harryfat1

Yeah, in the past 12 months, I would think everyone, including mega corporations like RCCL, was adversely impacted by inflation. Seeing the cost going down instead of up in the era of high inflation food prices leads to many questions on how that was achieved. I noticed on the RCI board here there are other threads of people unhappy with MDR’s new menu so I’m not the only one feeling this way. As per my calculation previously, people are now paying on average $183/day of cruising instead of $161/day a year ago. People won’t mind paying for more if they feel like they are getting more. But it’s hard to argue that they are getting more when food cost has gone down from $19.86 to $16.91. Out of that extra $22/per day people are now paying ($183 less $161), if RCI just adds $5/day on getting better quality food and a few dollars more here and there on entertainment and other venues, then people won’t be as upset. It's OK for a company to make a profit from the extra revenue but they need to give some back as a cost-benefit to the customers. It’s a bad business model when people are paying more and they feel like they are getting less in return.

OK. Enough dancing and singing. Walked over to the café promenade to get some hot tea and cold water to bring it back to the cabin as we wanted something to drink after the dance party. It was up 3 decks to deck 8 just using the staircase. As I said before, our cabin was in a super convenient location of 3 up and 3 down for the stuff we typically do. Back to the cabin to rest and cool down and be happy that we finished Day 1 of the cruise vacation. I will have the Gregorian monks close out the night as the Promenade clears out after 11 and gets pretty quiet after the 80s party. My wife commented that she couldn’t hear any noise during the entire cruise from the Royal Promenade by the time we went to sleep nightly after 11:30. This concludes day 1 of the trip report. The rest of the days 2 to 4 should be much shorter than day 1 as this is always my favorite day to see the new ship so I get more into it As I have said previously, thanks again for everyone reading along and providing comments. It’s a lot more fun/entertaining/learning experience for me when people chime in as part of the process.

With 2 college-age kids, our family wants to be entertained while on the cruise. That was something severely lacking on the Princess cruise last year. We were more than happy to come back to the higher-energy RCI cruises. At 10:15 PM, the 80’s dance party takes over the Promenade for about 30 minutes. As discussed previously, there will be music and singing from the party that will seep through the windows of your Royal Promenade cabins. If you are sensitive to noise or need to sleep before 10:30, then those cabins might not work out for you. But as we are part of the “noise making” we are fine with the Promenade cabins. The Royal Promenade cabins are also good for little ones to watch the party from above in safety without being trampled on by the dancing adults down below. 20230807_221928.mp4 20230807_222117.mp4 20230807_222332.mp4 As luck would have it, my son was selected to be part of the dance routine up on the “bridge”. That's him up there As I reviewed these photos, it struck me another old tradition has gone by the wayside. In the old days, they used to have the captain come out speaking “from the bridge” on top to welcome people with a toast on day 2 formal night. Was that eliminated as part of the Covid protocol or even before it was gone? As I mentioned previously, I feel old now that the cruise ship is playing ALL the songs I am familiar with compared to the previous cruises when they were playing OLD songs for my parents' generation…

Seems like beside Lines, we have prime rib appreciation club here as well. So for Prime Ribs, can you order a second helping with just the meat without all the sides? I know you can order 2 plates of prime rib but you don't want to waste food as you only want a bigger cut of meat. Can you make a request of having a "double order" of meat and keep all the sides as a single order? If so, then you don't have to be too concerned about the thickness of the prime rib?

So we made our way up and down the Promenade checking out the uncle in prison (aka window shopping). For the most part, it was a big disappointment as we wanted a model ship ornament to add to our Christmas tree. We had one from each of the previous cruises in our effort to build up our own fleet but the gift shop at the Navigator didn’t sell them. Maybe in the past we only cruised during the holiday week so there were more holiday theme stuff out. Hopefully, they have Christmas ship ornaments for the Odyssey in December.

So now what? Time to be entertained (or we entertain ourselves). At 10 PM, there’s the 80’s Dance party at the Royal Promenade. Since we had a few extra moments with the faster service dinner at MDR, we walked around the shops at the Promenade now that they have been open since we sailed. By rule, the shops won’t open when the ship is docked so depending on your itinerary of how many port days you have, the shops could be opened most at night. Shopping (similar to shipboard photography) to me is also under-represented in many cruise reports. Many cruisers, especially Newbies, will want something related to their first cruise. However, not too many people talk about their shopping experiences while on the cruise. It’s similar to having an uncle in prison as that brings shame to the family so no one ever talks about him at any family gatherings. We all know he exists as we visit him regularly and attend his parole hearings hoping he will get out one day but his name is never mentioned in any family conversation. Thus for the rest of the report, I will refer to any shopping-related activities as "visiting uncle in prison".

