VibeGuy

I used to worry one of us would get sick overseas and we wouldn’t be able to access a doctor or afford the treatment. Everything from dengue to COVID to elective reconstructive surgery has proven that fear wrong. Now I worry more that we’ll get sick at home and won’t be able to access a doctor or afford the treatment. I know we can’t be the only ones who schedule dental/medical appointments in ports we’re not crazy about but end up in frequently by virtue of the itineraries we sail. I’ve got one coming up in Puerto Vallarta in three weeks.

No, it is not required. It’s a closed-loop cruise calling only in the US and Canada, both WHTI signatories. HAL guidance: https://www.hollandamerica.com/en_US/faq/know-before-you-go.html

There is not. The Piazza has never had the full redo that added Vines/Alfredo’s and the IC to the sister ships.

Yes, beverage delivery to staterooms is covered with the Plus/Premium package and the standalone beverage plan.

Chedraui slightly to the south is ok; I think Walmart tends to have a more limited selection. In the post above mine, you’ll see a Farmacias Guadalajara at the upper right corner of the map - they are kind of the Rite Aid of Mexico and have more depth of selection. They also have suspiciously delicious fresh baked cookies in many locations. Go figure. For products that should be kept refrigerated, Costco isn’t too far by Uber and is highly trustworthy. The major classes of Rx that you need a receta for are going to be antibiotics, benzodiazepines like Valium or Xanax and opioids from codeine on up. Everything else is pretty much ask and you shall receive - even general anesthetics and chemotherapy drugs. So unless you’re looking for those three classes, you’re fine just asking for the generic name and strength you want, no Dr visit required. (If you do need very expensive specialized injectables, you may need a “farmacia alta especialidad”, and I don’t know one to recommend in PV)

But with complex fantasias like these, you really need a side plate to get the divvying up correct. Volumes could be written about how to properly divide a multiple-component dessert with asymmetric shapes. For example, an Oreo garnish has to be equally divided between sharing participants or something of equal value to the party losing out on the Oreo half has to be contributed. Then again, splitting a bag of seven donuts with my DH once got us o the radio with the NYT’s Ethicist columnist, so maybe we oversolve.

Perfect world: Sail north from Vancouver, spend 4-7 nights exploring the rest of Alaska that isn’t Southeast, sail back south to Vancouver. With three ships running the Vancouver 7NT linehauls, this is possible. Spend some time in Vancouver and environs on either end. If three weeks isn’t in the cards, cut out the southbound sailing. You lose the Inside Passage in daylight, but you’ll see a lot of trees, hills and water on the rest of the trip. Two weeks, with half on a cruise and half split between Alaska and Vancouver seems about right. If two weeks is pushing it, I’m going to say Vancouver over Alaska for the extra days, because the Lower Mainland is spectacular - arts, culture, food, shopping, outdoor activities, sightseeing - it’s uh-may-zing. Alaska is beautiful, but the weather can be dicier in summer and it’s A Lot Of Natural Wonder and the rest is nothing like the vibrance of Vancouver. Others will roast me, but I live someplace with trees and wildlife, but without the best Chinese food in the world. yes, including China and Hong Kong. Fight me.

It’s never been removed. Because it was never added. Sapphire and Diamond were the among last Grand/Gem-class ships built without the IC. After the debut of Emerald/Ruby/Crown, all but Diamond had it added at their next major refit.

DH and I are not motor coach people. We still find amazing stuff to do during port calls. I’ve often said our perfect shorex would be “We have a Toyota HiLux fueled and waiting at the pier for you; there’s a cooler of water and Diet Coke with USD50 in small local bills in that ziploc bag. Leave the keys on the dash when you come back to the pier.” Not everybody who cruises needs nor wants new places spoon-fed to them.

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.