nolafrank

Except that the one and only reason I’m doing this cruise is that it includes Hong Kong and Shanghai and allows me easy access to fly to China afterwards. I loved visiting Japan in cherry blossom season, but If China isn’t permitting western visitors I don’t have any interest in this cruise. Period. Hard stop.

Or by having a credit due to “Lift & Shift” where cancelled cruisers in 2020 - 2022 took cruise credits.

Good itinerary. We’ve been to most of the ports except the Malaysia ones (KL is on our wish list) but all good stops. Like others said, all or most these require more time than a single day allows. But you could spend extra time on the front end in Singapore and back end in Bangkok.

Cruises to and around Japan are very popular right now, as well as Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines. While you can find some cruises that stop in Hong Kong and Shanghai currently there are very few calling on the port for Beijing (Tiajin). We were in Asia in 2020 when the “Great Disruption” occurred. Had been traveling on our own or with tours in Cambodia and Vietnam and were scheduled on two cruises that ended up being cancelled. We currently have an Oceania cruise booked for Feb of ‘24 (and a Chinese land tour afterward) , but we are thinking about cancelling for two reasons. First, the lessons we learned from 2020 include the fact that we as cruisers have no rights if the cruise line wants to totally change their itinerary. Before Celebrity finally canceled our cruise scheduled from Hong Kong to Shanghai in March of 2020 they had changed literally every port—including embarkation and debarkation ports— on the itinerary except one! So the original March 2020 cruise was supposed to include Hong Kong, Taipei, Taijin (2 overnights), Shanghai, and Seoul. Celebrity’s proposed revised itinerary was changed to start in Singapore and end in Tokyo and was mostly Thailand and Vietnam—places we had just visited. The trip in no way resembled the original cruise we signed up for. The itinerary changes weren’t being made in transit but weeks prior to the scheduled start date. Hong Kong was still “open” at the time and yet they changed our embarkation point to Singapore—a city half the size, which at the time had twice the number of Covid cases as HK. The beginning and ending ports were nowhere near the original start/stop ports—thousands of miles apart from what was originally planned and their offer of $500 airfare adjustment didn’t begin to cover the cost of business class flights. Okay, so knowing they can totally change ports without recourse leads us to the 2nd and overriding reason why we might change. 2nd) Current political tensions in the area and other things out of our control. We want to visit China and we want to visit Taiwan and we want to visit South Korea. We aren’t interested in an “Asia” cruise, we want those countries specifically. Trying to read the tea leaves about China and Taiwan is a fool’s errand but there are discouraging words being exchanged. Our State Dept still has a level 3 travel advisory for China and any time an American politician visits Taipei, Beijing sends out more warships and aircraft for “exercises”. The world’s safety is more important than another retirement cruise, but for me, it means keeping an eye out for regional tensions that would cause cruise lines to cancel or countries to close borders. We’re keeping our reservations in place for now, but we have a plan A and plan B backup just in case. would love to hear others perspective on visiting China right now.

The extent that the cruise line can change the itinerary and the lack of recourse the cruiser has was brought home to us in the spring of 2020. We had a cruise booked on Celebrity Millennium scheduled from Hong Kong to Shanghai on March 14 of that year. We were already in Asia when Covid travel restrictions started to hit China. Celebrity informed us that literally EVERY PORT was changed including the embarkation point, the disembarkation point, and the ports that were of interest: Beijing, Shanghai, Taipei, and Seoul. Celebrity changed the embarkation point from HK to Singapore and disembarkation from Shanghai to Tokyo and ALL PORTS in between with no compensation for flight changes they wanted us to make. Remember this was all happening before we were due to set sail. How is that even the same cruise? We had flights, hotel, etc and for several weeks Celebrity refused to refund those who wanted to cancel and it was absolutely maddening. I never understood how that was possible but my TA and I wrote numerous requests that were denied. Well, eventually as the pandemic evolved the industry decided refunds and credits were due and we were made whole but that episode was an eye opener. You have NO rights on an international cruise except what the cruise line wants to grant. Scary indeed!