OK. Enough numbers talk. I think we lost everyone in the thread by now as they all fell asleep reading it... Back to Mexico cruise talk... ++++++++++++++ Supposedly one of the main goals of this revised MDR menu is faster service. For the first day, we got the desserts around 9:30 as that was the time stamp of our dessert photos. So slightly less than 90 minutes from when we sat down. I give them a pass as the first day on the timing as Day 1 is always slower with introductions and getting to know our habits. One final thought on MDR before we move on is that RCI is very good about food allergies as one person in the family is severely allergic to peanut-based products as well as minor allergies to tree nuts. This food allergy is relatively common as many places have stopped serving peanut-related food. Princess Cruise has peanut butter cookies in their buffet dessert area but they are hidden behind the counter and you must ask a server to get one in case someone with peanut allergy eats one by mistake. I emailed the special diet RCI email alias pre-cruise and got the generic reply that I should let the ship staff know. Not as allergy friendly as Disneyworld where I made a note in our dinner reservations at the sit-down restaurants and at each meal, someone from the kitchen staff would come out and tell us what food to avoid. Anyway, the waiter asked in the beginning if anyone in the party had food allergies and we let him know that. For the rest of the cruise, the family member was able to “pre-order” the next day’s food ahead of time so the kitchen staff would prepare the meal without any nuts in case the normal preparation calls for tree nuts. Instead of not ordering that food with a possible allergic reaction, RCI will specially prepare the dish without any nuts. For example, at the end of day 1, the waiter presented the family member with a menu for day 2 and the person can order day 2’s dinner on right then and RCI kitchen staff will make all the selections nuts free. This was a very nice policy. In all my years of cruising, I have never heard of special food preparation by the kitchen staff. I applaud RCI for having this policy especially given the number of dinners they must serve nightly. This is another reason to have the same wait staff nightly is because, for the rest of the cruise, the family member was able to pre-order the food for the next night. A lot more work if we had to deal with different wait staff daily. One picture of MDR at 9:40 as we depart for the night. There were still some people lingering over their dessert as we left.

Shhhh, don't tell anyone I like to work with numbers... In the very old days, publicly traded companies used to send shareholders glossy annual reports to show off the company. Not anymore. Nowadays I get my info the same way as everyone else - online downloads from RCI investor relations website. We all complain about the cost of RCI cruises nowadays so I did a quick math to see what the average cost per cruise day is and then multiplied that by 7 to get an idea of how much people are spending to book RCI/Celebrity cruises the past 6 months: So your average RCCL cruise passenger is now paying $1,278 per 7-day cruise. Assume RCI is lower than Celebrity and holiday sailings will be more. As well as newer/bigger ships will cost more than older ships. Assume Icon > Oasis > Freedom/Voyager (there could be some exceptions of course)....

Interesting item worth noting as I was glancing at the 10K. On paper, even though Utopia is a bigger ship in terms of gross tonnage if based on regular double occupancy, it has slightly less capacity than Utopia. Only when you add in the triple and quad cabins, then Utopia will have more people. That means harder to find double cabins on Utopia for a regular couple or family of 4 needing 2 double cabins. Looks like Icon 2 and 3 are already set. Maybe can't afford to go on this class ship until Icon 3 comes out and the excitement dies down a little...

Oh, you want me to actually “work” while writing my trip report? I thought the whole point of writing a trip report was so I could escape work for a while… OK, fine, since I am a shareholder of RCI anyway, let’s break out the RCCL’s latest 2023 Q2 Form 10Q to see the numbers. I have attached a PDF copy in case anyone wants to follow along. As it’s 590 pages, I highly recommend people not printing the entire set… OK, let’s start with the 6 months food cost info found on page 2 of the Form 10-Q. You will see it’s $402M of food cost. Note: As with some of these SEC filings, they round to the nearest thousand so when you see $402,086, it’s actually $402,086,000 as you need to add 3 more zeros to the end. Next, we skip over to page 29 to find the “Passenger Cruise Days” to see how many days passengers have cruised for the 6-month period. These numbers are reported “as is”. No adding zeros here. We see 23,772,032. Then we break out the handy dandy Excel spreadsheet and drop in the two numbers to see: By dividing the total cost of food for 6 months by the passenger cruise days, it shows that on any given day, the food cost for a passenger is $16.91. Keep in mind this is for all RCI and Celebrity cruise ships. In theory, Celebrity cruises have better food so they might skew the average higher. Nevertheless, when compared to the same period last year, the average food cost has gone down from $19.86 to $16.91. You would think with the high cost of inflation the past 12 months, the food cost of 2022 of $19.86 should go UP with inflation to maybe $20.85 or something if they bought the same type of food. The fact that the numbers went DOWN, could mean 1) they got VERY GOOD at price negotiation in getting food for much less when the rest of the world has high inflation 2) they decreased food waste on board the ships 3)t hey bought lower quality/cheaper food. Numbers are numbers. They can’t explain why. You interpret them as you see fit. But there’s no denying that the average food cost has come down per cruise day. RCL (Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd.) (10-Q) 2023-07-27.pdf_.pdf

