LeeW

Yup. Wife wanted to do this again last trip on Equinox and she convinced me to sign up again as well. Now we have an ornament (heavy, not really fragile), a drinking glass, and two fluted vases. Lots of fun and takes around 20 minutes each. Pieces are annealed overnight, packed in bubble and put in a white bag with your name on it available for pickup when the classes run the next day. As another poster has said, they do a demo around sailaway time and start taking appointments then, so show up BEFORE that demo time. Sign up for appointments right after each other and you can swap the camera to get pictures of both.

Only issue I can see is that you can get off well before the sea life center opens. So maybe go to the B2B group location and get your next cruise cards (or they will have you go to Guest Services to get them) and walk off the ship before the B2B group does. You can go to the center with her and then come back to the ship. Boarding runs late in Seward. We had time to take an 11am Kenai Fjord cruise and still get back before dinner.

Certainly. You can add cash any time. And last night can be a zoo at Guest Services. If you don't have a card on file they will freeze your onboard account when it hits $500 (this can vary with length of cruise) and call you to pay it down. Lots of folks use cash accounts.

On app you can select port arrival time without filling out id and credit card info. Then you can go back and do those later on computer. All people in your party can be done by one person if accounts are linked. Generally you can do this 45 days before sailing, midnight in the ship location. Sometimes you get an arrival time for all guests when you do the first. More often I just get one, switch to a different person and get theirs. And I use images on my computer for both passport and ship photos. App wants to take photos and scan passport.

Your room steward will ask if you want morning or evening service.

Snorkeling excursion works well there. There is an old sunken concrete ship that has a lot of fish around it.

Dropping off luggage takes virtually no time. Checking in and getting on and off the ship will likely be at least an hour - why do that? Assuming you are taking a cab to the port have the driver drop your luggage and then continue to the museum.

Make sure you price it - cabins for 3 tend to be pretty expensive. I'm 5'5" and fit, but I haven't tried to sleep there and sofa hadn't been made up as bed.

Cinco Soles store in the port has vanilla we really like. The port has a LOT of stores and is across the street from a major mall. Still a couple of miles into town if you want to go there. Cab prices are per cab, so if you want to go into town it is cheap. Not sure there is anything around worth seeing from an HOHO (and I don't remember ever seeing any).

Sounds like OP has booked a "B2B" with gambler her on one cruise and gambler husband on other. If they are not sailing together she will get points for first cruise and he will get JS points for second cruise. She may think that they both get points from her first cruise and then they again get points for his JS cruise. Doesn't work that way. Would have been easier to book a B2B with both of them, using casino booking for each in turn. If one booking was upgraded to JS, then both would have total points for two cruises, including one in JS.

The Pearl Island area is on the ocean side of the island. Snorkeling so good that boats come out there and drop passengers in the area. From the island it is a shore entry. HOWEVER, last time we were there the waves were high enough that people in the boats were having problems getting back in their boats and you weren't allowed to snorkel from shore.

I normally get a boarding time with the app and fill out other stuff later. Can't remember if the boarding pass will show up with just the time selected or you need to complete all the checkin details.

Thanks for info. Cruise is sailing end of next month with Freedom and Independence in port and returning just with Freedom.

The app typically doesn't show your reservations until you connect to the onboard network.

Research your ports on the cruise critic boards. Also research Galveston if you haven't sailed out of there: https://boards.cruisecritic.com/forum/316-gulf-coast-departures/ Flying is easier into Houston Hobby than Bush airport - about 1/2 hour closer to the port. Still a long way and there are no convenient rental car outlets on Galveston island, so you need to arrange transfers. Lots of parking very close to port if you are driving, though. The biggest difference between Carnival and Royal is that dining options have fewer hours. Buffet on Royal closes for an hour or two between meals. App does tell you what is open now, though, so you can plan a bit.

Which terminal is Freedom currently using in Miami? Seems like they are in Miami either alone or with Independence. I know if an Oasis class ship is in that uses A.

Check in generally at midnight of the ship location. So if ship is in Miami or FLL it is midnight Eastern time. Might take a few minutes for the process to open - try refreshing the page. Same for app - it might be before or after the web site.

All this means is that you can't sell/give the booking to somebody else. Has no effect on having the cruise line put a different person on the booking. Generally cruise lines let you change passenger names up until around 5 days before the cruise, as long as one passenger from the original booking remains on the booking. And unless that person was used for a casino booking rate or something similar they really don't care if that person shows up or not.

There is a spot on the checkout page where you can use OBC, but you have to manually add the amount you want to use. Otherwise the default is to charge the entire bill to a credit card. Normally I catch this before committing to the purchase but have missed it a few times.

Back around 2004-5 several cruise lines offered the option to stay onboard and lines like Princess allowed guest access for a few hours. A few years later US Immigration implemented the policy that a ship had to be zeroed before the next cruise could board. So current policy is that they can't board the new passengers in the US until all the old ones are off. This also includes crew that are ending or beginning their contracts.

With bookings through the ship you will get tickets in your room when to arrive. ALWAYS check these. Sometimes they cancel a tour and they may change the tour time even if the ship isn't docking at a different time than advertised. We have had morning tours changed to afternoon with the only notice being the printed ticket (and the tour was still the "A" time slot).

Summary - you can switch one of the grandparents for a new person now and then when you sail the second grandparent doesn't show up. Celebrity (and most any cruise line) won't let you switch all people in a cabin. People don't show up for many reasons - airlines, sick, ... You have already paid for the room so Celebrity doesn't care. If cabin holds 3 you MIGHT be able to book two new people into it and leave one grandparent to noshow. Problem with this is that they might reprice the whole room to add a third person. You could ask if you could add a third person to either of your cabins. Since you booked through a TA, they must be the one to make the changes.

Anything you buy from the ship or are gifted from the cruise line can be taken into the dining room. But our experience is that they rarely charge a corkage fee.

Some excursion operators have a list of names provided by the ship and they check you off as you check in. But when this is done they match the ticket to the list, not any id. And they use their list when people don't show up to try to locate the missing people.

Port days are cheaper.