VibeGuy

If Princess wants to dumb everything down to 7NT Eastern and Western Caribbean sailings, some transcanals, 7NT Mexican Riviera and 7NT Alaska line haul and circle Seattle sailings, 15NT Hawaii and then maintain a small Europe and Asia program, then a rewarding loyalty program is going to be all the more critical, because most cruisers will only do those so many times. (Disney Fanatics and aquatic snowbirds like myself notwithstanding). I don’t quite feel demographically ready for HAL, but it’s the obvious home for us. Between being introduced to Princess as a kid (and Sitmar and Cunard - my aunt wasn’t particularly brand loyal and I wasn’t picking the line) and sort of heavily settling in with Princess around the turn of the century, I was a pretty big RCL fan. They just shifted the hard product to megaships (their last appealing build was the Radiance class) and the soft product to a much more a la carte / less personal style that wasn’t how I enjoyed spending my more-limited vacation time. Princess put the right ships in the right places and treated us well and kicked back some loyalty benefits. If hard product, soft product and loyalty program are the three legs of the stool my spend is balancing on, and they keep kicking at the loyalty one, the other two have to work a lot harder to keep 20, 30, 50, whatever nights flowing in (24 in 2021, 60 in 2022, currently 6 booked for 2023). With our favorite ship spending 2023 on the west coast, it’s likely they’ll keep the spend but they’re taking “of course we’re sailing Princess” to “of course we’re sailing, it’s most likely Princess” and the next logical step after that is “of course we’re sailing, maybe it’s Princess”. Wouldn’t it be nice to have some guests who are absolutely certain where their next vacation dollars are being spent? Isn’t that the point of loyalty incentives?

Princess absolutely stated that nights rather than sailings would drive recognition when they quietly discontinued Loyalty Commend OBC. And then they promptly discontinued night-based milestone recognition. Extraordinary times, blah, blah, blah. It’s a handy pretext to align the relatively generous Princess benefits with the historically less generous benefits from other Carnivore brands. Unlike lodging and airline programs where the points held by members are liabilities accounted for on the books, none of the Carnival-umbrella programs actually generate a liability that needs to be booked. Everything they spend on loyalty benefits gets taken as a marketing expense or promotional discount on the booking at hand. Nothing is promised for the future. I know who was on the ships for a year into the restart. It wasn’t young families new to cruising. While many passengers were admittedly burning off canceled-cruise FCCs and bribe money, new money from people who like the product brought ships back on line, got experienced staff and crew back on the job and demonstrated that the business was still viable. So naturally, the best thing to do was eliminate the notion of future benefits for sailing. The grass isn’t particularly greener elsewhere. But truly top-tier/hundreds-of-nights loyalty is demonstrably less rewarded today than it was at the shutdown.

The medallion magnet is several orders less powerful than a pacemaker device control magnet, but it’s literally not worth finding out. It’s too easy to slip it into a breast pocket or around your neck. What makes the Medallion a particular regulatory nightmare is that it is always awake and transmitting from the moment the battery is installed at the factory. So it’s not just offering a device for sale which *might* emit RF in a band with regulatory impacts - for its entire life, it emits said energy. Some customs broker somewhere must have an incredible song and dance routine.

Santa Fe and sometimes Pacific Moon. They’re using Vivaldi and Savoy for contractors and crew.

Ugh. There is some specific *thing* that the plumbers can do when the sink has hot water and the shower doesn’t or vice versa, and it seems like the likelihood of needing it is directly proportional to how long the ship was out of service - Ruby needed it in every cabin we were in, and it’s some very minor thing because it’s done from the panel in the hallway and takes three minutes. If you can possibly imagine, the Sterling Steakhouses (eye roll) on Diamond and Sapphire used to be even less atmospheric because the servers wore US flag-motif vests. So bad. It’s one of the features I like least about the twins. I’m disappointed that Izumi isn’t fully functional. We are onboard in a few weeks and I’ve been looking forward to some quiet hot water.

Emerald now has just the thermal suite - I believe is $20/day, give or take, when purchased for the whole voyage, complimentary with a spa service and a bit more purchased a la carte.

Cash cows and actual bovines have a lot in common. Neither likes it when you come to the milking parlor with cold hands. The $100 Loyalty Commend was effectively a $0.30/day rebate from previous cruises. It was a gesture, and a nice one. The Milestone recognition was also a gesture, and a nice one. The laundry is admittedly the perk that actually keeps us loyal. Hotel loyalty is very transactional - what have you done for me lately, and it takes ten years at a particularly loyalty level to eliminate annual requalification. In exchange for 75 nights a year, I get a bonus free night ($250-300 if used well), lounge access that ranges from bottled water and pretzels in Dubuque to free pour of excellent liquor and five distinct food presentations per day in Asia, and automatic upgrades from whatever I booked up to a decent junior suite most times, and some ridiculous suites at times. Oh, and complimentary breakfast. Conservatively, my loyalty returns $40/night in benefits (breakfast for two, some evening beverages, bottled water, minor snacks) at the upper half of their portfolio and nothing at the lower half. The upgrades are gravy. I’m also earning redeemable points at about 10% of my spend. (17.5 points per dollar spent, $0.006 per point) Princess never came close to that before, and now without loyalty commend OBC, it’s a substantial devaluation. I’ve never thought loyalty improved my chances with the upgrade fairy. It doesn’t earn me free nights. I really like the product (both the hard product of the actual cabins and the shipboard facilities and the soft product of the service experience), but where before there were a lot of things driving me towards Cruise 51 to enjoy the rewards as our ability to travel continues to accelerate, there’s no reason to drive incremental spend to Princess or Carnivore Corporation as a whole. As someone under 50 who hopefully has a lot of years of cruising left, I guess I have to be a lot more transactional.

