colourbird

When we did the 17 night Northern explorer on Coral Princess last year, there were only a handful of non-retired passengers on board so there is a market for longer cruises.

I'm on that 11 night Diamond Princess cruise from Brisbane to Sydney. A friend has also booked on this cruise. We haven't been allocated cabins yet. Hope they are near each other. He's been on Diamond before and really liked her. This will be my first time aboard.

I don't mind sea days, but there's nothing stopping them adding ports up the Aussie coast. We're stopping in Brisbane and Newcastle on the way back down the coast next year.

I wouldn't mind this one, but i'm not back in time from my Icon of the Seas cruises. I need a cruise for the 2nd half of 2026 so this is a possibility if it repeated.

Yes we went on Adventure when she was pretty much brand new in 2022!

Why can't we have cruises to PNG from Sydney for something a bit different? Not sure why they always start in Brisbane.

They could have sent a Quantum ultra class ship to Sydney instead of an older ship. Virgin sent their newest ship to Australia. Other lines don't seem to be able to do that.

This is such big news, it must be quite rare for passengers to miss their ship.

Actually, if the ship has to leave they will, even if their tours haven't returned. Weather or tides may require a ship to leave before all the passengers return. If you are on a ship tour, they will assist you to get back to the ship. If you are on a private tour, you are on your own.

We got to explore the ship and have a meal on her in Sydney one night back in December. I can understand why you had a great time. We have enough cruises booked till the next Virgin ship arrives in Australia. Unfortunately Valiant Lady is in Sydney overnight 4-5 December 2025 and we arrive on Discovery Princess the next day so will miss out if Virgin repeats the open day on her.

I booked Discovery's repositioning cruise to Sydney. We had a great time doing a similar cruise on Majestic several years ago. It's good when they swap ships like this (unlike RCI sending us Ovation each year) as I like to try out different ships rather than ones i've been on before.

She's a beautiful ship. I'm looking forward to sailing on her sometime or maybe Valiant Lady who is due here for the 2025 to 2026 season.

Not that many, but you can do anything with statistics.

At one stage our single workplace had over 50% of staff infected with covid!

There's more gastro / covid etc... on land than on ships, but it isn't newsworthy.

For me, distance between things is good. I wake up every day at 4am and start walking around the ship from 4.20am till 7am for breakfast and do lots of walking all day long and never use lifts. I'm looking forward to Icon with more places to walk around and explore. When I was on Vista as it was so small, I managed to work out a 10 minute lap of the upper decks / jogging track, up and down stairs at the front and rear which made it a really good walk with lots of different views (once the sun came up) (although I had Venus keeping me company for most of the cruise).

...and there are a lot of places to choose from! When we were on Oceania Vista recently, that was a smaller ship with the least number of passengers of any cruise we have been on and that was only time everything seemed crowded. The small restaurants were often crowded, the buffet was too. I gave up on the theatre or finding a seat on deck. The small ships may have fewer passengers, but they are scaled. Ovation is the largest ship i've been on so far and although it was at capacity, people could spread out and there was always space available (except in the theatre when seat hogs would claim whole rows for family and friends who were yet to arrive).

No worries! I love cruise ships and I love water parks, I'd never been on one of the mega sized ships, but when Icon was announced, I had to make a booking (which I did immediately), we always book at least two years ahead so Icon will be the destination for our two November 2024 cruises, although we have also booked the thrill water park in CocoCay twice (so we will be getting off the ship)! If it's economical, some of the older small ships should be replaced by newer, more environmentally friendly ones. We were on Coral Princess last year and the captain was saying they were likely to withdraw her within the next five years, but there were no plans to build a replacement.

Just because you don't like it, it doesn't mean it's bad or there is anything wrong with it. Massive sized ships are obviously popular as they keep building more of them, which they wouldn't if they couldn't get people to sail on them. We are looking forward to our trip on Icon and so too are thousands of others.

The best thing would be to get rid of the smaller ships and just build and run the larger ones that can fit substantially more passengers on them. That's more efficient. It's a win for everyone, the environment and the passengers who end up with more to do on the ship. Having fewer ships would also please the residents of the countries who complain they are swamped with ships.

They are extra buses, not replacement buses.

Good, then they can run the service.

Brisbane is getting 200 new train replacement buses. I'm sure some of them could be used for cruise ship passengers.

That's not a tip. That's called bribery, as you are trying to influence another person.

Considering the ships generate a lot of money to their local economy, it wouldn't hurt to provide some form of public transport to the port. We've got a cruise from Brisbane next year and are starting to work out options. It's put us off booking other cruises leaving from Brisbane. If others are like us, Brisbane is losing quite a bit of money. We would have booked a hotel for a couple of nights, bought meals, used transport etc... It wouldn't be too difficult to make transport to the ship easier for passengers.