LXA350

X is going crazy not only with the Spa prices, also with speciality dining. Looking at the poor spa experience the price value is not justified anymore since years.

Slippers usually are provided as of Aqua, quite bad quality now a days and in Suites quite good from Frette same as bathrobes.

The Menu selection on Dinner on the Edge is usually nothing special and somewhow a combination of MDR and Chef'sTable quality. It's more about the atmosphere, but then again it could be windy or even cancelled last minute due to weather. I would rather go for Le Voyage and Magic Carpet you can enjoy on most days for drinks anyhow.

In summary, a error happened in the whole process. Either the upgrade confirmation was confirmed by the system almost simultaniously when someone else bought the cabin at full fare / someone else already received the upgrade. That you end up with your orignal cabin is ok but the whole process seemed quite unprofessional. You should have received a simple excuse that the upgrade was processed by error and as a token of appreciation they should have offered you USD 200 OBC, issue closed.

Great summary. That kin of cruise X, HAL etc are offering has nothing to do with a Antarctica expedition. It just gives you you a little preview of that part of the world, but to properly explorin it you need to spend there a longer time and be able to get off the ship. It's a bit like bein the first time in a City and getti on a bus and taking a panoramic city tour without getting of and walking around and exporing. Nevertheless it still gives you a small impression of that place 😉

Never had an issue on E Class to receive dishes from MDR so far.

Is your cruise full, there must be a reason X has cancelled the entire next season to South America + Antarctica? Given the many sea days + a very high likelyhood of a additional sea day given the stop at Falkland Islands is often cancelled they should rather spend at least 1 more day in Antarcitca which is the main reason most people choose this cruise. Yet again, given the size of the ship it at least gives the opportunity to get a small glimpse of this remote part of the world. Given the beautiy most people owuld probably want to return but then it would only make sense through a expedition to get the full experience.

Best is to stay in Mayfair area, you can cover many of the tourist attractions such as Buckingham Palace, Picadilly Circus and various museums etc from there. Depending of course how much time you will spend, visting Tower of london is in the financial district and a bit out of the way from the majority of attractions. Unless you want to stay in the highest hotel of London the Shangri-La at the Chard 😄

Have fun, this must be a once in a lifetime experience. Hope you will have great weather in Antarctica and not to rough seas, also for the stop at Port Stanley which was missed by the previous cruise due to high winds. How did you manage in Buenos Aires with transportation, you took a regular taxi or Uber?

Already at the previous embarkation port, Valparaiso the checkin process did not go smoothly. I hope that X is doing the maximum they can to improve the process going forward.

RCL will need to continue to offer cruises such as the Vancouver-Seward and vise versa itinararies. Same will apply for cruises that are port focused and not where the ship is the destination. Many people can't afford Silversea or any other upscale cruiseline to go on such itinararies. Also, not everyone wants to go on those cruiselines and prefers to go for RCL which is known for it's entertainment and and revolutionary ship features. Hence RCL likely is working on a solution to build the biggest ship possible to meet these missions. It will not feature a central park but on the maximum size such ship can be built they will surely come up with the most revolutonary features possible. As X will need to replace it's Millenium Class eventually as well I wouldn't be suprised if we will see that the basic structure to be developed will be used both for a future RCL and X ship class to serve this purpose, which is also economically more efficient than developing two seperate concepts to meet the same purpose.

If RCL wants to gain back marketshare in europe lost to MSC and co they have to increase their media presence there. Not to mention they will need to bring back more ships and more creative itinararies on top of that to compete.

The ones making the biggest fuss about this are probably the ones staying in Sky Suites which are Junior Suites and should be excluded from the Retreat and also with limited access to Luminae. A full dedicated personal buttler only makes sense from Edge Villa and above and even for Celebrity suites there should be a buttler service team and not a individual peron in charge. This would also require X to market the different suite products differently and not give people the feeling as soon as you are in the "Retreat" you are surrounded by buttlers that to everything for you, which we all know is not the case.

The quality served in CK is mostly much better than in MDR. Depending on the liking MDR has much more basic options which is probably why some are not so keen on CK.

It's a problem generally on X that they do not load any supplies especially fresh supplies on longer cruises. This doesn't matter if cruising through the Caribean Islands or Europe or a one off cruise. Obviously it requires logistics and for smaller ships this is much easier but X just doesn't bother to do so and then you end up without any choice of fruite / very pool quality at some point into the cruise for instance