SandJCruiser

"Hotel California", for thoroughness.

Papaflamingo- No offense taken. I was merely giving a real world example where the price difference seemed excessive. I'm sure that many pax experience good deals going with Regent's air. And yes, there are other factors to be considered, like convenience, transfers, etc. And, yes, we shouldn't expect Regent to handle air arrangements without recovering all their costs and a reasonable profit as well. Just this time, in our case, the offered air price was nearly double, which made our decision easy. YMMV.

For what it's worth, on our upcoming Regent cruise to Alaska, with the pre-cruise Denali tour, our experience was as follows: We needed to fly Las Vegas to Fairbanks and back from Vancouver to Las Vegas. The Regent flights would be Economy. LAS is not a gateway city, so I had my TA inquire as to Regent's quote to upgrade to First and fly in/out of LAS. The quote came back as an upcharge of $823.50 each, per direction. Plus the air credit component of the fare was $700 each. If you do the math, that worked out to be a total, in effect, of $4,694 for two. I booked Delta, first class, with very acceptable connections, for $2374. In this case, at least, it seems hard to believe that Regent would not have profited off of the air component. Just sayin'...

Not having seen one, back in August I started a Roll Call for our June 5 Alaska cruise. I know it was early, but figured people would jump on over time. To date, no one else has joined. On our previous (old) Crystal cruises, the roll calls were quite active. I do realize only a small percentage of passengers are participants in CC,but still... Are Regent cruisers generally not as active in Roll Calls, or is this just a one-off?

We are booked on our first Regent cruise to Alaska in June on Explorer. We received an email showing us "our" concierge cabin in a virtual tour. It's the same one that is on the website. I had never actually viewed it before, and when I did I noticed something strange. It appears to show a tub/shower combination and then a separate stall shower beyond that, opposite the toilet. I thought at first it was a trick of the camera angle or the mirrors, but it very clearly shows two showers, on with the tub, and a second with glass doors. Is that really the room configuration? Seems like overkill. When you look at the overhead "doll house" view, the quality is such that you can't really determine how that space is used, or whether it's and "L" shaped extension of the closet. Am I seeing things?

We lived in Costa Rica for seven years and the airport is actually in Alajuela, which is not as far as San Jose. It's about an hour or a little more, assuming no traffic issues. Roads are good; it's freeway just about the whole way. I would agree, however, that the Crystal transfer would probably be the wisest choice in this case.

Not just to past passengers. We are booked on Explorer for Alaska in June, which will be our first cruise on Regent. So I thought it was a little strange getting a survey, but I still answered it as best I could. Maybe we got it because we did have a booking that was COVID-cancelled, so maybe we somehow made the "past passengers" list in the system.

Why does a solo cabin have twin beds?

Quest.

Thanks to all of you for your kind acknowledgements. Host Jazzbeau - I don't believe that I used the term "luxury"; I said "high-end". I wasn't expecting Crystal or Regent or the like. We had our expectations set, I believe, about where they should have been. And you're right - itinerary is key with Azamara, and as I stated, it was the reason we booked this cruise and would be the reason we might book with Azamara again. I just feel that if a line is serving frozen pre-formed hash browns patties for breakfast, even in the MDR, that it shouldn't tout itself as having "fresh ingredients, careful preparation" in its dining venues. Am I nit-picking? Maybe. But these things are easily fixed and don't present a picture of a cruise line that is really premium. BTW, I also missed having any kind of enrichment or port lecturers on board. Granted, time was limited as it was a port-intensive cruise with no sea days, but a historian, maybe speaking a couple of times in the late afternoon, would have significantly enhanced our experience of the area visited.

