reedl

You do not have to pre-pay gratuities anymore with My Time dining.

We had the same experience on Caribbean Princess. It was so bad our eyes were watering. We got a good laugh out of it because out of the six of us, no one wanted to be the first to get up. I finally said sorry boys but screw this. We weren't even half way through our cigars before we put them out and left. Very sad.

...And people think that smoking does not affect others. You just learned what non smokers endure when being around smokers.

Does it matter if the luggage tags are printed in black & white? Or must they be in color?

:D

Yes, they must be in high Quality Color printed at least 800 DPI on photo quality paper in the exact size required, otherwise your luggage will be dumped over the side of the ship.

:D

Now for those who do not understand emojis, that was pure sarcasm.

Black and White is perfectly acceptable.

I throw them away, or leave them in the cabin waste can. They are too small for me, and the cover is not at all water proof.

I had a bunch of them for previous cruises, and never used them.

Years ago, we took my mother on her one and only cruise. Myself, my wife and younger daughter were in our cabin, and my mother was in another cabin with my older daughter. My mother kept complaining that the ship was rocking and could my daughter make it stop...

This is why my mother will never take another cruise.

Since I always fly in at least a day in advance, I rent a car at MCO and return it near the port on the morning of the cruise.

I have a bit of advice at Port Canaveral. When you arrive at Port Canaveral, drop the rest of your party off at the port, including your luggage and then take either nothing or your carry-on with you in the car. That way when you get to the car rental location, you just have to take out a single small bag and do not have to get your luggage on the shuttle bus, nor carry it off.

Then when you arrive at Port Canaveral, you merely get out of the shuttle and re-join your party.

I also wish casino was non smoking, many people avoid it because of the smoke, when we did Princess a few years ago they had a non-smoking night in the casino, it had a much larger crowd that night.

I wish the whole Casino was non-smoking. It plainly stinks.

I think is rare for someone to be drunk even with package.

I have seen many drunk people on cruise ships. They walk as if the ship is rocking even though it is totally smooth.

I do not drink, and I watch people. The amount of alcohol some people consume amazes me. If I were to drink that much, I would be dead.

They are well over the 'legal limit' and probably 2-3 times what they should be drinking. But because of the unlimited drinks, they just drink more and more.

When there are large groups of people on a cruise, remember that there are still around the same number of people on the ship. In normal cases, the groups will be much smaller (families), compared to 1000 people in a single group. The only difference you might notice is that might be areas of the ship that are used for meetings of their group (theater for example) when normally those areas are vacant. But I would doubt you will notice any appreciable difference.

A quick question that has not been answered. What is the relative size of the two rooms inside? If the inside is the same size as the balcony cabin, I would go for the Balcony any day of the week. OTOH if the balcony is significantly smaller (more than 25 Sq Ft), then I would figure out which is more important to me.

Who cares if it is obstructed? You will still see something, and the sounds will be there.

Personally I dislike inside cabins. I am on a cruise. I want to see and hear and smell the ocean.

I guess since all the pepper grinders have left the ship, no nee to order and pay extra for the lobster. But seriously, way too expensive for lobster. Her on Long Island we can get them for $6.99/lb.

Is that the raw uncooked price, or the cooked and ready to eat with everything else you get price?

It always bothers me when people compare the price of raw food to the price a restaurant charges. If that were the case, shouldn't a nice steak cost $9.99 for a pound of meat?

Cab would be about $25, the bus would be $2.75 per person. Not sure on RCCL transfer.

Actually the bus would be free. You can get on the Silver line at the airport for free. Take it inbound to the World Trade Center stop. Get off, and go up the escalator to the platform on the other side, and wait for an SL2 bus. That will drop you off out from the of the Black Falcon cruise terminal.

The return trip of course would cost $2.75 to the airport.

Actually a lot of businesses do this for security reasons. They're doing deep packet inspection and decrypt the traffic then re-encrypt it.

 

On a personal device you'd know since you'll get a certificate error, and it's what you'd see in a 'man in the middle' attack. (It's the error you had previously mentioned.) In a business we can just push out the appliance certificate to each device as a trusted certificate and the users see no error but the connection is *not* encrypted end to end.

That is true. But if he is using his own device then he would not have the company's certificate of course.

The lobster on a cruise ship is frozen. They do not have a live lobster tank below deck. But the upcharge lobster is still better than the 'free' lobster on the MDR menu.

If the e-mails were sent using a personal laptop over wifi, I don't think the ship's servers save this data.

That is correct. Because the SSL connection between the client computer and the server it is connecting to is protected with a SSL server certificate. Using TLE 1.2 there is no way (without a lot of computing power) to decrypt the traffic in transit.

UHHH...NO. There's a reason gmail is free - it is by no means a secure environment, and

 

Any email service can be monitored by whomever controls the systems it routes through. That's why workplace privacy is such a hot button issue today. Employers routinely monitor both inbound and outbound traffic on their systems. All they have to do is turn encryption off, and everything is visible if they want to look at it.

