Overhead Fred

One Big - To All!

They are HAL gift cards being sold at a discount by AARP. $500 value for $450. You can buy 5 cards per month. Go to the AARP Rewards page and drill down to find them. I just used a bunch for final payment on our April cruise. Use the link @Bill B posted 1 minute before me!

And Time for Hoppin' John!

If you don't have a scanner, there are ways to do this electronically. Download your brokerage statement as a PDF. "Highlight" in black all the info you want hidden, but do not send that page version electronically since the highlighting can be removed if you do. But if you print the page as a PDF, then the highlighting cannot be edited and it should be safe to send that version. This is for Windows PCs, there is probably an equivalent for Apple machines. I think upgraded versions of Adobe Acrobat also have a redaction tool that should work if you are willing to pay extra.

I used the app in early December for our April 2024 cruise. It worked fine, no need to link your brokerage account. In fact, that option never showed up for me. Simply sent them the page (PDF) from our account showing the CCL stock but with all other info blacked out. Basically the same process that we used to use with our PCC for the credit, just a different outfit doing the verification for HAL. It took a couple of days but seemed pretty harmless to me.

Get in the Christmas Eve Spirit!

@Nickelpenny

@Ichiban Nekko

My mantra as well...

I just used the "Reservations_submit@hollandamerica.com" email address on Sunday to request AARP OBC for our two previously booked cruises. I got a pleasant response this afternoon saying that they have applied the credit and then got two updated booking confirmations showing the added OBC. Fairly impressive service IMO.

Like many Dailites, We have been to Oranjestad a few times. I can't say its a favorite of ours, but the Butterfly Farm (https://www.thebutterflyfarm.com/) north of town is worthy of repeat visits IMO.

Graham (@grapau27), we will be in A Coruna next April. Can you give us any suggestions about shore excursions?

If you cancel and rebook you should get CO refunded. If you refare, you can get your CO to transfer. But it might depend on whether CO is sold out for you cruise. Since it is a year away, you should be fine. I recently refared our April TA cruise and was able to get CO transferred without any problem. Our PCC maybe had to go through a "pricing specialist" (or whatever the proper title is) to get it done, but I don't know the details. I then looked into refaring again when the Black Friday sale came out, but this time she said she couldn't guarantee being able to keep CO since it was sold out for our cruise. It sounded like she had to ask for a special exception the first time around and wasn't confident she could pull it off a second time. We decided to forgo refaring rather than risking our CO cabin upgrade to an aft veranda. I don't know how HAL would handle things if we "lost" our CO in the refare process, but I certainly would have squawked if a refund wasn't offered! This will be our first Club Orange experience and the cabin upgrade does seem like a good deal. But it can definitely complicate refaring to take advantage of price drops....

@Vict0riann Hopefully we will see you on the Nieuw Statendam in April!

Happy Thanksgiving!

I remember using one of these bad boys! Texas Instruments Silent 700

This thread from the beginning of the year might be worth visiting. There were reports of cancelling a cruise before final payment and getting the CO fee refunded. Not sure about cancelling CO and staying on the cruise...