BumperII

My DW and I are newbies and have already made several mistakes in booking our first cruise.

 

 

The answer to your question is in your first line. Nothing is ever a mistake if you learn something from it.

 

There is a very good chance one will not book exactly what fits one's cruising style on the very first cruise, or even the first few, but you have made, IMHO, a very good choice. The only way to find out what fits you is to cruise.

 

I don't recommend that you spend a single dime on what I like. Take the time to find what you like. The only thing I recommend you do is make sure that your booking is marked to show that you are open to an upgrade.

You did an excellent job with this review. We did fourteen days on the Island Princess in a Mini Suite last summer, and found it to be similar in all ways; a very good cruise experience, but not the perfect cruse. We left looking forward to another cruise aboard either the Island or Coral. :)

Don't worry about getting "stuck" with an inside cabin. On HAL ships, even the interior cabins are pretty nice!

 

We have learned the importance of getting a spot locked in on a cruise one really wants to take. You must watch the prices, but if they go down before final payment all it takes is a phone call to take advantage of the lower price. And if the fare goes up, you still have a lock on the booking price.

 

The biggest opportunity for savings is on the cruise when you don't care where, when or what cabin. Every time one makes a choice, the price of cruising goes up.

 

We enjoyed many a fine cruise in interior staterooms. Now that the portfolio has recovered, we are a little bit more fussy and spend a little more. :D

Your post doesn't indicate if you are pressed for time to get home but........

 

Not only would I not try taking a 10:00 a.m. flight out of Vancouver, I wouldn't even consider doing it the same day!! Vancouver is a beautiful city with a whole lot to do. We always try to spend a couple of days there before and after a cruise.:)

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Actually, I think this is a great thread, two years old or not. Our first 28 cruises were booked as inside cabins and we enjoyed them all. Now that the economy has recovered a bit and the IRA statements look a little better, we have tried out the Veranda staterooms and found that experience to be quite enjoyable as well. We even received our first upsell to a suite.:)

Anyway, we have booked the next two 14 day cruises in Veranda staterooms. If the money permits we will continue to do so. And if it does not permit, we will happily book inside rooms. The most important thing is to be on the ship enjoying the wonderful cruisemates and the service provided by the staff.

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Wow! Now that is a a very professional, objective review. Thanks for sharing your observations. And yes, many of us are really interested. We have sailed the Amsterdam before and are booked for Alaska in August. Like you, we had a great experience. Not a perfect experience, but still a great cruise. It was good enough that we booked two more cruises before disembarkation.

 

Wow! That is amazing! She has been at sea for over 27 years!

 

(and this leads to the bigger-- and tackier-- question) How does she afford it?:confused:

I would not pretend to know how she can afford it, but cruising doesn't have to be all that expensive, especially if one is a little older. There are families that put the seniors on a cruise ship simply because it is cheaper than assisted living!

Checking in on line will take you twenty minutes. Immagine all twelve hundred passengers taking twenty minutes each to register that information while you are standing in line behind them.

 

On line check in also serves as a check list to make sure you have all your ducks lined up, current valid ID, passports and credit cards.

 

We usually take advantage of on line check in as soon as the reservation pops up on the HAL website. When we arrive at the pier, the boarding process is a snap.

The only "bad" cruise we ever had was on Celebrity Galaxy. The crew was visably angry many times and the cruise staff seemed totally disinterested. The cruise after ours, the ship's captain was arrested for drunken driving the ship. We have never returned to X since.

My handle comes from Bumper Morgan, the protaganist of a TV show called The Blue Knight. The character, Bumper, was an old time policeman who had stayed on the job way too long and his backside was two night sticks wide.:D

We just had our first SA stateroom on the Amsterdam after a cruising career of booking inside. WOW! What a difference. DW loved it, and her reaction led me to believe she really wanted to be there all along! Bye the Bye, we booked this as a result of an upsell from a veranda.

 

We will probably never pay full price for a Neptune Suite, but we will be booking Veranda guarentees in the future so that we are in a position to take advantage of an upsell promotion. That first experience in a Neptune Suite was as enjoyable as our first cruise experience.:D

 

You are going to love it. Bon Voyage!!

