VibeGuy

That’s perfectly fine - I just don’t want to have to execute perfect time-on-target raids. What I’m trying *very much* to avoid is queuing outdoors, while standing up, being held back by someone with a clipboard and a chronometer. I’m 100% fine with as little as a folding chair in shade with temperatures between 50 and 85, once unburdened of checked luggage. I admit to being really disheartened by what I’ve heard about the boarding process in San Diego. We’ve been pondering our west coast homeport options and in terms of “everything that happens between getting to our home airport and being on the ship”, San Diego has a lot going for it - plenty of flights, rapid baggage claim, lots of fast, affordable ground transport options, plenty of stuff to do near the pier, great lodging if we fly in days before. Knowing up front that the right option is to drop the bags and have the Uber continue on to take us to a leisurely brunch as a workable way to avoid the Clipboard Dragons helps some. It’s not an irredeemable mess like Vancouver on a four-ship day.

Oh, yes, absolutely. We were thinking two or three weeks to start. We aren’t retired yet. Our record is 40 nights in a row so far.

The only difference in the balcony cabins will be the size of the balcony and how much is covered. Caribe is the largest and mostly open to the sky above. Baja is somewhat smaller and mostly covered, Aloha is almost entirely covered.

I’ve been sailing with Princess since I was adorable and wore short pants, but now that they’ve essentially eliminated the unpublished loyalty rewards (OBC up to $100/sailing, milestones like 50th sailing/500 nights), there’s no sense in blind loyalty. I haven’t sailed HAL for around 40 years, but the itineraries look good and the ships have some design elements and features that work for us. We aim for between two and three months onboard per year and generally book fairly standard balcony cabins. We tend to book Princess Plus, and I’ve been thinking we would book HIA on HAL - so the free loaded minibar isn’t a big selling point anymore and the internet discount is irrelevant. I think the only two meaningful perks that remain for us at Princess are complimentary laundry service and priority boarding. Princess offers free cleaning and pressing at the top tier - it looks like HAL offers an optional add-on that replaces that for a whopping $9/day. Aside from items that require specialty wet cleaning (linen, jackets), I don’t see any other gap here. One area of concern I have is that, delicately, I understand HAL is much stricter about enforcing boarding times, including terminal access, than some other lines. With Princess, terminal access is essentially a free for all (nobody cares about the boarding groups to get in the building), and any enforcement is around actual ship access. Fair enough, and the top couple of tiers have some priority on that part. Am I reading correctly that adding the Club Orange package fixes both terminal access *and* actually boarding the ship? So, for those who were earning Loyalty Commend OBC on Princess before the shutdown, am I missing something that can’t be fixed with application of a laundry package and Club Orange? At this stage in my travel life, I really value frictionless experiences and I’m willing to fork over a little for them.

Ruby has recently featured it in the Horizon Court.

The Medallion is mostly fine. Anything wrong with it can usually be fixed at guest services with a replacement. The problem is the accompanying phone app.

I think the internet price change is to better reflect the actual cost of the service. My contention since the change to MedallionNet is that, unless someone had an unflattering photo of an SES executive with an underage barnyard animal, there was no way that the retail price covered the cost of the backhaul. Since it’s going to be a year or more before the promised O3B mPower constellation comes online and they don’t seem to be using O3b Classic as much as they were before the shutdown, I suspect this increase merely reduces the cash suck - Princess has been subsidising the Internet to get people onboard.

Same. The app is a smouldering turd in off-ship mode, and one of the best things to happen to Princess since Aaron Spelling once onboard. The difference is night and day. Many of the day to day problems (login, disappearing information, mangled sailings) are due to them endlessly bolting web and mobile services onto POLAR, which has origins that probably date back to 1988, possibly earlier. There’s also, I suspect, a very challenging n-way data synchronisation thing at play. Princess blew the launch and expansion and blamed waaaaaaaay too much on users and their device:OS combination. They were idiots for not bringing up the web interface simultaneously with the app (they should have held the app until a web UI was available, period, full stop). They should not have used a Big Bang approach to feature deployment. They should have had more subject matter experts and real-world users in the development process. Woulda, shoulda, coulda. It’s still bad pre-cruise. Multiple issues that I bugged in November 2021 are still a problem today. Customers who like the onboard product so much that they book B2Bs are still having routine problems. Customers with extensive cruise histories or changed addresses have glitches with pre-boarding tasks. It’s all unacceptable AF. But the problems disappear once you’re past check-in and hit onboard WiFi. That part generally exceeds my expectations. Crew Call chat is probably my absolute favourite feature from a customer service perspective because it lets me set clear expectations with a paper trail, and being able to reliably get a drink by the Lotus Spa pool (without having to hope a waiter wanders by) makes my cruises with the app better than they were before. So go ahead and take your ball and go home after your little fits of pique. Chuck your wooden shoe in a power loom on your way out the door.

Yes, full suites can order from the MDR menus for all meals, and the suite breakfast in Sabatini’s is merely a highly suggested menu - you’re welcome to improvise.

This is a common problem. Nothing you can do on your end will fix it. 800-PRINCES, option 2, option 1, option 1, option 2. It will be an overseas call center. Tell them you can’t log in to the app with your booking number and that you need a ticket opened. The booking number will be the ticket ID. There is no other magic path. All escalations have to start this way.