I used to think their apple pie was abysmal. It has since improved. I don’t get why the pumpkin is Not Quite Right, either - their pastry people generally execute the recipes well, so I blame someone from Sitmar whose recipe has been handed down like family lore.

Sapphire rides the best of the Gem/Grand Class, IMHO, with a slightly wider beam and a lower CG. if you’re onboard and are prone to motion discomfort, try sleeping/laying with your head and feet perpendicular to the slower-changing moment. So if the ship rolls side to side every second and pitches nose-up and down every three seconds, you want to be port-starboard. Don’t ask me what to do in a yaw situation.

These are almost inevitable delays when it’s the first sailing after a prolonged absence from US ports.

They used to be $1.25 each at the lodges and ran on US quarters. I don’t think anyone has posted about it since the restart.

Never seen a “bag special” on Princess in Alaska.

Beware those Passionadas. They go down like a toddler on a freshly-waxed floor.

I’m currently booked with both a casino rate and Plus added on; my booking was handed by a PVP, not the Casino department.

Nope. The Princess-provided balloons are gone - it’s just passengers or group organizers doing it now, so it’s notably uncommon. Cruising changes. Some very nice junior officers on Sitmar used to be *completely fine* with letting an adorable kiddo fire a .410 shotgun off the aft deck.

We did four B2B SF sailings with less than 50% occupancy after the restart, got off for a month, and then came back for another month with slightly above 50% occupancy. I think our actual numbers for the first four were 23%, 48%, 40%, 32%, with Christmas and NYE bumping up the average. Let me assure you - the experience was fantastic. How fantastic? When we left home we only planned to do B2B. We added number three because the first two were so good, and number four because we realized we’d stumbled into something great. The only reason we didn’t stay for the next two was that my DH didn’t like the itineraries. Despite being a ghost ship, there was almost no indication that Princess was discouraged and cutting back. You had to *look* to find where they weren’t staffing or scheduling things - like how the IC closed at 11 or Midnight, or how one dining room/side of the Horizon Court never opened. The rest? Let me tell you about the rest. The crew was relaxed and helpful to the point of aggression. My silverware got replaced four times in one lunch at the Horizon Court. My wine glass in Vines arrived before I did. I actually felt bad for the performers in Wheelhouse and the Princess Theatre - one comedy headliner show had fifty people attending. That’s a big room to find the energy in. I think the combo in Wheelhouse had two tables to play for, and one of the guitarists had three (and he was quite good). I wish I had the Patters - they were absolutely the normal Princess level, but the whole thing felt like a much, much more expensive cruise line - the staff:passenger ratio + Medallion = Best. Cruises. Ever.

Yeah, it was a definite pleasant surprise, and a nice variety - meatballs, pigs in blankets, rumaki, samosas, etc. They were individually plated on a warmer at the other end of the buffet from the “action station”. It’s such a small thing, but it’s a *nice* small thing.

most sailings on most ships, unless it’s insanely rich with elite passengers, complimentary laundry left for your steward in the morning will be returned the next day before dinner. Rarely, it will be the day after that. Even rarer, it can be the same day. If it can be returned on a hanger, it will be, pressed or steam-finished as appropriate. I honestly think they do a better job than my local cleaners. They’ve even managed to get the “bacon collar” out of a couple of polo shirts I’d written off as hopeless. I do not know how smalls other than socks come back - the socks have been pinned together and draped over the bar of the hanger, however. Nothing (and I mean *nothing*, in 30ish sailings since we started getting free laundry and a few before that, where I just didn’t want to be bothered with quotidian tasks on vacation) has ever needed to be so much as threatened with an iron upon return.

They don’t cancel single sailings between two other sailings due to low bookings. Sailings before or after drydock, it has happened. Delayed restarts due to soft bookings? May I show you LA and San Diego with Sapphire and Diamond? But a random one where they haven’t moved sufficient cabins. It would be chaotic.

Comfy seats, attentive beverage service and a commanding sunset view are a winning formula for me in general, but our experience since the restart, with a hot hors d’oeuvre added to the usual spread, has been even better. I may not be a salted peanut who can be had for the price of a cocktail, but anyone opening the negotiations with a couple of those arancini might be surprised how far they get. It’s a genuine upgrade - I’ve always been a little envious of HAL and Cunard cruisers who got hot hors d’oeuvre with their evening libations, and now I look down on them. From Skywalkers. Literally. They’re mostly beneath me. In a purely geometric sense. I do think some thought goes in to scheduling the service staff - at least on Ruby, it’s been the A Team, for hustle and hospitality, and the majority of the servers from our first forty nights were there when we came back a few months later for another thirty - so it’s either a desirable gig that they request or management staffs to the service expectation and knows who delivers it. Either way, it works. If I had one wish list item, it would be for the wine options to improve. It’s the standard Skywalkers pours which are roughly the same as those at the open deck bars. I’d love for them to feature a wine of the day, by the glass, chosen to compliment the featured appetizer.

Yes. There are several obstructed OV cabins where it’s just a little bit of hardware instead of a giant mass of orange.

Sapphire by a mile - wider promenade, better designed dining rooms, more top deck space per passenger (wider and longer). Grand has the superior disco for late night with better access to fresh air, but that’s it.

Incidentally, if you’re referring to Planks and Steamers, they haven’t resumed service yet.

I haven’t seen an oak, hickory or mesquite tree within miles of a Princess ship. The dishes cooked in ovens and served with bbq sauce are tasty enough. Just not BBQ.