For dessert, some of us had the key lime pie (the original dark picture version). Others had the Boston Cream Cake or Cheesecake. None of them were bad. But none of them had the “Wow” look/feel to them. They just look like a bigger version of what dessert I would have eaten from the buffet. For most of the trip report so far I have bashed the Princess Cruise offerings (lack of entertainment and bad miniature golf area) but the one area where Princess far surpasses RCI is the dessert presentation. Especially in the new era of the RCI 2023 menu. Compared to the “Meh” presentation of the RCI desserts from above, here was what we had from Princess on Day 1 of the Alaska cruise last year. You be the judge on which dessert has the bigger “WOW” factor

So y'all just have to deal with the less-than-bright colors of the food pictures. Once again, starting from the top: Escargot Crab cake My wife also ordered the soup. You can tell it's her food anyway as it's taken from the top down. I do it more around 45 degrees tilt. Prime Rib (His and Hers - I let you guess who had which plate): One of my boys ordered steak: I ordered one extra dish for the center table so we all can share - it's typically the Indian food on the last item on the menu (lower right). For tonight, it was the Chicken Saag but I forgot to take pictures of all the Indian bread that came with each Indian dish

I ordered both the Maryland Crab Cake and Escargot. Nothing to me represents MDR dinner as Escargot as I’m not a foodie on land and won’t venture to any restaurants that serve Escargot. I seldom do any photo editing of my pictures due to: 1) My employment contract with CC doesn’t require me to upload nicely polished photos 2) There are way too many pictures to edit if I have to “doctor up” each one of them of the pictures I upload. I would still be at day 0 at this point 3) I’m lazy Think point 3 trumps the first 2 points... However, when I started to look at all my MDR photos, they were mostly dark with a yellow taint on the white balance scale. Assuming my pretty new Samsung phone is still performing as intended, the MDR lighting on the Navigator has something to do with why my pictures’ white balance is off. Here’s a picture as is Here’s one with a simple light adjustment

Anyway, more than enough talk. Let’s eat. Oh, I lied. There’s one more thing. With the new menu system, you order your appetizers/soup/main course and desserts all at once. Not having to present a dessert menu on the back end and ordering more later on, that in itself saves time in your meal experience. I’m OK with the new system as I pretty much know what I want to eat before even leaving the house as I watched the YouTube food review family from home. If you have never watched their food series, they are by far the most comprehensive food information videos out there. The dude is many times more anal than me as he takes pictures of stuff I won’t even bother taking pictures of like Apples or Bananas (I assume you all know what a banana looks like and it doesn’t look any different if presented in the Windjammer on a cruise)… However, my wife is not a fan of the new system as she says she doesn’t know what she wants for dessert until AFTER she is done with her appetizers and main course. So she prefers to order after all that is done. I think on one night after the main course, she made a request to add an additional dessert because she “just felt like having it that night”. As all married men can attest, no need to argue on any point when the woman says “That’s what I feel like having tonight”. Just let it go. You can’t win that argument…🤪 I’m typically not a big menu photographer as you can get the same menu from your phone App or from the monitor outside of the restaurant or online. Here’s one website that has the PDF version for you to download from home ahead of time: https://freestyletravelers.com/blog/royal-mdr-new-menus This being day 1 of the cruise, naturally, we had the “Welcome Aboard “ menu

