Peter Lanky

I am wondering if this is the norm or if I am just being unlucky. I have a cruise booked for next year, and every so often a need a response from my agent on a variety of items, for example flight details, cabin allocation or invoicing. The problem is my agent is always 'on another call' and rarely gets back to me despite an immediate call-back being promised by a colleague. Most of the time, my query is quite simple, but sometimes I have to ask three or four times along with a couple of emails (usually only read just before calling me), when the issue could easily have been sorted quickly and simply. Is this standard practice? This is only my second Silversea cruise.

That food arrangement looks much like the breakfast given to Silversea passengers at the Marriott in Anchorage after our Japan to Alaska cruise in May (Silver Whisper). I complained to SS about it with quite positive results.

As I'd suggested, my main reason for avoiding Cunard was that it is important to me (and I know many will criticise such a thought process) that I am not wanting to purchase anything after I have paid for the advertised price for the cruise, hence my preference for Azamara/Silversea. A possible window of opportunity opened when somebody earlier mentioned that higher categories of Cunard cabin may have these inclusions in the book price but others have suggested this is not the case. I'm never going to be reaching a higher loyalty level, so there's no opening there. I'm happy sticking with Azamara, but will probably pass on Silversea in the future due to the high price, but will always keep an eye out for repositioning itineraries. What does surprise me is the very small number of accessible cabins on all the ships I've looked at considering the age demographic. I can manage without one if really necessary, with some assistance from my better half, but I need extra recovery time when I do get inside. 😉

I am new to cruising having only been on one Azamara and one Silversea. Being of modest means we only consider the lower end of the cabin category, so it would have been interesting to see a comparison including Cunard that covered this. As I also use a wheelchair, accessibility is important. One thing that is very important to me is that everything relevant, namely drinks and he 'g' word are included in the headline price, hence these two cruise lines being attractive to me. I keep looking at Cunard, but the non inclusion of these puts me off. I don't mind an inside cabin as long as the door is wide enough to get through and there is some room to move around, which was certainly easy in the Azamara. All we do is sleep in it after all, spending most time dining, socialising or relaxing. On the Silversea I was only able to obtain a non-accessible cabin initially, and the door was not wide enough to get in, but the staff found us an accessible one after the first night. After comparing the two, the Azamara model was preferable, as we felt we had to go on all the Silversea excursions to get value for money. I would have preferred to pick and choose, as we were with Azamara, though as it happened, we were able to secure a daily excursion out of on board credit. In future I will look for a less excursion based itinerary to allow for more relaxing mornings. After a few days, repeatedly getting on and off a coach starts to get a little repetitive, for me at least. So now we come to Cunard and transatlantic trips. I was not aware that the higher price cabins included drinks and the 'g' word, and I know that these can more the double the price, but at what cabin level are these included? I am not particularly fazed by the class things, and am quite happy to be sleeping in the bowels of the ship, but is there a compromise cabin category where I don't have to get my credit card out at the end of the voyage, but don't pay 4 times the price of a basic cabin upfront? One thing with Cunard that I would like to clarify. Even if you are sharing a table of 6-8, if you are on the same table every night, then the same people are there every night, so how do you meet new people? What happens if people on the same table want to eat at different times? What happens if a group just doesn't gel very well? Or have I just misinterpreted the arrangement?

We are sailing on the Australia/NZ cruise on Silver Muse finishing in Bali on 18th March 2024. Our information tells us on the last day we are entitled to a tour on the last day if our flight leaves after 4pm or a day room if it leaves after 10pm. Ours leaves at 9:45pm. Has anyone had any experience of such a tour? Is Silversea flexible on the times for 15 minutes? I can imagine with our luck, we would get a tour that drops us at the airport at 1pm and we twiddle our thumbs for 9 hours, but maybe I'm being pessimistic. Anyone with any examples of final day arrangements.

I agree with you on the range of wines available, and I will also drink the wine offered with a meal even if I find it less to my taste than others, and make a mental note to avoid it in future if I don't really like it. However, if you are given an opinion from anyone who does not have a genuine interest in wine, which is the majority, most people will simply say the wine that they most frequently drink. As an example, on a holiday in a good hotel in Lanzarote, more than half the people dining were drinking 'Campo Viejo'. purely because it is what they drink at home or have seen on the supermarket shelves, despite there being a good range of local wines, of which we tried a different one each day. Guess what they would offer as a recommendation? In a completely different analogy, if asked who they consider to be the best guitarist, people will tell you the guitarist with their favourite band, or from a shortlist of the usual suspects. None will be a helpful answer.

I find it impossible to rely on recommendations from others for wine. The bottom line is that there are only two types of wine in the world; wines that you like, and wines that you don't.

We have gone for the basic package in the O-Life options, on the grounds that looking back at previous cruises, almost all our drinking has been while dining. When sharing tables and chatting to others, a 7:30 dinner can often finish after 10pm and after dinner I'm usually either at a show or too tired to be bothered with a bar, so the standard package covers 95% of what I may drink on an all included package.

I'm not really sure where we are heading here. This sub topic was started because someone said there was an extra charge on Azamara for speciality restaurants, and thus Azamara was NOT fully inclusive. I simply countered this by pointing out that there is no compulsion to use them therefore the claim is invalid. But then you claim all speciality restaurants on Oceania are included but then give 2 exceptions, so how does this make Oceania more inclusive regarding dining options than othes?

