ADeckOfficer

Most hotels & cruise lines will either;

Pre authorise a nominal amount (£1 - £10) when you register the card to check the card is valid and not reported as stolen / lost & then take payment from the card when you hit whatever limit the company allows you to rack up.

or;

Pre authorise for a set amount to ensure you have sufficient funds to pay the bill onboard, when you reach that limit they'll either raise a new pre-authorisation for the next amount or charge your card for the amount and raise a new pre-authorisation to cover the remaining period.

The pre-authorisations don't normally show up on your statements - you can see them if you have online banking as you'll see your available balance drop, while your actual balance remains the same.

Basically once a pre-authorisation is put on your card, the funds they pre-authorised for are not available to you to spend, the company then has 7 - 10 days (depending on card issuer) to confirm the payment or void it. If they do nothing the funds will be automatically released back to you after the 7-10 days have elapsed.

The above is what catches people out, in that they have registered a card where they are near to their limit and then try and purchase something ashore on the same card, resulting in the transaction being declined.

On a side note, if you're worried about the above but don't want to carry a load of cash, you can get pre-paid visa debit cards which you top up with cash in the UK, and can then give the card to the cruise line.

anyone help with info on the single cabins on deck 2 of Celebration....TA says that the white space next to the cabins is the laundry. Is this right and if so are the cabins noisy. They are pretty costly so need to make sure that they are decent. Thanks.

Next to those cabins on deck 2 aft is; Crew corridor, provisioning area and engine room.

Main Laundry is mid-ship on deck 0.

Does anyone know the transfer time between the airport Dubrovnik and the cruise terminal?

About 30 - 40 minutes depending on the traffic.

Hi, I’ve been following this since the start, I’ve had to create a new account to post so as to remain anonymous (as my old account was easily identifiable) - while I don’t work for Disney I am a navigation officer with another major cruise line and feel that perhaps a lot of the discussion might be avoided if you had an insight into the procedures used onboard - of course some cruise line’s have very detailed procedures which may differ from what I have put below;

As chengkp75 says, while on small boats, military vessels and cargo ships the immediate and standard action taught in event of a man overboard, where the person is seen falling overboard, is to execute a Williamson's Turn in the direction of the casualty. On passenger ships this is generally strongly advised against, chengkp75 has explained very well the reason why but to summarise;

You have 1 person in the water, however you have easily 4000+ persons onboard, executing a Williamson's turn requires hard over rudder movements, which will result in the vessel heeling. While every passenger ship is different, the majority of these large ships will heel over very easily at moderate speeds when you apply more than 5 - 10 degrees of rudder angle. (A trade off the designers have had to make to ensure that you all experience the gentle rolling of the ship rather than sudden movements which make a lot of people sick).

Applying full over at 20 kts will not only easily roll the ship to 20 - 30 degrees, you’ll empty all the swimming pools, destroy the contents of the kitchens, restaurants, bars and shops and send the occupants of the ship into the bulkheads causing numerous injuries onboard. (Incidents onboard Crown Princess, Grand Princess, Pacific Sun being examples of what damage occurs with only 5 - 10 degrees of roll).

Generally (some cruise lines have specific procedures which may differ) the action taken by the bridge team in event of a man overboard will involve (in no particular order);

Releasing life ring and smoke from the bridge wing - it gives a visual indication of set/drift

Recording position on the ECS / ECDIS or worst case GPS - the computers then give us a point to aim for

Engaging hand steering - we normally sail around on autopilot so we need to take manual control back

Informing man overboard parties - usually a coded announcement or can be automated on the DEC phones

Alerting the Engine Room (In most cases you would hit standby button) that you’re about to change the vessels speed - sudden changes of speed can (on older vessels using shaft generators) result in partial blackouts

Reducing speed while executing a slow “round turn” to whatever side the person fell

By the time the vessel had been manoeuvred back to the position the MOB teams are probably just finishing mustering and the ship is near enough stopped in the water allowing the safe launching of the rescue boat.

Of course this assume’s that the person was seen falling overboard and the incident reported timely to the bridge. In the case of Miss Coriam it appears - from reading the reports that she was reported missing a long time after it has happened.

Now, I again feel from the comments here that the general consensus is “why did it take so long for anything to be done”, please allow me to explain my opinion of what I believe most likely happened;

While on cruise ships we may share cabins with each other, we’re not all one big happy family - we get on with each other but most people enjoy having space and some time to themselves, so it wouldn’t be uncommon for someone not to be seen for several hours by their friends / colleagues & with 1000+ crew members you don't know half the people onboard - I can go through weeks of not seeing people I am friends with purely down to work rotations.

Now, I believe she was first reported missing after failing to turn up for work. People are late for work all the time on ships - just as people are late on land. The first thing that would probably happen is her colleagues would try calling her cabin when she didn’t appear and around 10 - 15 minutes later if she still hadn’t shown up her work colleagues / supervisor would try calling her cabin again and maybe even go look in the mess or other crew areas for her. If they can’t find her, they’ll try calling her known friends (again not uncommon for people to be asleep in other persons cabins) if still not found normally Security would be informed (and subsequently the bridge).

Now, at this point the immediate thoughts of most people is not “they’ve fallen overboard” it’s they’re asleep somewhere so most likely a check would be made to see if she had used her onboard account to do anything, a PA announcement would be made initially in all crew areas for her to contact a number and subsequently probably to the entire ship.

Still nothing, then a search would be conducted of the public areas (both passenger and crew) of the ship and crew would be asked to check their cabins - this in itself would easily take an hour to be thorough. On some companies the company would be notified at this stage, however not always. The next stage would be to check the entire vessel including all the restricted areas something on a large cruise ship which would take several hours to complete fully.

Now while this is going on Security would of course be checking the CCTV based on whenever the person was last seen - which could of been at breakfast or the night before in the crew bar and trying to follow them around the ship, a task which in itself will take several hours - there are 1000’s of camera’s onboard.

Eventually it would either be found on CCTV or assumed that they were not onboard and the relevant persons notified.

So while I do feel great sympathy for the family, based on what appears to be public knowledge (she was last “seen” 4 hours prior to not turning up to work as she had called her family - something that the ship would not know anything about until afterwards) the time frame that it took for her to be “reported” missing to shore authorities doesn’t actually seem that excessive, since it appears that roughly 1-2 hours after failing to appear for work (the first time the ship “officially” became aware she was potentially missing) the ship had determined she was not onboard and reported it.

As it turns out this was roughly 5-6 hours after she went overboard - as harsh as it seems the shore authorities will normally instruct the vessel to continue to her next port of call. Other vessels in the area will receive notification of a person reported missing in the area and be asked to look out for them and depending upon the shore authorities a search will most likely be launched by them of the area identified.

Please don’t rely on my accuracy of the timings as there appears to be different information on different news sites regarding when the incident was reported ashore.

Lastly, having sailed on a ship which trialled one of these supposed automatic MOB systems for 6 months, I can assure you that despite what the manufacturers claim; they do not work; they constantly give off false alerts when the sea is anything but flat calm and sadly didn’t detect someone jumping off the side of the ship when we were in port.