So our wait staff was fine. Friendly people. The main waiter is a bit too pushy for us in asking us to rank him a “10” on his nightly performance. The assistant waiter is a young gal and she was happy to see us at the Windjammer one day and told us to sit in that section the rest of the cruise so she could serve us. OK. Here’s the dreaded MDR menu discussion. There are numerous discussions elsewhere so I don’t think I can add anything new that hasn’t been discussed before. However, since MDR food is a vital part of an average Newbie cruiser, I can’t just skip this discussion in its entirety for anyone reading this report. Quick background – RCI revised the MDR menu at the start of 2023. In the old menu, they used to have the “classics” where the items listed are available nightly regardless of the other parts of the menu changing. Those would be things like Caesar salad, shrimp cocktail chicken breast, and steaks that would be there nightly for people who prefer the more basic offerings. Now those are gone. The current menu has the “theme” nights with some food “names” that fit the theme of the night like “enchiladas”, “tacos” and flan on Mexican night. But on the same Mexican night, you get Escargot/Spaghetti/Butter Chicken on the menu. This begs the question, why even have it as a theme night - what is the advantage of that? Other than Caribbean night where the staff would dress in their Hawaiian/tropical shirts, theme night really has no functional significance. I will first admit we only had 4 nights of the new menu and maybe the other nights will be better. I will reserve final judgment until after the December cruise but from what we saw/ate the 4 nights we were at the MDR, it wasn’t superb. The biggest drawback I feel on the new menu is the food selection has been “downgraded”. Time to take out the grumpy old man face mask and say “Back in the old days of RCI MDR offering, they used to have…” Historically I used to look forward to MDR food. I am no foodie by any stretch of the imagination. I eat Costco hot dogs/pizza/rotisserie chicken regularly as well as any food truck offerings if available. I have not paid once for any specialty dining on any of my cruises as we are pretty content with the basic Windjammer meals for breakfast and lunch so no one put the tag “food snob” on me. Having said all that, it’s a big disappointment to see “fried chicken” and “enchiladas” as a main course offering in the MDR. Wow. I doubt RCI put these two food items on their web pages as marketing tools to entice people to come on board on their website. What they showed on their web pages are always specialty restaurants that cost extra. Hey, I’m no food snob. I have eaten my share of KFC and enchiladas coming from California. Just don’t think they belong in the MDR as I have rosy color memories of what MDR used to be. So you ask, why the change if it’s not for the better? RCI claims that this simplified/streamlined menu saved people time in MDR as with the new system, people can be done in around 75 minutes or so. The cynics would say it’s cost-cutting as well as getting people to upgrade to higher food packages if they lower the standards of MDR.

So it’s 8 PM. Time to eat. We have the “late” dining seating at 8 PM (early dining is at 5:30 which is too early for us). As discussed in a previous post, if you have either one of these two seatings, your party is assigned a specific table for the entire cruise. I have always like that you develop a certain “bonding” with the wait staff as the cruise goes on and they know your preferences – for us is hot green tea with desserts – that by day 3 of the cruise, they know what to do. We were in table 411. In my previous RCI cruises, I used to be even more anal (Yeah, hard to believe, huh?) in emailing the special RCI email alias and requesting a specific table location. They typically respond and say they will grant my request but when I get to the ship, that’s seldom the case as what the “back office” on land in Miami promises you is different than whomever assigns your table a few days prior to your sailing. Somehow that person “never saw the memo” on your special request. After a couple of unsuccessful request attempts from previous cruises, I didn’t bother requesting it for this cruise as it’s part of the “been there, done that” as well as the “it’s only 4 nights” and “they never honor my request anyway” attitude. Has anyone had much success recently in requesting table assignments? Maybe I can make a special request for the Odyssey in December if the success rate is high. What was the email alias? Is it something like RCLdining @RCCL.com?

Here’s the huge line waiting to get into the MDR on deck 3 as of 7:49 PM. For our cruise, deck 3 is the “My Time Dining” where you are not assigned a table ahead of time. You can either request a dining time say 7:30 or just walk up without reservation. As I am not a big fan of my time dining, I have never utilized the part of the program. I think I read online that the right and the left lines are different. One line is for people with reserved time at my time dining and another is just for the walk-ins. Can someone confirm that? Regardless, I’m not a fan of my time dining system. I like my table pre-assigned as where else on any land vacation do you get to have the same table reserved for you nightly? I also like having the same wait staff nightly. Maybe being a Finance person with deadlines has been hardwired into my brain so for me having a set dinner time isn’t a big deal especially since we partake in the main show events (like ice shows and theater production shows) that are scheduled around the traditional dinner times, it’s not a major hardship to dine at the pre-set timeframes anyway. For example, the ice show was at 7 PM, just for the late dining folks so we could go to dinner shortly after the show ended. You either have the 8 PM set dining without the long wait or stand in this line in order to be "flexible"...

