harryfat1

After eating, I went back to the cabin to wake up the family. Looking outside, still somewhat cloudy morning to the east but more sun southward More sun to the south View of the 2 cabins from this angle. Having an open balcony gives you a lot more space

For those that are interested in coffee and pastries at café 270, you can see the selection behind the glass case as well as breakfast burrito for those that prefer a more substantial breakfast. Since I will be eating with the family again soon, I just got a basic cholate croissant

So I followed (stalked) Santa back to the 270 area as he settled in his chair to take pictures with the kids, I grabbed my croissant and coffee. Saw the video guys from the ship grabbing something to drink. All the theater background workers as well as the AV folks wore black uniforms

To my fellow Calfirnia cruisers, hope y’all stay dry and safe on Sunday as another big storm is going to wallop the state https://news.yahoo.com/prepare-now-historic-rains-californias-195233586.html?.tsrc=daily_mail&uh_test=0_00

Thank you for the compliment. Much appreciated. As for doing the old school trip report, that just means I’m old as this is the only trip I know how to write. I’m not smart enough to think on my feet to post live reports while on vacation. I need time to think and gather my thoughts to share after I get home. Similar to the concept of “too dumb to walk and chew gum at the same time”. Besides, being CFKACD, I wouldn’t be willing to pay for the Internet cost during the cruise so can’t do much of a live reporting if you have no Internet access for a few days. My wife actually prefers no Internet as we won’t all be looking at our phones during the vacation. Before cell phone cameras became the main photo-taking device, I used to turn off my cell phone right after the ship sailed into the open sea and put it into the cabin safe and won't take it out again until we docked on the last day. I would just walk around the ship with a camera strapped around my neck and take pictures of food with the SLR before taking pictures of the food became a fashionable thing to do. The only thing missing about not doing a live report is I’ll never get the acknowledgment from “Laura S” of Cruise Critic staff who typically posts a comment for the “live” reports…

Carnival disputed that rumor few months ago. RCI said nothing as far as I know... https://www.cruisehive.com/carnival-cruise-line-addresses-gratuity-nonsense/109106 All the publicly traded companies are audited by the major accounting firms so a sum as large as the annual tips amount in theory is accounted for. I have seen CC discussion on this every time there's a tips increase going from $14.50 to $16 to $18 as people wonder who gets that piece of pie? Cruise lines no longer break down the numbers so we don't know who gets what as the increases could go to some hidden group. I'm not convinced all the increases went to the major 3 workers that we see daily - 2 dining staff and 1 cabin steward.

Santa walks up to deck 5 and goes to 270 Got Santa to give me a special wave

Santa made it down to deck 4 from the NorthStar and people wanted to take a picture with him 20231225_075027.mp4

This is where you get your present from Santa after you provide your cabin info as everyone only gets one present. But if you rear-ended Santa yesterday at SeaPlex, your name is NOT on this list Something is pleasing about this view that I like

They had closed the shades in the back and watched the video of Santa “arriving” via the NorthStar. Huh? I’m confused. Why are they 1 hour ahead of schedule as it wasn’t even 8 AM yet but the Santa yet starts at 9 AM? Then a bad thought crept into my head – wait, did I adjust my phone time correctly last night so as to really forward the time by an hour? So instead of being 7:45 as I thought it was, the real ship’s time was 8:45. Damn. Good thing it was a sea day with no excursions or else we would have missed everything.

Got up and while my family was still asleep, I made my way to the 270 theater via the “secret entrance” at 7:45 AM to have another morning of peaceful coffee and a croissant early before the place was overrun with people at 9 AM for the Santa event or so I thought. The secret entrance I discussed earlier Opened the very heavy door and saw a whole lot of people sitting at 270 at 7:45. Huh? I thought the Santa event wasn’t until 9 AM when all the kids ages 17 and under all got a gift from Santa (minus the ones that rear-ended him yesterday afternoon). Another view of the library but nobody was here this early in the morning

OK, enough financial talk, let's upload a few pictures before I call it a night. +++++++++ Day 3 – Christmas Day (Another Sea Day – Sigh) OK, Finally got the daily compass from the cabin attendant the night before for Day 3.