It certainly isn't, but I suspect that people would get a little hungry if they didn't dine for a week or more. 😉

The 'speciality dining' on Azamara is not compulsory, and in my opinion, the standard fare on Azamara is of sufficiently high quality as to make any need for speciality dining unnecessary. We have discussed this while on our recent first Silversea cruise, where one can also pay extra for speciality dining. We concluded that the only reason to do this would be to prove a point about showing others the extent of ones wealth in that an EXTRA $60 each is pocket money.

I have one booked in 18 months time, but hoping things change in the meantime. I'll deal with the problem if and when it arrives.

I've never seen it, but then I have always attempted and succeeded so far to stick with cruise lines that charge the correct price and gratuities are not brought into the equation at all, namely Azamara, Silversea and Emerald. The end product is the same but it just makes me feel better.

PPG?

Not really a problem. Lets just say that the concept of gratuities just doesn't exist. The TAs would come up with another scheme to entice/cajole/reward regular customers. There is lots of potential for discounts, upgrades, drinks packages, and so on. The fact that so many cruise lines are moving to all inclusive pricing must suggest that it has it's merits. Imagine buying a car, but the wheels are not included in the brochure price 😉

I can just as easily do that myself, but back to my original comment, wouldn't it just be so much easier to include it in the brochure price and remove it from the equation? There seems no benefit from not doing this, hence my comment that we could then put it to bed forever. It's a bit like the tax that is added at the till in shops in some countries. Everyone has to pay it seeing as it's not optional, so better for it to be advertised at the 'product + tax' price.

It depends on which websites. As I said Silversea, Seabourn, Regent, Azamara and some lower prestige one have what we would class as 'the correct price' for the cruise, and the only mention of gratuities is that we don't pay any. Oceania however doesn't yet do this, so we can't compare value for money of the cruise as we have to do an additional calculation for what we will have to pay later. I can't comment on home porting as 95% of cruises start at Southampton, which is more difficult to get to from where I live than flying abroad, so I have never considered them.

No. The concept of gratuities as a separate item is totally alien to the majority of us, in a similar way that we would not expect to see fuel costs or laundry costs. We simply see the cost of a cruise as 'the cost of a cruise', and separation of any element from the total price is not of interest.

I have recently sailed with Silversea and Azamara where all drinks were included. I never once felt that people were cramming in drinks at dinner and overburdening the wine waiters. Drinks were topped up regularly, and we maybe ended up with 4/5 glasses each during a meal lasting 2 hours. I would expect Oceania to offer a similar service. I have heard stories of wine waiters disappearing after the first fill, but as I've never sailed Oceania, I can't comment. If this did happen, I would always ensure I made an appropriate member of management know about it.

Well yes I do, just like I have recently done on Silversea, Azamara and Emerald. It's so easy and tidy and means I pay the correct price for the cruise before I sail. I'm never likely to be silver loyalty, so that's off the radar.

Technically yes but that's hardly important today, however it was always a low key practice and definitely neither compulsory, nor at such a high rate. We are in 2023 now, not 1723, and the likes of Silversea, Seabourn, Regent, Azamara and even a few cheap lines have now scrapped it. I think Oceania is one of the few premium lines still doing it.

I have never heard of Simply More up to this posting, but as I result I looked into it. It seems that Oceania is moving closer to the luxury lines for inclusiveness. Shame that it has not thought to include the ridiculous gratuities in the brochure price, and start to put this practice to bed for ever. It will be interesting to see how much the brochure prices change after this move.

Having given this some consideration I have now changed my O Life option from the Excursion package to the drinks package, because previously I had not cruised before so didn't know how things would work out for me. I didn't do it by maths, because everything is overpriced on cruises and tends to give a false conclusion, but these are my musings: Excursions from cruises are not really all that they are cracked up to be. On most of the ones we did before, you get on a coach and maybe visit 4 or 5 places to either walk around for 30 mins or stop to enjoy the scenery and take some pictures at each one for 3 or 4 hours in total. For this you are charged over $100 each. I have now decided I would rather use the shuttle service to the port town and explore there and only take an excursion where there is no viable option. The $800 on board credit doesn't really buy much when you consider the prices of things onboard that are triple the price on land. We considered our previous drinking habits, and 80% of our alcohol consumption was drinking wine with meals. We made lunch last an hour and spent 2-3 hours at dinner engaging with other guests. We maybe had an occasional drink pre/post dinner, but that was it. Therefore the limited drinks package offered with Oceania of wine with meals near enough covers what we need. If you are buying a package as a standalone, rather than an O Life option, consider that the average price for a glass of wine is around $13, which becomes almost $16 when the gratuity is added (don't even get me started on that farce), so the House Select at $40 including the 'g' word, means that it is better value if you have 3 glasses of wine or more per day with meals. Anyone who likes more than one drink outside dining times would be better with the Prestige package.

I wasn't thinking of our concept of rounds, but when the wine waiter comes round, they simply filled everyone's glasses at the tables on the cruises I have been on. No need to ask because everyone was inclusive. I was just wondering how it worked when not everyone was in the same position. I think my question has been answered in other replies though.

That's interesting. I was aware of reading online of a six bottle limit, which is probably the maximum most people could carry when struggling with suitcases etc. I will probably do this but just for drinking in our cabin.