DallasGuy75219

Not based on the empty hallways when I dropped my bags on my last cruise. The signs on the fire doors say rooms not available until 1:30 and don't mention any exceptions. Early access for P/D is an unspoken secret. As I recall it was a P/D benefit first. Then they figured out how to monetize FTTF but kept early cabin access as a P/D benefit so it wouldn't look like they were taking it away from P/D just to make them pay for it like the unwashed masses.

Not since they stopped selling FTTF with the restart and haven't publicized very much that Plats and Diamonds can drop their bags after boarding if their room isn't ready yet.

But the casinos alone can't stop the bleed. Until possibly when COVID protocols were just relaxed, the casinos were spending a big chunk of change to get warm bodies onboard with free rooms, free casino play, and free drinks, with the hope that they'd spend or lose more than it had just cost to get them onboard. Otherwise CCL wouldn't have just issued $1billion in stock and extended $339 million in bond debt.

I'm not old enough to have used metal keys for cabin doors, but I remember back in the day when on the Holiday class you had a VingCard for your cabin door and S&S card for everything else.

With travel insurance all your claimed losses don't have time be paid for at the time you take out the policy. What you do need to do though is add a cushion to the amount you insure for insurable costs you expect to incur after the date you take the policy out, e.g. cabin upgrades.

You're ignoring the complexity of making every cabin on the ship available for the everyone in a lower category to bid on, and then managing that process, even systematically. Princess has no incentive to build out that system and process when there are plenty of people willing to bid for a guarantee cabin in a higher category. If there was incremental money to be made by allowing bidding for specific cabins, one of the other cruise lines that beat Princess to the game would have already tried it.

... except those wanting something for nothing (free upgrades) and those with socialist entitlements who can't comprehend that people with bigger wallets than them are inherently willing and able to pay for nicer cabins than they can or will pay for. In other words the people b****ing and moaning about the change here.

Your "pool" scenario relies on the flawed assumption that no one in the chain is overbid, which is unlikely to happen unless you want expand the collusion to everyone booked on the sailing. Once anyone in the chain is overbid, the scheme falls apart for that person and everyone below, who just subsidized someone else's upgrade and got nothing in return.

Possibly not, but Carnival doesn't care. Room stewards and guest services are essentially fixed costs. I believe they are salaried for base pay, so give the room stewards more workload and let them figure out how to deal with it. Make passengers wait longer in line longer at guest services if people with tampered envelopes/missing S&S cards are prioritized, because every position at guest services is usually open at embarkation anyway. But the check-in agents are outside contractors, so reducing the number of them needed to check in a sailing is an increase to Carnival's bottom line.

Regardless of what category you're talking about, the concept is the same. Princess will charge what they think the market will bear, and someone, possibly with a bigger wallet than you, will be willing to pay a price that you personally might balk at.

https://www.carnival.com/cruise-food/?shipCode=PA

That's a huge assumption that no one lower in the chain got outbid, and even more unlikely if they were lowballing their bids. If one person anywhere in the chain gets outbid, the scheme falls apart for everyone under them in the chain, who just paid for someone's upgrade to a suite and now have nothing to show for it.

Like my $240 upgrade from a balcony to a 2 bedroom Grand Suite on Explorer of the Seas in January. Of course I kept my mouth shut in the Suite Lounge.

How is that different from the current practice of charging high prices for the nicest suites? Princess will charge what the market will bear, and in the long run those with the biggest wallets will still get the nicest cabins. Under your logic Princess should sell those nicest suites for less than the market price to give people with the smallest wallets a chance at them too. If you were Princess is that how'd you'd run your business? Of course not; this is capitalism, not a charity.

Practically every cruise line does this now, either by bidding or offering guaranteed paid upgrades to targeted booked cruisers. The upgrade fairy is now the upsell fairy. If you owned a business with a limited amount of inventory, (i.e., desirable unsold cabins), would you give it away for free or sell it to customers willing to pay for it.

The instructions on the envelope are to go the Priority Line at Guest Services, so someone wouldn't be waiting in a massive line. If your card was tampered with they would give you a new folio number so that any fraudulent charges would be isolated to your old folio and Carnival would not charge those to your account.

The stewards close the cabin door once the room is ready and don't (or at least are not supposed to) put the S&S cards out until the time when rooms are officially ready.

The tickets for your excursion will be left in your room. Each ticket shows the meeting time and place for the excursion.

Yes, always people drinking wine from water goblets in the MDR. And the water goblets in the cabins are different from those in the MDR so they know you're drinking the vodka and soda you mixed in your room, not ice water. I buy the wine packages anyway but I'm always sure to bring my wine glass back to my cabin after dinner.

Yes, but TBH it was probably more about Carnival's bottom line than the improved passenger experience. Over the course of thousands a check-ins for a sailing, those minutes shaved off of each check-in add up to multiple agents no longer needed to work check-in. And it preserved the value of FTTF so people kept buying it vs. going to their cabin early anyway since they already had their S&S card.

Or airline miles if you have them, since most airlines stopped charging to redeposit miles if you cancel an award reservation. That's what I did for my Australia cruise in October. Carnival's Australia restart had been pushed back so many times that I wasn't taking a chance on buying a non-refundable airline ticket. Refundable tickets to Australia are obscenely expensive, and Carnival's version of EZAir doesn't even sell flights from the US to Australia. So I booked with miles so I could get them refunded if Carnival cancelled my sailing (again).

Keep in mind all the guests who never rebooked using their FCC until this week when they knew they could cruise without being vaccinated (i.e., the reason booking activity doubled from 2019 on August 15). The decision to take FCC vs. a refund for a canceled cruise was irrevocable, I'm sure a lot of the anti-vax crowd were later kicking themselves after taking FCC because (1) they didn't expect cruises to be on pause for over a year and (2) they had no way of knowing most would initially have to be vaccinated to sail after cruises restarted. Unrelated to the change in protocols, I happened to have booked two cruises this week, and my PVP said he's been slammed with people booking their first post-restart cruises now that most itineraries don't require vaccination.

There are too many risks and uncertainties associated with cruising in the COVID era for anyone to meaningfully give you the reassurance you desire. Anyone who tries to give you that reassurance is just telling you what you want to hear. If Princess couldn't or wouldn't provide that reassurance, that's a sign that no one else can or should either. If this uncertainty is too much for you, I would suggest getting a refund instead of rebooking and waiting to cruise until the operating environment for cruises is more certain.

That's the workaround... fill your glass in your cabin and your waiter has no way of knowing if you stopped at a bar on the way to dinner or poured it in your cabin.

You don't have to turn it over. You can serve it yourself but your waiter may or may not charge you corkage, whether they see you drinking from a bottle you brought yourself or they served you the bottle you brought yourself. You can't get around corkage by serving it yourself because it's not really a fee for a service (oncorking and serving your wine) but rather a BYO fee for the profit Carnival didn't make from selling you the bottle of the heavily marked up wine you (theoretically) would have bought had you not brought your own.