said:

Not only can Celebrity put it ships through a time warp, it can also move bridges

 

hmmmm I've been to a place called Sydney that looked exactly like that.... but it wasn't in Nova Scotia

[az_tchr]

Maybe you are actually going to be on the Millenium Falcon with Captain Kirk!

[Northern Aurora]

We have also done several trans-Pacific crossings and several times folks on the CC roll call have been convinced that the ship would be arriving on a different date than the published itinerary.  On at least one instance someone was purchasing air to fly home on the day of arrival, and was having an extremely difficult time understanding that they were purchasing a flight on the wrong day.

[BEAV]

17 hours ago, BEAV said:

We sailed this route in April/May last year and had the same issue w/Celebrity. It provided some comical discussion on the roll call with half the people thinking we’d arrive Vancouver one day and the other half thought it would be the following day. People were even booking flights home on the wrong day. 
 

Poor Wendy. If I was stuck in Wichita I’d probably be just as confused! 🤣

I also remember with last year’s Spring Transpacific that the Flights by Celebrity website would default to May 11 as the arrival date in Vancouver when in reality the ship arrived on May 10. If you wanted to fly home on the date of disembarkation, Flights by Celebrity wouldn’t allow you to book anything for that date.

[sasset]

How do you make dinner reservations in advance?

[chemmo]

We cruised in the opposite direction and lost a Wednesday....

 

Not an issue until the end of the cruise when I was collating my ‘Today’ leaflets to take home and binning art gallery and other nonsense....I had been hunting for the missing leaflet for some time before I remembered ‘Wednesday had never happened’....it does have a flavour of the twilight zone...