William234

You have to gamble a large amount of money. I believe it’s around $1500 but I am sure someone will correct me. 
 

The drinks on us card is also only good in the casino and not everywhere else on the ship. 

We used the Nursery on both the Oasis of the Seas and Freedom of the Seas and had good experiences both times. We will be using it on Freedom again in February. The first time our son was about 13 months old, the second time our son was about 18 months old.

We like the freedom and Oasis class ships because they have the baby splash zone which does let diapered kids get wet. They still can't use the majority of the H2O zone or the main pool though.

One thing I would like Royal Caribbean to do is offer an Internet rate priced by MB instead of a daily rate. I like to stay connected but I hate paying those high per day prices (even with my Diamond Plus discount it is still expensive on 14+ day cruises) for a connection that is doesn't work half the time. Maybe add a $5 per 100 MB price offering. I am lucky to get that much connectivity over a week. I know it isn't going to happen, but since we are doing wishlists... :D

When we were on the Oasis last year, we had no trouble in the caribbean with the ships internet. We were able to stream music from Rhapsody, stream movies from Netflix and Amazon prime, watch two hockey games, and use FaceTime a lot.

I think it would be cool, to build a giant edge to edge pool on the very back of the ship thats an infinity pool.

The website typically quotes the price per person based on double occupancy without port taxes and fees. If you add a 3rd or 4th passenger to the room, the quoted price will be the per person price, based on the total room price divided by the number of passengers in the room. The "sales" they have are clickbait. They just increase or decrease the price of the room to make the sale add up to what they want. Lets say they want to get 1000 per per room and have a 50% off sale. They'll say that the room costs $2000, and quote $500 per person.

There are no sales. If you like the price of the room then book it. Check back occasionally to see if the price has gone down.

We did a family cruise a last year and had them. People tended to write obscene messages on them or draw obscene pictures.

Sure...blame IT...we're used to it. ;-)

Us developers always blame IT.

Cisco supports a split tunnel. Not sure why it would handle the traffic one way on a PC and another way on the Mac. I assume you are using the AnyConnect client on both devices?

Yes, AnyConnect on both. Its probably how the corporate IT people set it up.

I suspect what you want to know is does your VPN client use a split tunnel or not? If it is, only the traffic going through the tunnel would appear to come from the VPN. The rest of your traffic would come from your ISP, which in this case would be RCI in Florida.

The commercial VPN providers route all traffic through the tunnel. Otherwise it would defeat the purpose of having a commercial VPN.

Whats interesting is on my Windows PCs, the corporate Cisco VPN routes all traffic through the tunnel, but on my MacBook, only the traffic to my workplace is routed over the VPN.

My VPN at home, I had to explicitly route all traffic over the VPN, but then have some routing issues with certain networks due to overlapping IP space.

Most of the commercial content providers detect that you are using a VPN (their IP address ranges are well known) and prevent you from accessing their sites via VPN. While VPNs work great on ships, the content providers may block your access anyway. I can't speak to sky, but I know Netflix works to actively block VPN access and the local cable company blocks access to the internet streaming over VPN connections.

We however did watch two Tampa Bay Lightning games on the Oasis of the seas back in May. When we tried to use the Fox Sports Go (or was it the NBC Sports) app on the iPad, it detected that we were out of the country and when we flipped on the VPN, it complained about that. To get around this we watched the games on my MacBookPro via VPN. (I run a personal VPN server in my home off a Raspberry Pi 2 Model B.) Got some strange looks walking from our 12th floor cabin down to the dining room with my laptop on my arm. And then set the laptop up on the table so my wife, son and I could watch the game.

I was disappointed with the lack of unicorns.

Why is there no Like button?

I have seen parents in the older age groups getting pagers, so I think they will give you one if you request one. But, I don't know all of the circumstances... like maybe that child had special needs.

The FAQ used to say that for older kids, one will be given if requested and if there are an available. If the parents of the younger kids claim all of the beepers then you won't get one.

Well Symphony does fit with the last ships name of Harmony. I wonder if Oasis 5 will be something like Orchestra of the Seas.

If you put your phone in Airplane mode to disable cellular and just leave WiFi on, you will be able to FaceTime. If your phone supports WiFi calling, and again you put it in airplane mode, and just leave WiFi on you SHOULD be able to send and receive text's and calls without being charged. (I can only say that when I did this using T-Mobile I was not charged. I don't know your carrier or plan so I can't say for sure.) iMessages go through the internet, so again, on WiFi you won't be charged.

Sometimes you need a power strip because the plugs in the cabins don't accommodate the power bricks used to charge different devices. I know all 3 of the cameras I am likely to take on a cruise have external battery charging bricks. (We bring 2 water proof cameras and 1 DSLR. When we do snorkeling, my wife likes one of the water proof cameras and I like the other.) One of the waterproof cameras and the DSLR have bricks that don't fit into most cabin plugs or if they do, they cover up the other plugs rendering them unusable. I also have to have a laptop computer, 2 iPhones, an apple watch, and an iPad.