 

The servers at my employer trash any incoming email that's not encrypted that comes to by business email account, but my gmail account gleefully accepts them.

When you visit a secure website like Gmail, Hotmail, or the like, you use an SSL connection which guarantees that the connection between your computer and the server you are accessing has not been intercepted. That is why the connection to your bank is always secure also. If there is anyone who is decrypting the connection in the middle, then it would have to be re-encrypted with a different encryption key which would cause an HTTPS error on your browser.

So the connection between your computer and Gmail is secure.

If OTOH you do not trust Gmail to change your email then that is one issue.

Also if the sender is using a company email service which scans outgoing emails then of course the email will be viewable by the company of course.

Nowadays, all transfer of email occurs over an secure connection instead of the non secure TCP connection.

I can understand the OP's issue here. For me a Caesar salad needs LOTS of fresh ground pepper. The stuff that has been sitting on the table for months as lost all of its flavor.

I have never seen pepper grinders on the table, but on every cruise that I have been on, the waiter will leave the grinder on my table every day for me so that I do not waste his time putting lots of pepper on my food.

For some people, pepper is not important, but for me, without it my salad does not taste as good.

When booking onboard, the amount of credit received (whether on that cruise or on the next one), is EXACTLY the same as the amount of the total deposit.

I recently booked an Alaska cruise for next year on my recent cruise. I booked a GS and got $200 OBC on that cruise. My total deposit was $200.

So there is no negative to booking on the ship. You can make an appointment for the booking, and it takes less than 10 to 15 minutes to complete the booking. I always transfer it to my TA and get what they give me also.

My upcoming cruise I got $400 (GS, 12 nights) OBC from booking it on the last cruise, and got a lot of perks from my TA also.

Open bookings (where you do not specify a date) are useless now. I will not do them anymore.

The weather I am sure is one of the most common complaints. The weather is too hot, too cold, too sunny, too rainy, too windy, too calm, too whatever.

This was told to me by a guest services manager on the Majesty cruise I was on. They had a customer who did not know how to use their iPhone. They went to Guest Services because they knew that if they left it on that they would have large bills. Guest services held set her phone to airplane mode and told her to leave it in this mode during the cruise to not have phone calls, text, messages, and vampire data (updates, etc) being used.

Well, she left guest services and of course was unable to make a phone call, or send a text or update her facebook page or the like, so the set the phone back to normal, and then got a VERY large bill for all the data she used. She called RCCL corporate and complained that They should pay the bill because it was on the ship, etc. It made it back to the manager, and he remembered the woman and explained it to corporate what happened.

Some people never will listen to anyone.

The tagline for Chops is the best steak on the high seas. That might be true, but any steak that is cooked on an electric grill is not going to be worth that kind of money for me.

I can get an incredible steak around here for that kind of money. So I would rather eat the regular food, and enjoy the great steaks locally.

The only way a steak should be cooked is over hardwood charcoal or hardwood. Anything else is awful and flavorless to me.

So I avoid chops because of that.

I drink soda that is Diet and Caffeine Free. I have never had an issue getting a Sprite Zero from the bar with the soda package, except for one person on one ship who I avoided after that.

So if you weigh 240 and are 5' 11" you are undertall, not overweight! :D

The ones I have personally heard.....

The people who think that the cruise line purposely hits the waves to make the ship rock more than it should are always funny to listen to.

The person complaining that her phone call from her cabin (where the rates are plainly posted) cost as much as at did. She was convinced if she complained enough they would remove the charge.

The couple who were in the Concierge lounge complaining about everything on the cruise (food, service, no chocolates, etc., etc., etc) but when asked why they cruise if they have so many complaints they say because they like to cruise.

There were people on my New England cruise in the fall complaining about the cold weather. They believed that Royal purposely picked that route which they travelled because it was colder.

But the unanswered question is:

What is the amount of play required to get any sort of discount?

What is the accumulation level of table game points?

Since I am a computer nerd and deal with factual things, statements like "Not much gambling" mean nothing to me. Someone who gambles in Vegas on $100 tables might think that gambling on a $25 table is 'not much'

Thanks!

So your saying any Initial Transaction, regardless of amount spent will credit the account with 10,000 points? Thanks!

Yes.

You just need to make a single purchase. It could be a pack of gum for all they care.

I made about $15 in purchases the at a Fast Food restaurant for my first billing cycle. The next billing cycle is when I charged my upcoming cruise.

You get the points credited to your account on your statement closing date, which is better than Amex since they credit the membership rewards when you pay.

I used the 10,000 points, plus the additional 10,000 points to get $200 in OBC on my next cruise. Remember all purchases on RCCL (and sister lines) get double points.

When redeeming, make sure to put your RCCL reservation number into the comments section when you fill in the form with ship, sail date, etc. That way if there is any issue when crediting the points, it will be resolved. On my last cruise that I used points to get OBC, I saw the money in my account on the second day. It is Refundable OBC BTW, so you could not spend anything and get the cash back.