Tourist1292

For a long excursion or in a tight schedule, it may be safer to go with the cruise. Otherwise, they are way over priced.

8 minutes ago, justcrusn said:

Its a logical question. If the ship will provide one, upon request, why can’t you carry on one on yourself?

It’s not a question about whether its the butler or stateroom attendant who supplies it.

Surge protector is not allowed on cruise ships due to the different way of wiring on ship than a typical household on ground. Sometimes, it is hard to tell if an extension cord has surge protection or not. So it would be safer to ban all extension cords from passenger but provide one simple extension cord that they know it has no surge protection.

9 hours ago, Newbie2006 said:

I just got an extension cord without surge protection. My family (who I travel with) always had one because the plugs were always in awkward locations in the cabin. [My dad said I can claim it is a phone charger as it has 3 USB ports, that I will probably use way more than the outlets].

 

*Also, my dad said they will offer to provide an extension cord if you need one for medical reasons (i.e. CPAP machine).

 

Has anyone here actually have one confiscated???

It is not what you claim it is. You got an extension cord with USB charging port. I got those at home too but it is not classified as phone charger even at store. Yours likely has surge protection which is also banned in other cruise lines.

Yes, it is buried way down on that page. It took me some work to find it a couple months ago. I ordered an extension cord without surge protection before I found that. I ended up cancelled that order and bought some adapters from eBay for my upcoming cruise.

Use the Octopus wherever you can unless you want to keep some loose change as souvenir. Most, if not all, public transportation there would accept Octopus. Same for supermarkets, convenient stores, and even many restaurants. In addition to money loaded on Octopus, you probably want to have HK$1000 cash on hand in smaller bills. To live that, I would spend around HK$100 per day on transporation, but a tourist would certainly use more. Food cost is really up to you. I can survive with less than HK$100 per day on food, or you can spend hundred times more. My guess for a typical tourist would spend around HK$500-$1000 per day other than lodging.

I guess the upcoming "Titanic II" cruise ship is not you. 🙂

Where are you planning to cruise?

You are paying for any activity anyway, either directly by extra charge or indirectly from the price you have paid. I would rather to have all those additional things optional and let the user pay for them. The same goes for all the dinning and drinking packages. All inclusive just means a higher price and only those with above average usage benefit from it. Nevertheless, there are always some entertainment and amenities included in the cruise fare. Besides reading the cruise line forum, make sure you check the app, flyer, or newsletter while on-board for activities during your cruise. Your room steward may have additional information too. My friends were told by their room steward for a special dinning offer that was not publicly announced.

I booked our May 2019 cruise in December 2018 through Costco and the final payment was a month ago. I monitored the price weekly and noticed at least 3 price drops within that 5 weeks window before final payment. At the same time, the port fees and tax went up slightly. I called each time I saw a price drop and it got adjusted over the phone while they contact Celebrity. However, the port feesand tax was not changed. So we ended up paying less than the then current price. Nevertheless, the price dropped further after the final payment as there was not much new booking. We could have wait till now to book the same rooms to save another 5-10% on the cruise, while we would have to pay more for the air tickets and hotel rooms for the trip.

For the staterooms that we picked, having the bed by the balcony will still be a distance from water due to the 3x size of a regular balcony.

There is a survey on this topic in another subforum. Basically, around 10% more people prefer the bed by the balcony. We booked two rooms on Solstice with 3x larger balcony for 6 people. We prefer to have the bed by the bath to have larger continuous space with the large balcony. However, we got one of each bed arrangement in the two rooms.

I had trouble in cashing traveller checks in HK a few years ago. It is not accepted at many places. Credit card is the way to go.

We use Chase Saphire. They have 3 different levels from no annual fee to $450 per year. Not only it has no FTF fee, you earn bonus on travel and dining expenses plus it includes travel insurance.

Thanks for the Totem Bight idea. I looked up the bus schedule. It is every hour and the fare is $2 each way. We are going to do a walking town around the town which only takes around 2hr. This is a good addition to that.

My friend who took the Cruise to Alaska in July told me they were offered $30 per person in the middle of the cruise. It is not a standard promotion offer though as they did not get that the year before.

Here is a searchable database for the port schedule.

http://www.cliaalaska.org/port-schedule/

If you find there are a lot of ships at certain port at the same time, you may want to get your excursion booked earlier. It also helps me to decide whether the have lunch or dinner at the port depending on the schedule of the other ships.

I found the port calendars that list the arrival and departure time of all cruise ships to be very useful for planning excursions and dinning at ports. 

Even for the same size and class of room, only half of them can accommodate more than two people. We booked two state rooms on the exactly opposite sides of the ship with the same class and size. One sleeps 4 including one on the upper berth and one on the sofa. The other one sleeps two only.

We booked 2 staterooms near the front elevator too. From the spreadsheet, there is no noise issue. 7229 is not on the spreadsheet, but the rooms next to it are okay but may hear music from the atrium sometimes.

Thanks. It is our first cruise, but we have spent a lot of time reading cabin reviews before picking the rooms. 😁

8 minutes ago, HappyCouple72 said:

Did you go on cruise yet. 

Were they as you wished 

if you could select this , which cruise line etc 

I just checked the cabin review spreadsheet again (for Celebrity Solstice class ship). We booked two state rooms with two of the largest balconies (~3x bigger than the other rooms of the same class), one on each side of the ship. One sleeps 4 and have the bed near the bathroom. The other one sleeps 2 and have the bed near balcony. We will mostly hang out in the room that has the bed near the bathroom for the larger opening space connected to the balcony unless the other room have better scenic view.

We picked two cabins with extra large balcony. We want the beds near bathroom so we will have more space for 6 people going in and out the balcony.

6 minutes ago, ozark74 said:

You can use any credit card you want. You don't have to use the same card that you paid for the cruise with.

It is true, however, you just enter the last 4 digit of a credit card which has no useful information unless it is already on their record. We use the same card and checked in without problem.

Did you use the same credit you paid for the cruise reservation?

It works great on Canon and Nikon. I have been waiting for a deal on that in the last couple months as I missed the last deal. The price also went up after the New Year.

Make sure you have entered each field. I asked my daughter to do the check-in as I was busy. She was so frustrated that it either stuck on the same page or lost all the input values. Finally we worked together line by line to get it done. It took us way over an hour for checking in 6 people in 2 cabins.