canderson

The stuff in the Oceanview is swill (the ice tea out of the taps is actually worse). They serve proper coffee at all of the Al Bacio counters I've tried, along with some decent teas.

Not true. Upper suites have Lavaza coffee makers either there when you board or made available on request.

Take a printed copy of a 2/passenger page with a timestamp on it supplied by your browser and be prepared to stand your ground. You're not responsible for X's external communications.

Yes, let your TA make the change if you want to switch! Your TA can batch several customer issues on a single call. You'll have to decide whether 8:30 works based upon itinerary. Back when there were only 2 fixed choices, if we had a cruise with a lot of ports, we'd pick late dining to assure we had time to get back aboard, relax, shower, and dress for dinner.

No kidding. Was very surprised to see this as well. Someone posted it here somewhere a couple of weeks ago. Since we're landlocked here, it's a bit of a pain to pack 4 bottles in checked luggage, and bringing them carefully as carry-on blew up for us back in 2001, not to mention the weight issues. We only take wine now if the cruise is long enough or stretched as a B2whatever and I have something special I'd like to take along. Example: dessert wines aboard are pretty dreadful as they are in many venues - just grape syrup - no acidity to back up the sugar. It's a rare climate that produces both in a grape, and then not every season. Have been known to bring something like that along, but not more than 2 bottles, even for a longish cruise.

See above. Rules recently changed on site.

Or possibly just an acknowledgement that the policy as it existed was putting people in a very untenable position in Italy due to the unique requirements there. It was certainly getting some "bad press" here.

As a consolidator, Celebrity has access to a certain amount of inventory on any particular flight (though not all of them) at a given price. Just because BA had seats available to them didn't mean that Celebrity had access to them.

+1 to THAT suggestion. I wouldn't depend upon the cabin number on my invoice being correct given all of the cancellations and shuffling that has gone on over the last months. Would definitely go into the planner online to see what cabin numbers appear for both legs. It would be unusual, even for X's IT department, to showing a cabin in available inventory when it is not, which would allow a double booking to occur -- something we just don't hear happening.

Looking at their photos of a particular stateroom class is a total crapshoot at this time. They mix and match between various ships at will. I hope the average viewer doesn't believe that when working with a particular ship within their web pages, that the stateroom photos are representative of the ship they have selected, because more often than not, they aren't. It's just bad web page management.

We here at CC are a tiny minority of cruisers. If X prominently published the details of how their policies are actually being executed, rather than generalities, far more might reconsider their plans. The Devil really is, especially in the case of quarantine policy, in the details. To answer your question specifically, it's not an either/or proposition. For most, it's a risk/reward question. It's necessary to understand both clearly for any individual to evaluate their own risk tolerance, and I'd argue that few cruisers have the information to do that, or for that matter, realize what the issues are. For those who do become informed, and X should be making that easier, there is much that X could do to alter the 'risk' side of the equation. The current application of policy has proved for some to be downright punative when it needn't have been. About all that has improved has been the practice of performing periodic wellness checks that were nil early on. On some X ships, they still haven't seemed to have figured out that those still quarantined on turn day need to eat, and that shutting down room service for lunch service presents a real problem when that's the only way that these folks can be fed. X could and should do better at dealing with COVID positive pax if they want their business, especially at top dollar rates. That was the point of my post.

Perhaps you missed the word "perhaps"?

Depends upon the water. I still have an old photo of myself somewhere reading a newspaper while floating on my back in the Dead Sea.

That's very good news... perhaps an acknowledgement that the cost of having to house positive pax was worth avoiding the negative PR being caused by offloading positive patients in Italy with their tough protocols there.

Eh? My experience in reading name tags is that most of them are Filipino. There's evidently a major agency there that Celebrity uses.

PDF available here >> This menu should cover all M class ships, including Summit, until they go to a new 14 day menu.

While true, the cost may well be. If to get the newer fare, it is necessary to cancel/rebook for any reason, you have to deduct the deposit from the savings on the new fare to see where you come out.

All Celebrity casinos are non-smoking.

What's silly is that it appears we would be able to sail into FLL after a trans-Atlantic cruise from Barcelona after spending 13 days fairly well confined (lots of at-sea days) with a couple of thousand other people in October -- without testing before arrival in FLL -- but would be required to test to fly home from Barcelona after being with just a couple of hundred people for a 9 hour flight. Go figure. Have to wonder if this craziness will be done with by then.

IIRC, non-refundable OBC coming from a TA is actually a passthrough from Celebrity, so technically not TA OBC.

If you're OK with black and white, and can email the image to yourself, you should be able to log into your webmail from the Internet Cafe and print it that way. No need to plug anything into their machines, which as Ian notes, is (usually) a non-starter.

Typically not. As you say, it typically doesn't appear until the start of your cruise. That said, if you suddenly find a bump in your OBC, it may be an exception. In any case, yes, if it's in your cruise planner, you can use it! Was the amount the $ that you expected from your TA?

Are you referring to the generic early/late seating? That's still available, and is set up when making the cruise reservation itself. Changing early/late can be done by your TA or with a call to Celebrity. If you chose the 'anytime' (aka Select) dining option, you make reservations on your own.

And I think that's understandable, given that the change in protocols pre/post-COVID has increased the risk of financial loss. I think a lot of folks are now saying, "Hey, look... your prices are way up again. Your protocols put a great deal of our cash at risk. If you want us to spend even more than we were paying pre-COVID, you need to help us mitigate the financial risk". Whether that's reasonable can be argued, but it's certainly understandable. As an example, in the 'old days', the primary risks to missing the start of a cruise were flight delays. Now everyone has to deal with the possibility of being in a foreign country, preparing to board, being asymptomatic, and discovering that they're COVID positive the night before. At least the lines are still compensating passengers for that eventuality. Beyond that issue, however, the lines are making it less and less their problem and more the problem of the passenger. The real issue, of course, are the protocols in place specifically for COVID and whether those protocols continue to serve the objective -- or rather, whether the objective still makes as much sense as it once did. By now, I think it's clear that since the omicron variant came into play, taking a zero-COVID approach is a fool's errand. We've seen many threads here outlining the consequences to passengers. If the lines insist on both high prices and high risk of a bad experience (due to protocols) together, people will object. Given the current threat of omicron, should onboard experience for those testing positive be greatly improved if they're willing to take the risk of cruising knowing that protocols won't be quite so draconian?

Was nice enough on Connie. Pretty well stuffed myself at lunch one day.