Pratique

One must have low expectations and then use the booze to lower them even more.

I hear you. At home when my wife asks me what to get for lunch I always say Windjammer and she rolls her eyes.

Yes but why would Royal want to build smaller ships if the big ones are doing so well?

Your neighbors probably didn’t have enough to drink.

Okay then, do kids and multigenerational families want a smaller ship? Where is the market for Royal to do that and be distinctive from NCL etc.?

Why wouldn’t they just use Celebrity as the platform for this? It seems more logical to me.

Maybe I’m not thinking creatively enough but I wonder how they could get a mega ship experience in a midsize ship. Or if that even makes sense? These ships with the outdoor venues really only work in warm climates and quite frankly people who prefer a smaller ship don’t like the mega ship experience.

They are still rebuilding from the pandemic shutdown. I think they lost a lot of experienced folks. Whatever the reason this guy with 10 years experience seemed concerned.

We are onboard with you and completely concur on the selection at Windjammer, which is our preference for lunch. Lackluster is a good description. As usual the crew are trying to encourage people to go to other lunch venues including of course the up-charge ones. Maybe it's a conspiracy, make the food lackluster to get us to spend more on the specialty food lol. But otherwise the crew have been excellent so far. Although the Captain's jokes are pretty weak. 🙂 We only checked one bag at the curb and by 5:30 our stateroom attendant said he couldn't find it anywhere including Security, so he sent me down to Guest Services where they told me bags were delayed due to the rain. Our attendant said they were delayed due to the short turnaround and early departure. Then my wife calls me and says the bag arrived. The cabin tag fell off and they figured it out from the name on the other tag on the bag. Lesson learned is to never staple the paper tag to the bag. I need to get those plastic holders.

IMHO Royal is not interested in the small cruise ship market. They will leave that to lines like Margaritaville at Sea. Royal is shooting for the moon on the megaships and the handful of itineraries that they can sail at full capacity year round. Last night we were chatting with our server onboard Oasis who has been with Royal for 10 years. He said that he is concerned about how Royal is going to staff all of these new megaships with two to three thousand-plus crew per sailing. He thinks they need at least 50% experienced staff on a given sailing to meet the minimum service levels, so they will need to poach crew from other ships while they train up the new recruits. I could sense the apprehension in his voice about how well that is (or isn't) going to turn out. Time will tell whether Royal can pull it off and what the end result will be for the rest of us.

Following this thread b/c I am getting on this cruise this Friday. I will be bringing an Apple Watch for the first time and it appears that using indoor workouts instead of outdoor workouts will avoid the skewing caused by GPS when the ship is moving. I will give it a try.

Agreed from my point of view but not all suites are created equal in Royal's eyes. There are suites and then there are Royal Suite Class suites on the Oasis/Quantum class ships. Apparently free internet is a product differentiator. But don't complain too loudly otherwise they might make internet an upcharge for every suite across the fleet except maybe Star Class.

That's fine if you're done with me. These are the benefits I'm referring to, just to be clear. Anything else is frosting on the cake. https://www.royalcaribbean.com/faq/questions/what-are-the-benefits-of-royal-suite-class

If a perk on a cruise isn't tangible, then in what way is it a benefit? If one of the perks is a free drink, then yes I expect to be able to hold the drink in my hand. If one of the perks is reserved seating at a show, then yes I expect to be able to sit in that seat. Consider yourself fortunate that the CK and SL have never been so crowded for you to the point where there was nowhere to sit. I have not been so fortunate.

The horse has been out of the barn for about 10 pages now.

Yes, and I think this is a natural human condition. I worked at Walt Disney World in the 90s and 2000s. Back in the 90s just before Christmas they would close the Magic Kingdom to day guests at 6:00 pm and then reopen it exclusively for employees and their families. At first they did this for three nights to accommodate everyone, then reduced it to one night, and then eventually to zero nights. Instead, they gave out passes so the employees and their families could visit the parks with the day guests. Then they started putting date restrictions on the passes so they could only be used during the "off-season." As the years went by, the perks disappeared and each time there were complaints followed by acceptance and rationalization. Win for the company, loss for the employees, but life goes on and memories are short.

I will be the first to admit to having been fooled. Once I was chasing a benefit for free burritos. I had to eat a lot of burritos. But the free ones were especially enjoyable. Until the company realized that they were giving out too much free food. It was nice while it lasted.

