Another Elite Benefit Bites the Dust AFAIK

[memoak]

2 hours ago, tetleytea said:

 

That is starting to sound like when I got offered the benefit of "3 days at a world-class timeshare resort".   Thing is...it is 3 days...and 0 nights.  All they do is let you use their amenities during the day, for 3 days.   Later you find out,  "What, you think you deserve to be given a room, too?  How entitled!"

 

Priority tendering...but as it turns out it is only to get off the ship--not back on the ship 30 minutes before all-aboard time--is the same mis-marketing nonsense.

 

It has always been written as priority ship to shore. Never had bee offered as shore to ship. Either you don’t read things carefully or you just make slot of assumptions 

[memoak]

2 hours ago, tetleytea said:

My last sailing, Blues could get free laundry tokens. 

On the Discovery last 2 weeks all self service laundry was free no tokens needed. That is of course if you can get to a washer. 

[memoak]

5 hours ago, tetleytea said:

 

I wasn't looking.

 

Elite passenger went to the front of the line and showed their Elite credentials.  Princess cruise staff ignored the Elite status and lumped those passengers along with everyone else.   That is amiss.  

  

That is not how the Beni fit works. On board there are announcements as to which lounge to get tender tickets for elites. They will send you down in groups from there. You can’t just go to the line and barge through

[Guest ldtr]

1 hour ago, tetleytea said:

 

AND:  a reasonable person would believe that the benefit is exactly as written:  EMBARKATION.

 

The part you are conveniently refusing to see.  Some people wear bifocals, and they need to lower their nose by about 6 inches in order to see them both.

 

 

You are ignoring the definition of embarkation.  The lines clearly states the meaning one has priority from ship to shore.  The embarkation means the embarkation (loading) of the tender.  It is to tell you that your benefit is for priority to get on the tender when going from ship to shore.  They state embarkation because you do not have priority to get off of the tender when you get to shore.  If they did not include it some might assume they they should have priority in getting off of the tender as well.

 

You apparently think that the only meaning of embarkation is when you board the ship.  As I stated earlier embarkation is the act of boarding any vehicle  Ship, tender, plane, car, etc.  So when you board the tender to leave the ship you are embarking on the tender, with embarkation meaning the process of loading the tender.

[Ombud]

Wow this is going down a rabbit hole!!  

 

Edited June 20, 2023 by Ombud

[Guest ldtr]

19 minutes ago, Ombud said:

Wow this is going down a rabbit hole!!  

 

Is it embarking down a rabbit hole or disembarking down one.

[Princess Chatterer]

The definition of the word priority is the quality or state of coming before another in time or importance.  This is exactly what Princess offered, in writing, for ship to shore tendering..   Passengers in the rewarded group could either accept this perk or just ignore it.  It's sort of like having a loyalty contract with Princess.  A loyalty contract is very nice to have and must be earned. Receiving an elite waiting room for tenders is good but not in a very significant way.  Being granted an advantage by Princess of priority placement in a long tender waiting line is a very distinct benefit. This was not what happened on that particular day.  Our "priority" boarding group was fed into into a very disorderly queue of other groups coming down the stairs all adding to pushing and shoving, wall to wall, passengers already packing the 4th floor tender waiting area.  It was chaos for everybody.  You may correctly say well it's been that way for quite a while. Or even has always been that way.  But that misses the point.  The point is does priority ship to shore tender boarding still exist other than on paper?  Well it may still exist on some ships but that benefit sure didn't exist on that  morning in Maui.

[OzKiwiJJ]

Then again sometimes it works to your advantage. We were at Mystery Island in the South Pacific on a Ruby cruise in 2019. We went to the Elite tender waiting area (one of the MDRs) reasonably early. There was a bit of a wait, which was a bit annoying, but after a few more people turned up the hostess made a hurried phone call after which they sent us down to the tender. The Elites group were the only ones on that tender! It was very nice. For some unexplained reason there had been a delay/pause in the tendering for everyone but we definitely got priority that time. 😊

 

Since the pandemic I've noticed they seem to be spacing out the groups they send down to the tenders more than they used to so that area doesn't get too crowded.  

[555]

The last time we used priority boarding was on the Enchanted 2023 in Dec. 

It worked out to an advantage having it rather than waiting on the long line for tender tickets. 

[karatemom2]

Priority tendering, in my estimation, is still one of the biggest benefits of being Elite, right behind laundry. I really appreciate not having to stand in long lines to collect tender tickets and potentially wait for hours for a group to be called. 
 

I really don’t mind the new process of having Elite passengers go to a separate lounge to collect tickets and then be called out in groups. This has been the case on all 5 of our cruises since COVID, and it seems to work well - very organized and efficient. We have never waited more than 15 to 20 minutes once we get our ticket to head off to a tender. It’s still much faster and any difference in the time between doing it this way and just walking off ourselves like we used to is negligible.
 

Many ships sail with a lot of Elite passengers these days and I can understand that Princess needs to manage the flow of traffic to the tenders. I would much rather they do that by having a separate, but still fast and easy, Elite tendering lounge, then take the benefit away.