DeckLife

We stayed there Dec. 21st, and it was fine. We found the food service a bit slow, but the food was good. The hotel is not in a location that lends itself to touring about on foot. The room was perfectly fine; our room had a lovely view of the mountains (and the highway, oh well). The buffet breakfast was a bit strange. It was served outdoors in a wonderful resort type setting near the pool. However, it was cold that day and the propane heaters stationed here and there were not able to ward off the chill. It was supposed to be warm in Santiago then!

Do it; you won't be disappointed.

Albingirl, don't be down about the low response count. Look how many people have seen your review!

I hope to take a trip like this someday. The port selection seems especially good, and I appreciate your taking the time to write. Please do it again for your next big cruise. (Say, if you throw in some negatives, that will create drama and more comments! Just kidding!)

We have always gone somewhat early, certainly by 6 or so, and have been seated more or less immediately. Also, the maitre-d' always asked if we minded sharing. We didn't mind, and did share tables, usually 6 or 8 people. The question, though, suggests there are two-tops readily available. (At least at that hour.)

Thank you so much! Funny you mention Norwegian. I had the sofa as my nightstand on our recent Sun cruise.

If there's a full curtain between the bed and the sitting area on the Zaandam, that will be great!

As for the closets, extra space there will also be most welcome.

I LOVE the drinking straw idea for thin chains. For bold costume jewelry including semiprecious beaded necklaces, I often use small scraps of tissue paper. Fold tissue paper around the necklace and then fold or curl to put in small plastic bag.

Thanks for the info.

We had an ocean view on the Maasdam and a balcony on the Noordam.

Can someone explain how these cabins differ from balcony cabins elsewhere? The pictures I've seen show a cabin that is very much like what we had as a balcony on Noordam. I note there are fresh flowers and a whirlpool bath. What else is different?

We just upgraded from an ocean view!

Taking ship excursions means the cruise line does all the work. I just show up and follow instructions. This is worth something, to me at least, and I recognize I'm paying for it. However, the cruise lines could devote less excursion time to shopping!

On our recent Maasdam cruise, it was explained that this new system is to more closely simulate what would happen in an emergency. You learn what horn blasts mean what. The first horn signal is to alert the crew. The second tells passengers to go to their staterooms. The third is to report to muster station. As I understood things, in an emergency, they will want people to go to their rooms and await instructions. I imagine that in some cases the emergency turns out not to require evacuation. But if it does end up requiring evacuation, then having passengers report to their known muster stations would make it far far easier for officers and crew to count not just heads but actual people by name and get passengers on their correct lifeboats. I think it makes a lot of sense.

In our muster, the lineup on deck was very quick. The crew had us stand in columns with taller people toward the rear. Again this made for easy head counting, just a matter of multiplying rows times columns. I don't recall how the wheelchair-bound were dealt with.

Thanks for the info on Luggage Direct. The instructions on our recent cruise were to leave the ship in the first group. I suspect the reason is that those luggage pieces go off the ship first, and usually the authorities want the people that go with the bags getting off around the same time. We did not end up using the Luggage Direct service.

Questions about using Luggage Direct, if you know: Can you use the HAL transfer when you do Luggage Direct? Also, will Luggage Direct take into account airline perks one has such as free checked luggage?

Very helpful. Thanks!

Could someone explain "penalty phase"?

I got us extra OBC through our HAL agent. We are not yet fully paid up on that cruise. The credit was somewhat less than what the promo called for but still a nice hunk. It can't hurt to ask.

Port side - that's really interesting. I haven't paid much attention. On our Mediterranean cruise, we were starboard because of the route we took. That worked very well much of the time for viewing land from our balcony, though I couldn't tell you what side was "in" when docked. Starboard was definitely the wrong side for the sailaway in Venice, so we went to the top decks.

May I ask why you favor port side?

We had a pizza delivered to us in the Sun bar near the back Lido area as a dinner. It was really cool to do that! We didn't mind the $5 charge because we thought the delivery-anywhere option was great!

I don't know how it will turn out, but I was told to do it over the phone with ship services, not online.

Can one not pay ahead of time for the drink package? Or is that too an OBC?

If you buy a shore excursion ahead of time, when you go onboard, it shows up as a fully paid shore excursion, not as credit. If you buy indulgences ahead of time, this shows up as paid-for stuff, not as credit. That's what I mean.

All I know is I asked our cruise consultant if I could buy the laundry service ahead of time, she said, yes, just call ship services to do that. Now I have not done that yet, but I see no reason at this point to not believe her. She had already asked ship services the pricing on my behalf, so it wasn't as though she was just talking off the top of her head, though I suppose she might have been.

The by-the-bag price is $30. We were on the Noordam for 22 days April into May. The price sheet I brought back says $99 for 11 days. There would be a discount if you were on for another 11 days.

We were told $150 by ship services before the cruise for the 22 days but $99 plus $79 on board. I argued, they checked, and we were charged $150. (I may be off by 3 or 4 dollars, though.) Anyway, I'd pay ahead of time. It should show that you have paid for the laundry service and not as a credit - hopefully.

That's what we plan to do on our next HAL cruise.

We keep a lot of stuff on our computers, too. But we don't have a system yet for papers. We have a stack of papers on a chest in the dining area for upcoming cruises. It probably has old stuff too. I am still confronting two envelopes with info from the last cruise. Don't know what to do with the stuff.

I also do my clothes planning in detail. My problem is that I am obsessive about it, and I think I enjoy it. My goal is to put some of that effort into more research about what we plan to see and do.

I took probably 5,000 photos on our Mediterranean cruise, and have found it a huge effort to winnow them down to show friends (who Have asked, by the way). I like taking pictures, but now this hobby is starting to seem like work.

Question for anybody, but especially the planners: Do you keep your paperwork/notebooks/folders after the cruise? I myself like to throw things away if I can. That usually takes me awhile, though.

We were on Magic in December. Try not to get too close to the stern. The rumble/shudder seemed worse than that of other ships we've been on. In the fee dining room near the top of the ship, at the stern, the tremble made the salt and pepper shakers and utensils and such move around on the table.

We did a lot of planning for our 22-day Med cruise on Noordam in April. We could have used a bit more planning for our pre-cruise visit to Hadrian's Villa outside Rome, because now we realize how much we missed. We should have devoted all our Tivoli time to this place rather than spend part of the day at Villa d'Este, lovely as it was.

As for the other planning - clothes/packing, how many Euros would we need, tours, etc., global phone plan, loading phone with apps and docs -- I thought it all worked very well. Planning takes away stress for me.

For our Mediterranean cruise, we did a day-by-day spreadsheet to figure up how much cash we would need. We did not want to use credit cards if possible. Since we needed only Euros, we made the tally in USD and then converted to Euros. Then we had the bank order the Euros for us.

The kinds of items we had on our day-by-day list included transfers between hotel, airport and ship (plus tips), hotel tips (bellhop, housekeeping), tips to ship tour guides and drivers, any meals on shore and a category we called pocket money, which covered things like small souvenirs, a soda, a water, or whatever might tempt us. We also listed our private excursion fees, tips and entrance fees.

For meals, we figured we would have lunch on board most of the time, and that's how it worked out, thanks to hearty breakfasts.

Because of more cash purchases than expected (who'd've thunk it), we went to an ATM just once just for an extra cushion, and we ended up not using much of that cash.

If you have need of other currency, just chart that in as well.