If you do a speed test, just focus on the "download speed" number to see how fast data is coming into your iPad. If it's less than 25, it may be slow and cause the video not to run smoothly. As for the age of the iPad, the newer ones have faster CPU and more memory so it can process the info faster after it reaches your iPad. Sometimes if you restart the device it might improve. The final suggestion is you might need to use your laptop or PC for the videos.

Haha, I will inform my joke-writing team of one that someone appreciates his bad jokes. I think others who will be sailing soon on the Odyssey will disagree with your priorities in preferring to read about the trip report instead of the financials. Besides, there are a lot smarter people than me on CC who can do a better job analyzing it than me. Also, you do realize the reason I am writing these trip reports is so that I can get away from work? Going down to the SEC reporting page by page is like going back to work. Although looking the the earnings press release yesterday, the decrease in payroll for the year was intriguing to me (the yellow highlighted area from yesterday). The annual report of 10K won’t show up for another 3 weeks but the old quarterly 10Q for the first 9 months report is out and the numbers for the first 9 months of 2023 showed the same payroll declining trend as the annual basis so the trend already started. Looking at the 9-month report, you will notice that the payroll amount decreased compared to 2022 on a gross basis. For 2023, it was $888 Million and for 2022 it was $981 Million. Oh, yeah, these financial statements are rounded to the thousands so you need to add 3 more zeros at the end of every raw number. You can see revenue jumped up from $6,2 Billion to $10.5 billion from 2022 to 2023. The revenue number jump makes sense as 2022 was still a restricted year until September before they allowed unvaccinated passengers to cruise and 2023 was a “revenge travel” year so we all knew the cost of cruise went up. Nothing to see on the revenue side other than knowing it went up. But the labor cost in gross terms and % basis went down makes you wonder why. In theory, if they are running at higher capacity for the ships and more people sailing, the payroll number should be going up, not down. Back in 2022, labor cost was 15% of revenue but in 2023 it dropped almost by half to 8%. So does this mean they hired fewer people or all the RCI employees just decided to take a pay cut so that the labor cost went down? What y’all think? In the 10K, they will talk about the number of employees so we can do some comparison there but this is something to keep in mind as a "Hmmmm"

Before I do the nightly upload, I want to take a step back and explain some basic info as I am assuming people understand all the financial info but maybe a quick background will be useful. Major cruise lines like RCCL and Carnival and NCL are registered as “foreign” corporations overseas but headquartered in the US. RCCL is registered in Liberia and Carnival is in Panama. They do this for income tax saving purposes as US tax laws treat foreign companies differently. However, as a publicly traded company, RCCL is required by the SEC regulations to provide high-level financial and operational info every quarter. That quarterly report is called the 10-Q and summarizes the quarterly operations/financial results. Then every year, they must file the annual report called the 10-K to summarize info for the past year. RCCL is due to file their 10K by the end of this month and maybe we can take a peek at some of the numbers from it to see where they spend their money or where they DIDN’T spend money as part of the cost savings (we suspect food and labor). So when I say 10Q/10K/financial statements, I’m referring to the SEC report. In the old days, you had to write to the company to get that information sent via snail mail. Nowadays everyone just reads it online.

Hi, Thanks for reading another installment. I have been receiving constant notifications these past few days from your reactions to the old posts from the beginning. You have come a long way in the past few days to be “live” with us. It’s probably equivalent to binge-watching 2 seasons of Game of Thrones in one week… You should give Royal Caribbean a try. Although at these high prices, you can wait awhile to try one of their ships. Every cruise line is different yet similar. Now I'm curious - what brings you over to the RCI boards to read this trip report if you are not sailing on an RCI ship? We will be on the sister ship of the Carnival Celebration on the Carnival Jubilee this December. No inlaws for the Odyssey cruise but they are slated to join us as a group of 11 going to Texas as I have never sailed out of Galveston before so looking forward to that. I am already planning to go and see the Space Center in Houston either pre or post-cruise. We saw the space shuttle when we were in LA a couple of years ago so looking forward to seeing more space-related exhibits in Houston.

Good point. It saves more space to have one large table than 4 small ones. Nowadays people are probably less likely to share tables with strangers, especially during the holidays when many families are traveling and solo passengers will not fit in with other families. I assumed you showered before dinner so that wasn’t the reason why no one was at your table?

