VibeGuy

You can definitely bring fresh citrus on board - I grab white grapefruits in season for better daiquiris. what you can’t do is take it back off the ship

Exactly this. The non-refundable provisions are generally around voluntary changes and cancellations.

Speedtest results are traffic shaped. Latency and packet loss are much more important factors when streaming or doing something interactive. I have zero problems with them throttling to protect latency and deliver 99%+ of packets.

Day to day operations are expected to be unaffected. JP Morgan has owned lots of operating hotels before as part of foreclosures or deeds in lieu.

Princess was not assessed a single PVSA violation fine that wasn’t mitigated out in the region that includes Seattle and Alaska over a ten year period ending in 2019. It’s a canard.

Princess looked like Luddites for not adopting azimuthing podded propulsion, and then the bearing failures started. I believe every line that had pods cancelled cruises or changed itineraries over it, and the pod manufacturers paid out a lot of damages and covered upgrade costs during early life dry dock. The bugs are worked out now so it makes sense to use them for the Sun and Star. The limitations of the Royal class for Alaska are real and adding maneuverability that pilots everywhere are extremely comfortable with (vs, say, a Becker rudder) should make the new builds more agile even though the “sail area” is going to increase relative to the Royals.

If demand for exotic itineraries could sustain something the size of Island / RCI’s Radiance-class (Panamax), lines might be able to thread the needle and offer a broad library of interesting product at, say, $225/night vs $300. HAL is the logical place in Carnivore Corp & plc to do so.

The Royal class has two problems from Vancouver. One is clearance at the Lions Gate Bridge. Any ship of a certain height regardless of passenger capacity or other design details is subject to these restrictions. There are some departure and arrival times that get moved around to accommodate these height restrictions on many lines, largely due to tidal conditions. The other problem is more complicated than just size alone. Enter Seymour Narrows. It’s a channel about 2/3rds of the way up Vancouver Island and, for a variety reasons (geographic, hydrologic, meteorological) of it is one of the more challenging stretches of water to navigate in vessels of any size. The water flow is exceptionally turbulent. In vessels with azimuthing propulsion, full engine power can be directed in any direction. In vessels with conventional fixed propellers, like every Princess ship to date, directional control is mostly limited to the rudder and asymmetric thrust between the propellers. Expert opinion from local pilots is that the manoeuvrability of the Royal class is insufficient relative to size and the conditions likely to be encountered in the Narrows and they won’t provide pilotage. No pilotage, the insurers won’t cover the ship. Technically it fits, technically they’re allowed to sail the waters, but if you can’t use a pilot and the insurance pools say you need to use a pilot in certain waters, this is where you end up. I think it’s possible to practically serve Vancouver with vessels up to about 175,000GT - it’s just hard to arrange more tonnage than that in a practical way and fit inside the various limitations. Coincidentally, Sun and Star Princess will both be in that range and have more manoeuvrability than the Royal class (azmiuthing pod propulsion and brawnier bow thrusters). Princess doesn’t need to go bigger than that but their ability to be financially successful in their market space is improved by being closer to that than to 2000-passenger vessels.

Thanks. I couldn’t remember if they were 700 pax or 700 cabins. In the days of cheap bunker fuel and very cheap hotel-side labour, Princess printed money with 700 passenger ships but growing the business required cruising to become at least as cost-effective as land vacations and now a huge part of the value proposition is that it’s cheaper than a land vacation by a dramatic margin (you can take a family of four from the Midwest to Alaska for a week in a balcony cabin with air for about half the cost of a week at Disney World, as an example, even at 2023 prices). Carnival Corp and plc may not be filled with the greatest business minds of our time, but they can use Excel well enough. Fincantieri absolutely could have delivered them something in the Icon-Class range (250,000GT) or a new gen Panamax (92,000 GT), but for where they think cruising is going to go over the ships’ useful lives, the sweet spot seems to be 175-185,000GT. If Princess had a plan to be at a consistent $300/day basic fare they could absolutely go smaller and make money. But their market is just too price sensitive.

Princess can barely make money with the Panamax ships as it is. The economics of a 2000-lower berth or smaller ship vs closer to 4000 aren’t favourable - the highly paid portion of the officers and technical / hotel staff are one per ship, but you’re dividing the cost over fewer customers. Fuel is the same issue - you might need 10 units per person with a 2000 guest ship but only 8 per person at 4000, to sail the same itinerary day. Princess doesn’t command the price premium that you need to run small ships. They got the R-class ships (1400 lowers?) at truly scrap steel prices, and couldn’t make a buck. HAL can make money in the Panamax size range because they charge more per day for those sailings and people are willing to pay it. So if Panamax and popular prices are going to exist anywhere in Carnival Corp & plc, it’s going to be HAL. Luxury and small will be Seabourn. I actually think the comments by executive leadership about ship uptake in 2026 and beyond are a negotiating tactic with Fincantieri et al to obtain favourable export financing backed by their host countries, or lease-option structures or anything else that continues to grow capacity but keep the debt either super cheap and/or off-balance-sheet. Adura is getting an entire new fleet but the acquisition costs and borrowing don’t land on CCL/CUK directly. Fincantieri isn’t going to let the shipyards and the subcontractors go idle.

