caribill

No problem at all to bring your basketball on the cruise.

That is information the waitstaff never sees. This is why you must inform your waitstaff of that dietary requirement.

If it includes customs information, it sounds like it must be filled out using a smart phone, not a home computer where it can be filled out in advance. Not everybody has a smart phone.

Is ArriveCan something that will be permanent or is it something temporary due to the pandemic?

OK. That is not the situation I thought you had. I thought you were talking about dining every evening. For this one-time group lunch work with the Maitre d' (or whatever the position is called now). He will arrange a section of the dining room to be reserved for the group. There will be various table sizes, but they will be near each other. Try to get with the Maitre d' early in the cruise to set this up. Normally this will be scheduled for the time that the dining room opens for lunch.

In general, the largest table size in a Princess dining room is for 10 people. If there are two such tables, they may not be near each other. With a table for 10, the distance between people at one end and the other is too great for conversation between people not near each other. Often a party of 10 is better off at two tables for six that are near each other. For a group of 19, you might be better off with tables for 6 (or some for 4) and can switch who sits with whom each evening.

Is that within 72 hours before boarding the ship of within 72 hours after boarding the ship (but before the ship reaches Canada)?

Pre-pandemic Princess had two types of dining. One was "traditional" which was seating at a fixed time with two seatings an evening (example: early seating at 5:30, late seating at 8:00). The other was "anytime" which meant you showed up when you wanted and were seated as table availability allowed. What you had on Celebrity would be the equivalent of Princess traditional dining with the late seating. Princess has done away with traditional dining and now has what they call Dining My Way (DMW). You can reserve the time you want at the time you want. Or you can just show up when you want without a reservation.

From the Princess list of full suite benefits: Umbrella if needed during your cruise https://www.princess.com/downloads/pdf/ships/PrincessSuite_eFlyer.pdf

Cruise lines, Princess included, love it when passengers pay for everything they can up front. Turns out that people who have done that psychologically feel free to spend more once on board so that the cruise lines get more total income than if much of it had not been prepaid.

Like the casino itself, the unlock-cabin-door contest is designed for the "house" to win, not the customer. Look how many people bought MegaMillions tickets and did not win $1 billion. Princess will come out ahead with those who upgrade to Premier as the extra cost to Princess of the alcohol used, the specialty restaurant meals, the digital photos and the prizes for unlocking your door will be far less than the extra $$ paid to Princess for the upgrade.

And that could fully explain what happened with the OP's friends.

So much for the webinar for Travel Agents where Princess said they were not anticipating increasing beverage prices to move them into the Premier package.

Our devices fully support banking web sites, travel web sites, E-mail web sites, etc. The only thing I want to use that is not written to be used on our devices is the Princess app. We also have recent Amazon Fire tablets that support all browsers we use and the types of web sites I mention above. But Princess has chosen not to allow its app to work on Fire tablets.

Nobody is looking at what you uploaded in order to approve it. There used to be a number for app questions, but it has been discontinued. There is a special e-mail address (goes to Carnival, not Princess) for questions, but I do not know what it is. Best bet is to call the regular Princess number and hope the rep knows enough to give you a correct answer to your question.

Many tiumes thge GTYs are assigned within a week of embarkation, The latest we have had a GTY assigned was 24 hours before embarkation while we were on a plane flying to the port city.

If you have your friends' booking confirmation code, you can ask Princess what is different with their pricing than with yours. Princess can look at their booking to see if there was a special code entered.

The 26 Schengen countries are Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland.

No. Pre-cruise or onboard you can get the 50% discount. However, onboard the base price is more than the pre-cruise price, so even though you pay 50% of the onboard price, it is more than 50% of the pre-cruise price. You were right to want to pre-pay before the cruise.

As I indicated, call Princess and purchase OBC with the bonus card.

A feature that hard to locate is designed not to be used.

Yes, you can get the discount on board --- but if you book the Internet on board it will be at a higher price than if you book (and pay for it) pre-cruise. So it is a 50% discount of a higher price if doing it once on the ship.

Yes, that does cover 99% of smartphones in the USA. But the app is only available for the more recent versions of the operating systems for those devices.

Assuming you are using the same credit card for onboard account and you are paying for the specialty dining onboard, it does not matter since the balances for the two of you will be combined. If booking pre-cruise and have to pay in advance for the dining, OBC cannot be used (must use credit card) so it does not matter.

When you printed out the luggage tags, did they say Cabin A505? If so, how far in advance of the cruise did you print them out?