We took the Croatia Intensive 9 day cruise round trip out of Venice from 7/26 to 8/4. We booked through a TA and she dealt with most of the website-related annoyances. I was unable to book shore excursions on the website using OBC, but she got this done with phone calls. I have to say that everyone was right who said that everything would be smooth on arrival at the ship. Check in and embarkation were easy and fast and our cabin was already available upon our arrival. The only issue I had was that my TA’s contributed OBC did not show up on our account at first, but one visit to Guest Relations fixed that and all worked out from then on. It is unfortunate that the cruise ship ban in Venice creates such logistical problems with people getting from the airport to hotels to ship, etc. I think in general that cruise lines are going to have to take a more active role in this situation. Although transfers could be bought for airport to ship and vice versa, those who stayed in Venice or Chioggia pre- and/or post-cruise were on their own for transport, which could be difficult and expensive. We booked a private transfer from the airport to our hotel in Chioggia and took a cab to the pier next day. On return, we took the Azamara excursion to Padua, with a drop-off at VCE, and then took a cab to our local hotel by the airport for our return flight the next morning. Padua was a great tour, incidentally, and added a little bit of a bonus to our trip. Having not sailed Azamara before, I was looking forward to the experience, based on the mostly positive reviews on CC. It turned out that while overall the cruise was grood, there were some small low points as well as some high points that we experienced. As I mentioned earlier, the check-in process was extremely fast and easy. We went immediately to our room, and I left to make dining reservations, and by the time I got back, the luggage had arrived. While we were unpacking, our room attendant, Tess, arrived and went over the usual details. The safety talk was held in the Cabaret Lounge for all passengers, and we were good to go. We had a Veranda Plus cabin, which is the same as a standard Veranda with a couple of perks attached, but physically the same. Everything you may have read about cabin size, and especially bathroom size is true, and yes, the showers are really tiny. About 22 inches across and 33 long, but with a couple of angles at one end that reduce the length a bit. I’m not a small guy, and I managed to make do, but, not gonna lie, it’s really small. Storage space is adequate, just, for a short cruise, but for a longer one, especially one with a variety of weather conditions expected, it would be pretty cramped. If we were ever to book Azamara again, I think I would not book a veranda, but would look for a Club Concierge cabin, which is notably larger. However, they are also significantly higher in price, and I would have to see if the value for the price was there in comparison to other lines. We got 120 minutes of free internet included with our cabin and used it up just before the last day. It worked pretty well, but for more intensive applications we waited until we were in or near a port, as our phones from T-Mobile worked for text and data in all the countries we were in, so we didn’t need much separate internet. The highlight of the cruise was the crew. Everyone says how wonderful the crew is on Azamara and they are right. Everyone we encountered greeted us with a smile and service was uniformly excellent. I was particularly impressed with management responsiveness. Early on I had a couple of EXTREMELY minor issues having to do with coffee and breakfast service, but I brought them to the attention of Guest Relations, more as an observation than a complaint. I had not one, but two, restaurant and beverage managers approach me when I was out and about on the ship, call me by name, and inquire about my issue and what they were doing to correct it. They must have some kind of system that allows them to find you by your picture that they take at check-in, because they would have had no way to otherwise ID me. So that was impressive. The ship overall was comfortable, clean, and well maintained. We were about 65% capacity, so there were never big lines, and tables and chairs were always available. Even the elevators responded pretty quickly, and one of the four was out of order the entire cruise. There was no long wait for tenders at the ports that needed them. If the ship had been completely full, it might have felt a little more cramped. Now for the nits that require picking: We found, overall, that the food was OK, but not fabulous. The specialty restaurants, Acqualina, and Prime C, were very good, and we also did the Chef’s Table, which was Italian and it was excellent as well. Dinners in the MDR, Discoveries, were nicely presented, but somewhat unimaginative and most of the time, severely under seasoned. It wasn’t that the food was bad; it wasn’t. It just wasn’t anything to write home about. It had no WOW factor. Most notably, the breads were so-so. And there were some glaring faults that I found particularly worrisome on what’s supposed to be a high-end cruise line. For example, although there was some fresh fruit offered in the buffet, a lot of other fruit offerings were canned. And the onion rings in the Patio Grill were of the bagged and frozen variety. Muffins were identical to what you would buy in your local supermarket bakery. Pizza was not impressive. Desserts were attractive enough but all pretty much tasted the same – sweet but no particular flavor of what it was supposed to be. I.E. lemon cake, raspberry cake, and orange cake all pretty much tasted the same. Again, you just didn’t get any of the, “Wow, you’ve got to try this!” moments. The Entertainment offerings were, again, OK, but with a couple of exceptions, fairly ordinary. There was a lounge pianist whom I didn’t care for the little bit I heard him. The other ship act was a quartet from the Philippines who did pop and rock covers. They were OK, but I had to cringe when they announced, “Here’s our version of a Guns n’ Roses song,” and proceeded to play an uptempo, jazzy version of (Bob Dylan’s) ‘Knocking on Heaven’s Door’. Respect the music, people. As to the main show room entertainment, there were 4 juke box presentations by the 6 person singing and dancing team. They were enthusiastic and reasonably talented, but there was little to get excited about. The Cruise Director did her own show one night, and was spectacular. I didn’t see the ACD’s show. One night, the “Destination Entertainment” (read on-ship AzAmazing Evening) was a dancing and singing of traditional and modern Croatian music, which was well recieved. And the last night in Italy, they brought on two opera singers who were very good. But overall, I can’t give the entertainment more than a B. Notably, every show was basically singing and dancing. No comedian, magician, ventriloquist, or the like to break up the music shows. A little more variety would have been nice. We did not upgrade past the standard beverage package. We found a white and a red wine we liked on the complimentary list the first night and stuck with them the rest of the cruise. Would I book Azamara again? Maybe, if the itinerary was attractive or unique enough. That is what caused us to book this one. But overall, we found the experience just OK, and for our cruise dollar, we want to be blown away, and Azamara just didn’t do it.

I'm not actually asking for dollars, but is there some way you could define "reasonable cost" for me in your case?

I know in the past that Azamara has sometimes offered higher level staterooms, a few weeks before departure, to loyalty members on a bid basis, but I was wondering whether, if they have unsold staterooms, they are willing to offer them on a first-come, first-served basis to passengers after boarding at any kind of reasonable discount. Anyone have any experience with this?

Absolutely not. Take them on a line that's designed to accommodate kids.

Cartrawler.com which uses independent contractors, I believe. Never used them before, so this is NOT a recommendation. I just started by Googling transport services and looking for decent reviews. Fingers crossed.