Candy Apple 12

Can you use the non-refundable OBC to pay for butler and concierge tips?

So, American Airlines changed our flight, and now we have a lot more time in Honolulu after the cruise. We are considering this excursion. Is the Honolulu City part of the tour just a bus tour? Any details would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Does anyone have a photo they could post? I need to show it to my nephew who will be 12 on our POA cruise, so he can decide whether to order from the children’s menu or from the regular menus at the specialty restaurants. Thanks!

I’m trying to book our specialty dinners. We have 10 in our party. Cagney’s and Moderno only allow 8 and Teppenyaki only allows 6. What do I do? I know I could book one table and another stateroom in our party could book another, but I want to be sure that we sit together. We are all suite guests. Would the pre-concierge be able to help us with that? If so, does anyone know the email for the POA pre-concierge? Thank you!

How would this work at Moderno, which is basically an all you can eat restaurant? Will they charge for the 12 year old? Will the 12 year old only be able to eat off the kids menu if they don’t charge? It seems like it would be hard to make sure that kids weren’t getting anything from the salad bar or side dishes that come to the table, although I can see how the meat servers could limit the meat service to the adults.

How many people were on your Pearl Harbor tour? What type of vehicle did they use? Were there multiple pickup locations? I want to avoid a huge tour bus which stops at multiple places before heading to Pearl Harbor.

Did the tour include the actual boat trip to the Arizona Memorial?

Can a 12 year old order from the kid’s menu for free? How would this work at Moderno’s?

Where would you park to go to Ka'anapali Beach? On Google maps it looks like there are hotels all along the beach.

[YOUTUBE][/YOUTUBE]

If the hotel is holding a room for you and you don't plan to stay there, you should cancel the reservation.

Will doing this mess up our overall reservation with NCL? I definitely want to free up the room for someone else, but I don’t want to mess up our cruise reservation and end up having to rebook at a higher price.

We are currently set up for a free night before the cruise. I think we got this as a promo from NCL. We want to go a few days early and stay elsewhere. Do we need to cancel the free night? Does anyone know if we are expected to pay for anything associated with that “free” night, like resort fees? If you’ve stayed there, did you have a bill upon checkout? Thank you!

POA has one.

No M&M's on the POA this past summer. :( We asked because we had heard about it here. We did get cookies every day but no gluten-free cookies. We were disappointed about that because we had listed that two of us were GF. Disney ships always have GF cookies available. POA did not.

Valley Isle was awesome. Part of the reason I picked them was their ability to accommodate my special diet.

What special diet do you follow, and what did they serve? I'm needing gluten-free. TIA!

If you plan on eating any of the items that the cruise line buys for gluten-free customers who must eat gluten-free, please notify the cruise line prior to sailing. This allows the cruise line to order a sufficient amount of these specialty items (i.e. GF bread, pasta) for the entire length of the cruise for those guests needing GF food. If you don't tell them ahead of time, the GF provisions may run out before the end of the cruise, which has happened. This is no problem for you because, as you said, you can cheat. It is a problem for those who cannot cheat. You can always cheat at the buffet.

It used to be 8am. Then about a year plus ago (not sure exactly when it was) when they were changing everything around, ie: ala carte, no water/soda allowed, etc. they snuck in the time changes on many cruises without notifying the cruisers. In spite of the requests to NCL for an explanation, there was no response from NCL. The prevailing thoughts of CC members was that if NCL had more time to get to the next port, they would save many bucks on fuel costs. That theory went along with NCL's money grab at the time and the transition to the FDR regime.

 

It was about 2-3 months ago that the times were changed back without any notice or fanfare.

Definitely without any notice. On our June 2017 cruise we didn't find out until we noticed that we were in port earlier than 10:00 AM. I wished that we had noticed the time change on our daily Freestyle which we had received the night before. This would have given us a chance to wake up earlier and start our day earlier.

This thread on Trip Advisor has detail on number of tickets per time slot available in advance and for walk up. It seems like if you want to do an earlier tour walk up is a better bet.

https://www.tripadvisor.com/Travel-g29222-c219018/Oahu:Hawaii:Reservations.For.Uss.Arizona.Memorial.html

Wow, not a lot of tickets given out ahead of time. It looks like the best bet is to wake up early the day you want to visit and hope you get one of the 1,300 available for that day, even if you don't need to do an early time.

Unfortunately you called 1:05 after they were available at 7:00 HST and remember that Hawaii doesn't participate in daylight savings time: 3 hours earlier during the Mainland's DST & 2 hours during ST.

 

Advance Tickets

• Available online or through the call centre daily from 7AM HST
  
• Advanced bookings available 2 months in advance, or for Next Day Tickets
  

https://www.recreation.gov/showPage.do?name=landing&landing=/htm/pearlharbor/home.jsp&contractCode=NRSO&parkId=72369

DH corrected me and said I logged in at 7:05 HST, so 5 minutes too late due to slow internet issues on the POA!

What time does the online option open up for next day tickets? I tried to get them for the day after disembarkation from the POA. I logged on at 8:05 Hawaii time, and they were out. We weren't able to get there early for the "day of" tickets, so we are going to try again next year when we take another trip on the POA with the in-laws. I really need to figure out the best way to get these tickets without dropping lots of bucks to Roberts when we will already have a car.

Who was the concierge on your cruise?

Starboard

Suite guests on the POA can eat a sit down breakfast at Cagney's. I can't remember what time it opened, but it was always early enough for us. We also had a standing order for tea and juice to be delivered to our suite every morning before breakfast. There's a coffee maker in the suites, along with tea bags, but our butler told us the tea would taste like coffee, so she had some delivered every morning.

There are no Haven suites on the POA.

If you are doing an NCL excursion, you meet wherever your excursion ticket shows, and you will be escorted to the tender with your group. If you do not have an NCL excursion, the concierge will escort you to the tender.

On the POA a few weeks ago, the chef prepared the two GF meals first, and he used GF soy sauce. Food was delicious, and the GF eaters did not get sick. The GF eaters got the egg drop and corn soup from East Meets West instead of the miso soup and the seaweed salad. Also, the GF dessert was the coconut tapioca pudding from East Meets West instead of the green tea cake. The GF eaters got GF soy sauce for dipping. The onion and creamy mustard dipping sauces were not GF. We were concerned about trying it, but in retrospect, we didn't need to be concerned at all.

You can ask the person who scans your ship card when you go on or off the ship for excursions. They can see how many souls are on board at any time and how many passengers total are booked. On our recent POA cruise, I asked and was told that there were 2543 passengers. On our Disney cruises, I could actually see the monitor which listed the numbers.

All though I haven't been on POA myself, I am pretty certain the menu will be the same as in the Asian Fusion restaurants you find fleetwide (different restaurant names, same menu):

http://www.beyondships2.com/uploads/8/2/4/5/8245255/asian_dinner_menu.pdf

Just got off the POA on 6/24. We ate at East Meets West twice, and the menu is the exact same one as this one. I cannot attest to the prices of the upcharge items, though, because we did not get these items.

We are arriving in Honolulu the day before the cruise and sailing in a suite. What time does the port open? What time can we board the ship? Thank you!