Thank you for the compliments. I will pass along the good words to my writing staff of one that people actually read all this as I thought they were here for the pictures and the YouTube video on how to unpack your suitcase with hangers inside… The Effectors are nice in having high-tech gadgets and props compared to other shows that are just singing and dancing to some songs that are older than me. Entertainment is subjective similar to food so not everyone will like it but I would be looking forward to seeing part 2 of the story if I go on the Wonder. Just the concept of seeing a continual storyline from ship to ship is intriguing.

Oh, I haven’t done my deep dive yet. That’s coming in about 3 plus weeks after RCCL published their SEC reporting. This was just a high-level analysis from the top of my head after reading the press release. The tip is revenue to the corporation as it’s collected by them as part of the fees onboard or pre-cruise but they get to deduct the whole amount as an expense since it’s being distributed to the employees. In accounting, we call this a “wash” meaning if they collected $1M in tips, they will get to deduct $1M in expenses as technically the money shouldn’t belong to them. There have been rumors/speculations that cruise lines may not be giving up all the money from the tips pool but some people dispelled that. We will assume they are honest and pass on all the tip money that they collected and not offset that against some other expense instead. As for tax liability, that’s the biggest scam out there. Major cruise lines like RCCL/Carnival/NCL do not pay any corporate tax as they are registered overseas (since all the ships are not registered in the US for tax purposes). If anyone cares to read the 10K from the company, they specifically tell you they pay no federal corporate tax because of the way they are structured. This is how they can pass along some of the tax savings to the passengers so we can (or could in past tense) enjoy cruise vacations at a lower price than land-based vacations. So your local mom-and-pop store down the street that is a Schedule C pays more federal income taxes than a major multi-billion dollar cruise corporation. But the cruise line does pay other taxes, just not federal corporate income tax. This is from their 2022 Form 10-K

Sure thing. If you have the time and read along later on in the trip report, I talked about how we got lost and what the opening looks like the deck plan implies it’s a constant opening but it’s not in reality.

Correct. We calculate the financial costs of every major business decision but rarely does the Finance department make the final decision. That comes from the CEO/President/BOD. The only time I can think of the Finance folks changing business processes is when the operations are doing something wrong and it causes penalties/fines and we get the bill, then we tell the other departments to change what they do but I seldom see any Finance group just comes out and say “lay off these guys to save money” on our own. But it’s easier to blame the bean counters as we show the company the money savings in making various decisions - shoot the messenger...

Ahhh, finally someone comments on my musical selection. I was waiting to see if anyone here likes my musical taste. Yeah, I like these guys. Probably the most consistent cover band on YouTube in playing all the major hits. Looks like these guys are situated in Australia as I don’t see them having concerts outside of there: https://www.songkick.com/artists/10202223-hindley-street-country-club/calendar Since the previous post is regarding Piano Man, let’s queue the Billy Joel classic:

Haha, yeah, the piano player takes up valuable real estate, especially at night time when there are a lot more people using the elevators. But we enjoy them as they provide high entertainment value. I think many of the cruisers, especially the ladies enjoy being in the elevator with him. Not sure about the iPad viewing as I don’t have an iPad – CFKACD has an Android tablet instead as those cost less. But from reading the other posts, the problem may not be with all the tablets. It might be if I have multiple videos in the same post, it could impact the download from the server to your iPad. Going forward, I will try to have just 1 video upload per post to see if that works better.

Thanks for the kind words. I’m not smart enough to write a book. Besides, writing a book is boring. It’s like talking to myself. A lot more fun to have these bantering with fellow travelers in these forums where we learn from each other’s experiences. If I had written a book by myself in the corner somewhere, I would never have known about Mark's special luggage tag hack on saving paper/toner...

After the show, we did our nightly routine of going down to Café Promenade to get some tea and iced water for the cabin to drink for the night. As noted previously, we were supposed to change the clocks/watches/cell phones ahead by one hour. So I made the switch to set the phone one hour forward (or so I thought I did...) Few more pictures as we call it a night. Same night pictures from our balconies. I noticed there were flashing color lights in the upper corner cabin (see arrow). Zooming in: These people must be really festive to decorate their cabins with lights I will let the Eurythmics song close out the night: This concludes day 2 of the trip report ++++++++++ As always, thanks to all that’s been reading along. We don’t do anything special on sea days so sea days are not compelling reading unless you enjoy talking Financial info 🤪