The way people use connectivity in the mobile and broadband age is distinctly different than it was when you sat down at the computer and “got online”. Push and background tasks and other forms of ubiquitous connectivity created behavioral change, and the minute-based packages were no longer useful. Minutes-based internet packages are for people who type in all caps and forward chain email to relatives who avoid them at family gatherings.

Yes. Everything gets CHG and alcohol. CHG for the skin, gin for me, thanks. I’m also a master at the one-hand application of the Tegaderm. What an ordeal. I can only imagine. I’m glad she’s feeling up to a cruise after all that and I’m sure you could use one, too.

I recently walked a friend through deaccessing his over FaceTime. He was convinced they’d find his body splayed across the kitchen floor looking like a scene out of _Carrie_. Such confidence.

Yes, the walk path along the E side of Pacific Highway, parallel to the golf course fence is perfectly pleasant. The part skirting the roundabout wasn’t as bad as I thought it might be, and yes, that bus stop is rather isolated. I’m pretty sure I didn’t go via Guildford, though (I stay at the Sheraton nearby there fairly often). I made a connect somewhere that took me either to either Richmond-Brighouse or Bridgeport. The details are fuzzy. I had a waitlist clear very, very late for one of the one-night repositioning cruises on Princess, and NOTHING was available from Seattle - Bolt, Greyhound, Amtrak (train and bus), Quick, cruise line transfers, all three airlines. Even with my corporate code, Avis wanted more than I was willing to stomach, so I started noodling how to do it with public transit. I started in Tacoma about 0500, and sat down to lunch in the dining room just before 1300, using Sound Transit bus, Community Transit, Skagit Transit, Whatcom Transit x 2, Translink x 2 and Canada Line. Everything ended up lining up absolutely perfectly - if it hadn’t, I was going to grab an Avis in Bellingham and worry about the cost later. Not exactly recommended, but it’s actually a very scenic ride from Bellingham to Blaine and you can stop for an ice cream cone at Edaleen Dairy, which makes any trip better.

From an open deck or a balcony, all of those three ports should have decent cell service (LTE or 5G). Princess sticks to local time in ports where passengers are likely to drink.

Another fun wrinkle - closed loop cruises that call in Martinique and/or Guadeloupe are not WHTI-compliant. That one catches even some relatively savvy people unaware. A painful and expensive learning experience.

$100. That’s why.

Colombia and Panama aren’t WHTI countries. I hope you have an email from the travel agent saying the card would suffice. I’m not one of these people who think you shouldn’t get on a cruise ship without a passport book, but at 85 and for two weeks, the odds of having to fly internationally aren’t close enough to zero for even my taste. Panama has been extra-spicy about inspecting passport books since the restart.

I send wool suits for the cleaning with no hesitation. They do an excellent job, and it’s complimentary. I spend extra locally to get the wet-process eco cleaning and they don’t do as good of a job with the pressing and finishing as they do onboard.

You need better streaming subscriptions.

To the issue of port access: I would think both the physician and nurses would be comfortable and technically proficient with accessing and deaccessing a port, especially for TPN, but I would absolutely plan to have my own saline and heparin syringes and a copy of the access instructions just to be on the safe side. Also, because I have sensitive skin, I’d bring my own preferred tape. Accessing and deaccessing are easy to learn and your wife’s infusion provider or doctor’s office would probably be happy to walk you through it. The biggest advantage of DIY is being able to do it on your own schedule.

Only if that ship is docked. Next to my router. No. That was the screenshot I use to show friends what I’m looking for. Two recent results are shown in subsequent posts. Sustained bandwidth is important for streaming and large file downloads, but the time to resolve DNS, load all the crappy dependencies of websites and mobile apps, register clicks - that’s all driven more by the high latency than the bandwidth. I’d be perfectly happy with 256-512kbps if the latency and packet loss (not discussed here) was low.

The partners and principals at A**enture are brilliant at selling the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel and delivering fingerpaint from intellectually challenged toddlers.

Anyone who has ever done a project like the OM app with massive executive visibility and 100% outsourced development could see it all coming. The emphasis on sizzle versus substance. The “blame the user/device fleet” when the problems were in the back end. Relatively common things like B2B and S2S sailings causing crashes and being dismissed as corner cases. Those of us who have been tasked with rescuing smoking craters of shareholder money also know that bombing a project like this is no impediment to executive promotion. 99% of the issues I’ve had with the OM app have been pre-cruise and most of them have had to do with OM choking on legacy data from the OS/400-based POLAR or vice versa. The issues I’ve had onboard have turned out to largely be dead medallion batteries after multiple consecutive segments. But all the effort spent to change the ship graphic by port and time of day? The endless dead ends for features that weren’t ready at launch? The performance on top-spec iPhone Pro Max? It’s the worst combo of modern “minimal viable product” thinking (which is for pre-funding startups, not companies with paying users) meeting meddling from the top concerned with style over substance. while returning a rental car near port Everglades, I missed a turn and ended up at the Medallion Experience Center. I sorta wanted to just yeet the car right through the front door. I joked that despite having two medallions in the car and a contract with my name on it in the glove box, it would take them days to figure out the car didn’t belong there and they’d never figure out who did it.

I know better than to ask many questions about split sausages of a suspiciously dark color. I love sausage and respect the law, and thus scrupulously avoid asking much about how either are made. They don’t have it every morning and they don’t have it when they have their (very tasty) merguez.