Robisan

I wish SB would contract day pass excursions to some beach clubs or resorts on the Caribbean cruises with round trip transportation included. The crowded tourist beaches usually have very spartan facilities/amenities and are often beset with pestering local vendors. Beaches away from crowds usually have no facilities at all. There's always the nagging concern whether your return taxi will available. Etc. At our age, we prefer real facilitates, real food, ideally real cocktails and no worries. Second this. The Lululemon ABCs are light and comfortable enough to wear daytime on excursions yet still dressy enough for evening elegant casual wear.

Perhaps you should reply confirming your new, lower HAL pricing.

IMO if you wear a blazer/jacket it will absolve the "sin" of wearing a polo shirt and of course a dress shirt w/o jacket is also fine. Polo shirt is fine at Colonnade and E&O, and frankly you won't be turned away from the Restaurant either if you're comfortable not caring if a few diners snootily choose to be offended. Honestly, most won't care.

This is ridiculous. They hand you a wide-ranging menu that requires a multi-lingual cryptologist to decipher and then they restrict your choices? Other than chef's prix fixe menu dining there isn't a fine dining restaurant in the world that would impose this restriction. At this price point unless the request is untenable the customer should never hear "no."

Try Netscape. Don't think they've updated their website since that era browser.

Assuming this was not a typo, spot on!

This and the wait staff can be overly taxed handling both drinks and sushi, especially during the pre-dinner cocktail hour. If you're going to have sushi as a meal your experience will likely be better if you wait until the pre-dinner cocktail crowd has moved on to the dining venues.

So I take it you were "near tears" of joy? Surely not tears of sadness.

Acknowledging that some places can only or best be seen by ship and the advantage of seeing multiple places w/o packing/unpacking, nevertheless one could put together many extremely luxe land-based travel itineraries for that kind of money (and less) that allow multiple days per location at the finest hotels, Michelin level dining, private tours, limousine transfers, etc. Plus you never have to worry about missing "all aboard" deadlines after just mere hours per location and most of it can be cancelled within days of the travel date without penalty. Perhaps there will continue to be enough cruise addicts and/or people for whom money is no object to remain successful, but IMHO the cruise business structure, especially at the high end, is dated and out of touch with online generations currently reaching and becoming an ever increasing percentage of the retirement travel market.

So, Panda Express?

The whole cruising sales models and pricing gimmicks are such an antiquated racket. The worst part is the virtual requirement to pay a +/-10% commission surcharge to TAs (less what you can claw back from the TA in discounts, rebates, OBC, etc.). If you book direct with the cruise line they just pocket the unpaid TA commission and flat out refuse to credit any portion of the unpaid commission back the purchaser.

"Sail of the Year" has been going on since January and the offers have been, shall we say, evolving. In late January we were looking at the 11-day late March crossing from Miami to Canary Islands cruise on Quest, had the pricing nailed down and decided over the weekend to book it. Contacted the TA on Monday and soon found out that the previous day SB had revised the offer on the cruise, adding $500/pp OBC - and had increased the fare price by $600/pp! The new OBC was promoted as a limited time "sale" offer. Needless to say, we declined their offer to pay $1,200 for $1,000 of OBC and too clever by half Seabourn lost a booking.

I also didn't know they offer espresso in the dining venues. Thanks! Perhaps we need to compile a Seabourn Secret Menu.

These two sentences are self-refuting.

I wasn't aware of this. Thanks! Still, it would be nice to have regular, non-Americano coffee available to go, especially when the dining venues are closed. Ah well, the first world problems of having to make do with cappuccinos.