After the ice show ended around 7:40, we had a few minutes prior to our 8 PM dinner at the MDR. I had the choice of either searching for Studio “A” nearby with the logical assumption the ship designers would situate Studio “B” next to “A” or we can visit our crazy aunt in the basement (aka photo area) as the photo area is just outside of the ice rink. Being lazy and family-oriented, I opted to visit the crazy aunt. We checked out our onboard picture taken earlier this morning by the pier. Gone are the old days of hard copy printouts where you have to run all over the place looking for your pictures by the wall. Nowadays you just swipe your card, and you can access your photo account. RCI has a promo where if you buy any of the photo packages on days 1 & 2 of the cruise, there’s a 20% discount. They promoted it heavily and after thinking about it, we bought the package on day 2. So if getting photos is high on your list, jump on the promotion early as the price does not go down after day 2. Don’t think “Oh, but they will have more promos on the last day”. Nope. At least not on our cruise. I bought the photo package online for our December cruise during last November's Black Friday sale. More on that later.

Few more ice skating pictures before we move on to something else. As you can see, just a bunch of ice skating. No silly props like Monopoly on other RCI ships Take a bow. Well done.

Onward with more skating pictures: ++++++++++++++ One drawback of cell phone pictures versus SLR is that it's harder to take pictures of moving objects at night. Besides the slight shutter lag between when I click on the button, the auto picture feature of the phone has limitations. I guess I could have tried the "pro" mode and tinkered around with shutter speed and F stops but that seems too much work for vacation pictures. Drones Not the best-focused picture but I wanted to show that almost every seat is filled with the exception of a few odds-and-ends seats behind the poles that people don't like. Also, I noticed people sitting illegally on the staircases. Land-based fire marshalls would have fits if this happened back home

Yeah, next time you and I are on the Voyager class ships, we need to do a scavenger hunt for Studio A. The hardest part of the long video is that it eats up my phone storage space. A 2-minute video at higher resolution ate up over 200 MB of storage space. Need to come home and get it off the phone ASAP as to free up storage space.

That's very expensive but like you said, just having an insurance carrier in the area is a challenge as many insurers have left the state. I tried to get an annual quote for our house and on the website of some places, they said they no longer take new applicants for our region.

Now that we have showered and changed, it’s time to head for the ice show at 7 PM at Studio B. Being anal, I assume there must be a Studio A but I never found it the entire cruise. Maybe because it was a short cruise I didn’t have much time so maybe next time when I’m on a longer cruise I will be able to find Studio A… The ice show is pretty popular so don’t expect to show up 3 minutes prior to showtime and expect a good seat. This photo has a time stamp of 6:44 for the 7 PM show and you can see the highly desired “end section” is already mostly full. Also, another good viewing section slightly off to the side is reserved for the suite guests so if you are staying in the slums like us, you can’t sit there either but I read they open those special seats to the general public a few minutes prior to the show starting. Can anyone confirm if that’s still true? Per the posting by Biker, only the Navigator and some selective ships have the drone pre-show. The drone show looks better viewed from the side as the positive is different but if ice skating viewing is important, show up 30 minutes prior to the show to get the best choice of seats. Not that I know diddly about ice skating. I only watch it in passing every 4 years during the Olympics and listening to all the commentators getting all excited about some “double-axel-camel-cow-horse” jump is the extent of my knowledge of technical ice skating. However, after having watched various ice shows on different RCI cruises, the Navigator’s version seems to have harder technical jumps and spins than the silly theme (like Monopoly) of other RCI ice shows we had seen. As the video of the event is better than the pictures, I thought I try to video the entire drone show. I hope y'all appreciate the difficulty in trying to hold the phone steady for 2 plus minutes. Note to self to negotiate for a higher compensation package on the next CC trip report if I have to record more of these long videos - I demand 2 iced tea coupons from the Windjammer instead of the base 1 drink coupon CC pays me... 20230807_190214.mp4

Speaking of left and right, I find the RCI numbering of cabins confusing. The Princess system is easier to remember as the is an odd number on the Starboard side and an even number on the Port side. On top of that, the color of the carpet in the cabin halls tells you if you are on the port or starboard side as one side is blue and another side is red. It's really easy to find your way – even after enough drinks in your system, as long as you can tell the difference between red and blue, you are on the correct side of the ship - The harder part is finding your cabin in the LOOONG corridor…