Has anyone been on the land tour before? My wife uses a c-pap and was wondering how others carried there c-pap machine around with having to pack 2 different bags and a backpack :confused:

Thanks,

 

Hugh

 

Not sure just how big the CPAP machine is, but mine comes apart and is about half the size without the water tank. I don't take the tank with me on the cruise. I keep this and all my meds with me in a small carry on. I never check them. ADA gives you the right to carry it on just about anything.

Thanks for the kind words. I do get rather wordy, LOL.

 

Sue

 

That is just fine. Sometimes we need more words to paint a word picture than are required for a classified ad! :D We thank you for this review. We will be on the Island for two weeks in late August, and this review was exactly what we were looking for.

I have purposely left clothing articles and shoes behind. I planned to do so from the start. I often bring DH's oldest underwear with intention of one wearing and discarding it. same for some older jerseys of mine that I would exercise in and discard. They were not useful for donation IMO but could do for one hot, sweaty exercise session. :)

 

Happy to learn I'm not the only one who does this. I cruise with all my oldest whites and shirts. The suit coats and sports jackets and neck ties are all over ten years old. If my luggage gets lost, I might be out fifty bucks. When DW loads up on stuff we just cannot do without, we throw out all my old stuff to make room for the new. I try to limit the stuff cannot be disposed of. We have never lost a suitcase, but if we do, it won't ruin the vacation.:D

Yep, sure is. Once the HAL reps see that you are a Neptune suite passenger, they will show you what to do. Your boarding pass is the key that they use to sort out the priorities.

 

We like the S class ships. Normally, timing your arrival to about 1:30 p.m. will get you aboard even faster than priority boarding.

On a two week cruise we like to use the Pinnacle and Canaletto four times each. I would not even bother to pre book an evening at Le Cirque! What works very well for us is to make all the restaurant reservation immediately after boarding. The demand for Le Cirque is lower because of the high price. You can get Canaletto reservations almost any time, even same day reservations.

I LOL'd :D

 

I always answer the door wearing nothing. Why do they always just run away before you can even tip them?!

Now that is a clever disguise!:D

This is the Timex thread, it just keeps on ticking.

My first cruise was aboard the sternwheel steam ship Mississippi Queen out of New Orleans in 1979! It finally wore out and it is in mothballs somewhere.

I will take note of those cabins. Unfortunately, they aren't available for the 2013 Veendam cruise. Hard to believe since the information on the cruise was just released. Since it is to Antarctica, those passengers on board a HAL ship probably snapped them up.

 

That might not be an absolute. HAL plays games with inventory to make sure the get full booking. The cabin you want may not have been 'released from inventory' for booking yet. That is where a good TA comes in handy, because the TA should have the contact at HAL to get them to release the cabin you want for booking.

You really don't need to do a whole lot of research, there is a wealth of experience and info right here on these threads. We had no idea you could get stung with guarentee 'upgrades' until we were upgraded to a closet with a porthole. A lot of it comes from cruising until you get a sense of what works for you.

We like inside cabins, and we like quiet when we sleep. That means K cabins on the Main Deck or I cabins on the Vernada deck on S and R class ships. On Vista class ships, the J cabins on the main deck are to our liking. I don't want to knock guarentees, they are a great way to find out what cabins you perfer. In nearly all cases we were upgraded to very nice cabins. Now that we know our way around, we select what we want and book it.

Just ask a few questions, and the posters here will pile on the answers.

That is the nice part of being homily. One more wrinkle one way or the other doesn't make much difference. I'm not the least bit interested in spending money to save this image for posterity. :D

If you stop in Seward, a visit to the wildlife refuge center is in order. Entrance fee is under $10.00. They have a bird sanctuary there and a rather famous Puffin named Sebastian. Sebastian is a ham actor, he loves attention and actually poses for pictures.

Have you thought about making your own avatar? It is easy enough with a digital camera. Take a close up picture of the three star pin.