The oasis of the seas was the first ship where I didn't need the power strip since it had 3 plugs on the desk, and the two outside ones were spaced far enough apart that I could plug in my laptop, and one of the camera chargers.

The laptop has 2 USB ports on it so I was able to charge 2 of the 4 apple devices at once.

If you can get to 8 cabins, you can get a group rate. Maybe invite some aunts/uncles/cousins to go with you.

Go to someplace like Buy Buy Baby, and get those baggies that you can put used diapers in. You don't want to just leave them in the trash can. This will keep the room smelling better.

Bring a little blow up tub to bath the baby in. All you'll have is shower, and that makes bathing the baby hard.

Amazon sells full body swimsuits (sometimes called rash guards) that will reduce the amount of sun screen you need to use.

I know on Freedom of the Seas and Oasis of the seas, they have a little baby splash zone. This is the ONLY pool diapered children are allowed in. You might want to bring a few toys.

With our son, he goes to bed at 7:30 or so. We would sit on the balcony and stream netflix to the iPad when he went down for the night.

We had no trouble with the baby sitting service and quite enjoyed the adult time.

You probably want to carry a box of diapers on board rather than check it. Nothing would be worse then it getting lost as they cannot be purchased on board. Royal does have a Royal Babies program where you can pre-order them and have them delivered to your stateroom, but they are VERY expensive that way. This would have to be done before sailing.

The internet service doesn't know that your son owns the device and not you. It will just prompt for a username and password when he connects.

I don't understand the requirement for long pants. It's not like it's cold. Can anyone explain that?

If your children have no experience ice skating, I would be less worried about a concussion and more worried about a broken bone. Having fallen more times than I can count while ice skating, I have almost never hit my head. However, I have broken my arm and torn my adductor muscle, and know many people who have broken arms and ankles.

That being said, my friends and I were wishing that the rink was a full 80x200 with boards, so we could host a hockey tournament at sea. Sadly that is far from the case.

Its not just on cruises that this happens. I see it frequently at church on Christmas and Easter. Clearly some people don't actually get anything out of the service.

We are sailing with GD on Allure in October and I have been researching this frequently. Keep in mind when you look at the RCCL www site there is the Royal Tots Program and the Royal Tots Nursery. It's a little confusing. They are totally different and available on some ships and not others.

 

The Oasis class has the nursery, which is for fee and staffed with sitters. The program is non-supervised, free, and is a play area where parents can take kids.

Freedom Of The Seas has it as well. WE've used it on both ships.

On the Oasis back in May they had an area near the nursery with a bunch of toys that was open all the time. It was unsupervised, except for the parents playing with their kids. We used it frequently with our not quite 2 year old son.

The nursery allocated I think its 15 hours per child that you can book for babysitting. If its not all booked you can request additional time. This is of course a for fee option.

True, now that you mention it the messaging was not going through VOOM. However, I also did some surfing of the web and it took upwards of a couple of minutes for cnn to load enough that you could actually click on the stories. And the Skyping goes through Wi-Fi and, as I mentioned, there were two days when there was literally zero service for hours. We had gorgeous weather for the entire trip.

 

I'm not saying it was completely worthless - albeit, at times it was - I'm more pointing out that it is NOT anything like high-speed, more like dial-up and they shouldn't be claiming it to be high-speed (in my opinion).

When we were on Freedom, they hadn't done the VOOM upgrade and the service was virtually unusable. The 2G cell service I got on the islands worked better than the WiFi on the ship. T-Mobile has free 2G data in like 120 countries with quasi-reasonable voice and SMS rates.

Just for future reference, traditional text messaging is called Short Message Service (SMS) and is cellular provider only. As was mentioned already, your text messages were going through the international roaming provider on the ship and I guess on the islands as well, and that's why you were getting charged.

 

Now, if your cellular provider offers "Wi-Fi Calling", it may be possible to send SMS messages over Wi-Fi. Verizon Wireless, for example, allows this. When I'm connected to the ship's Wi-Fi, it is sometimes (depending on the quality of the internet connection onboard) possible for me not only to send and receive text messages over the Wi-Fi connection (and not be hit with international roaming charges), but also make telephone calls to loved ones at home.

 

Other providers offer different levels of Wi-Fi Calling services. If I remember correctly, Sprint provides such functionality for calling, but text messages still go over cellular. (It's been a while since I looked into Sprint's Wi-Fi capabilities, so this may have since changed.)

I have T-Mobile. I was able to make a phone call on the Oasis over WiFi calling with incurring any additional charges. On the Freedom I was able to send a text message without occurring an additional charge. The weird thing is, the phone old me it will use my location for billing purposes. I am not sure if maybe thats boilerplate in iOS or if thats T-Mobile sending the message and not actually billing me.