I appreciate what you are saying and I don't begrudge you for seeking the benefits. However, you say you are not a class envy type of person and then immediately describe yourself as a class envy type of person. I have learned through experience that chasing benefits is a fool's errand. I have spent a lot of money to achieve a benefit just to see the benefit watered down or eliminated - or granted to others who have spent less than I did under some special promotion - leaving myself to ask whether it was worth chasing the benefit in the first place. I am at a certain tier on one airline that affords me complimentary upgrades when available. But the upgrade is only available maybe once out of every eight or 10 flights, so the benefit is not worth much. It's nice when I get it but I don't choose to fly this airline over another for that benefit because it is not valuable. Not worth chasing. Royal Caribbean calls the lounge for suite guests the "suite lounge," which implies it is exclusive to suite guests, but it is not. They should call it something else. But whatever they call it, it is a watered down benefit to me. I will enjoy it if and when I can, but I don't book a suite for the lounge benefit. I book it for the suite, because that has value to me. I can stew about the overcrowding the lounge but it is not something worth wasting too much energy on. If other people are getting better benefits than me, for whatever reason, so be it. The perks are supposed to be above and beyond the core product. The core product for a suite guest includes access to the suite lounge but it is a perk for the lounge to be exclusive to suite guests. And going back to the topic, the deposits for most suites above JS will now be higher. What I get out of that deal is a big fat zero. It is not for my benefit at all. Royal will charge whatever the market will bear for the cabin, and people will still cancel at the last minute regardless of how high the deposit is. The real way to curb this practice is to make the entire fare due at booking and non-refundable. We may think that is a crazy idea but I don't think it is. When they reduced housekeeping in the main cabins to once a day, lots of people came here to rationalize that the second visit was not worth anything to them or that it somehow keeps fares lower. So if someday suites become due in full on the day of booking and non-refundable, someone will come here to rationalize how that is just fine with them too.

Putting aside that this thread has been hijacked by a discussion about "spend", a show of hands from everyone who cares what other people are spending. When I am flying, I do not care how much other passengers paid for their seats. I do get annoyed when the gold/bronze/platinum passengers get to board ahead of me, and that is not any incentive for me to spend more with the airline to earn that benefit. At the end of the day, I evaluate the value for my money. If I see my CK server doting over a Pinnacle at the cost of ignoring us (it has happened more than once), I am not happy and I do not think "well, they earned it." Instead, I think, "all things considered, is this cruise vacation worth the cost to me." And at some point, I will probably say "not any more" and move on to something else. Loyalty is absurd from a customer's viewpoint because the perks are always getting diluted. Always and without fail.

I think you are both right and wrong. Right in the sense that an on-staff meteorologist can provide another layer of guidance that is tailored to the company's needs, something that would be difficult to obtain from a third-party service or someone in house who isn't doing the job full time. Wrong in the sense that it is very difficult to quantify how much more value the meteorologist adds, so getting rid of the position has no significant impact on operations. For an analogy, a broad proposition that middle managers are useless is countered by a broad proposition that middle managers wouldn't exist if they had no value. On an individual basis it is hard to quantify the value of a given person in a middle management position. Maybe they did a good job but life goes on just fine without them. Or maybe they are bad at their job but keeping them on makes little difference. Royal did fine without a staff meteorologist, they did fine with one, and they will do fine without one again. And maybe the day will come where not having one will work a disadvantage but that will be more than offset by all the days where having one gave no advantage. For what it's worth, Royal doesn't really need any loyalty ambassadors either. We can just all line up at Guest Services for everything. And the show will go on without having a cruise director on every ship. And so on... (By the way, the title of this thread is some weird schadenfreude).

I am also on the June 16 sailing and I hope this rumor is not true but I guess we'll find out when we get on board.

This.

Disputed or declined? If the charge never posted to your credit card it is likely the bank declined the charge. Sometimes they do that for no apparent reason, maybe it was flagged as suspicious. My bank is good at catching fraudulent charges but every once in a while they decline a valid charge. If it was disputed then the bank should have a record of the dispute and resolution.

That is interesting. I went back and looked at some of my receipts since 2019. Some of them have $500 deposits for 7 night suites and some have $900 deposits for 7 night suites. So far this year I only have one cruise booked (suite) and I booked it within final payment so I don't know for sure what the deposit would have been since I had to pay the entire amount immediately but I vaguely recall the RC reservations agent telling me it would have been $500 before she realized we were within the final payment window. EDIT to add: I think I figured it out, since we were rebooking so many things during the pandemic some of the bookings that were originally 10+ nights ended up being changed to 7 nights but the $900 deposit was already in. That probably explains the discrepancies.

I was paying $500 deposits on 7 night suites up through 2018. Then it went to $900.