Also plan to take the Chuckanut Drive scenic route from Fairhaven to Bow. It’s one of the nicest scenic drives in Washington and only adds a few minutes to your trip. The bus transfers are awful. It’s literally like flying into Orlando to catch a cruise in Ft Lauderdale + Customs and immigration. You’re making a smart choice.

With king crab prices and labor availability where they are, I have my profound doubts about steamers coming back - especially on ships that get Catch by Rudi.

Compared to a la carte sashimi or the smoked salmon bagel with the Ultimate Balcony Breakfast, this is quite a feature!

I’ve literally had them do the FCD and then immediately book for us to stay onboard.

They might break even if they doubled them. You could give someone a whole Maine lobster for the price of single red king leg at the moment and still be money ahead.

Seems tacky to name a new ship after one that had a catastrophic accident with a loss of life. But that’s just me.

To some extent or another, the streaming companies are sensitive to bandwidth limitations in mobile and satellite networks. They’ll make some adjustments based on device screen and content types and if they get a bunch of dropped packets or the ping times are long or whatever, they’ll dial it back. You’ll see this in speedtests even - speedtest and Fast will report different speeds because Fast traffic is using Netflix infrastructure and gets shaped by client-end networks. if you assume 1mbps streaming (phone/smaller tablet), you should be able to get 1200 streams per cell (I believe the second polarization has been turned on in the latest gen of satellites and the maritime terminals - it was 600ish before). This assumes ~80% utilization and 20% overhead. Since everything to the west of the satellite overhead a vessel on the west coast is nearly-empty ocean, you can do some very clever stuff and practically ignore the terminals out there, moving bandwidth from that cell to an adjacent one by using a second frequency. This, I think, is the primary reason for the large number of antennas in the installation - not only is there a rather low internal bandwidth between the radio and the Ethernet, and you want some redundancy, but the bandwidth requirements of the ships could easily require several downstream channels and the maritime hardware can only listen on one and talk on one at the same time. The use of the phased array antennae on the satellites means you can *pour* bandwidth on a glutton like a cruise ship and still deliver a committed amount to other users that happen to be bobbing around 30 miles away. This specific feature of their spotbeam architecture is a lot more important than I had previously considered - it’s modestly interesting in terrestrial applications but in coastwise applications where the RF is “wasted” on the low subscriber density offshore, but you can redirect it to close-in high-density users like cruise ships, it’s super interesting. I don’t think a quarter of the ship (pax and crew) streaming simultaneously is going to be extremely common but I don’t think it’s all that toxic given the traffic shaping and the dynamic bandwidth reallocation.

The 50% deal is legit. They manually adjust 50% off the lowest Basic fare other than casino offers that comes up on a user’s account.

Well, aerosol hairsprays were admittedly much stronger back then.

Not add. Add back. That was the whole point of the four unpublished loyalty commend levels that were, being unpublished, quietly eliminated before the restart. Cross-line loyalty recognition between Carnival brands will happen before they do anything that costs a dime. They have 12 years of profits owing to bond holders.

Yes. The gins in Plus are Tanqueray/Beefeater/Gordon’s on most of the ships.

I came here to ask this.

That ping time is utterly remarkable and the jitter breathtaking.

I have every reason to believe traffic shaping is in use to make sure everyone gets 2.5mbps or so. Everybody gets 2.5, nobody gets 50, but nobody gets zero, either. Each Starlink terminal has some hard limits as to how much data they’ll handle (both the radios and the embedded network gear) which is why they’re deploying multiple antennae and I suspect there’s some clever management to make sure each one is using different uplink channels to avoid interference. The conventional MEO/GEO gear absolutely handles more data on the uplink and downlink but the service is WILDLY oversubscribed for the next eight months or more. Internet responsiveness at sea is more than just a speed test - it’s latency, it’s packet loss, it’s delivered bandwidth. If they can deliver 3mbpa with low latency to every user on the ship who wants it, and do so without regard to latitude or how full the ship is, that’s terrific. Also, Starlink “cells”, for lack of a better term, are much smaller than those of O3B or GEO networks, so they’re less affected by the presence of other users more than 500 miles away. I’m shocked how fast this is rolling out. I honestly did not expect Princess ships on the Alaska run this summer to have Starlink. The maritime hardware seems to be in much greater supply than anyone outside Starlink expected.

I can read. I can also say that the paragraph in question says a luxury cruise, award-winning cuisine, first-class accommodations, top entertainment and superb service are all included. Beverages were not.