seaoma

Absolutely, they won't have to reimburse you for your destroyed vacation. All the covid protections for a ruined vacation ends soon anyway.

How does "learning to live" with a virus that slammed the world in 2020, mean living like it's 2019? We have the tools to live with the virus, there are just too many people that aren't willing to put in the work.

Understanding Exposure Risks | CDC August 2022 It's length of time you are exposed to the virus by someone It's whether people are coughing, singing, shouting, or breathing heavily from exertion It's whether they are symptomatic or not It's whether people are wearing a mask, no mask, or a quality mask such as a N95 It's the quality of the air in the room as to ventilation and filtration It's how close you are to an infected person and how many infected people there are Nothing like a grocery store.

We actually live in the eastern US. We drove across the country to Seattle last August, just for a vacation and to do a HAL cruise to Alaska when they re-started. We spent 2 1/2 weeks driving there, the 7 night cruise and then took another 2 weeks to get back home. We stayed at the Mediterranean Inn for a few days before the cruise and did a little sightseeing but we were extremely careful because we didn't want to test positive before our cruise. We had a fantastic trip. Thanks for the offer, Jim! Right now we don't have plans to be out your way anytime soon, but I do have a desire to take a Panama Canal cruise one day that I would like to end in your part of the country. We've been to Seattle a few times over the years, but realized the last time we were there was in 2012 when we vacationed with our youngest daughter. This same daughter had been planning to move to Washington, but when Covid hit, she decided to remain closer to all her family in the eastern states. I won't be surprised if she makes the move one day though.

Well done, Jim! Now you are a pro. I'm glad I could help ease your concerns about this a little bit. My first test was a proctored one from a hotel in Seattle. Once I got past that, we began using home tests all the time for meeting up with friends and family. Anyway, by the time you cruise, you probably won't even need to worry about testing and overseas internet connections. Stay safe and enjoy your cruise.

I like that! Nice when you aren't doing a cruise with a lot of beach time. Can you provide the link?

First, Hank, seriously most people can't do long cruises until their kids are out of the house or they have retired. I was cruising and traveling before I had any kids, but I didn't have the income then either or the time allowed away from work. We have done that also because shared tables were always the norm. I will say it's probably the length of the cruises you are going on, more than the shared tables. People have a tendency to open up more when you meet them over and over and spend time talking with them over and over again, rather than one evening spent dining with them. Unfortunately, hearing loss has made large tables uncomfortable for me, as are large rooms with multiple people talking, like the Crows Nest. Once upon a time, people used their quiet voices in there, but not anymore. I'm glad travel agents work for people. They have never worked for me. The perks aren't worth the trouble and time I have spent fixing something that didn't work for me. Lots of agencies will give someone perks, but the bottom line is the service that someone receives. If the service is lacking, then I guess you could say that they are paying you back for their poor service. Here's another anecdote. I booked through the big-box store for years for Disney cruises. They didn't discount the cruise, because Disney doesn't allow that, but they used to give you their "discount" as OBC. I was happy with that. I don't need my hand held for a Disney cruise. Then for various reasons they had to stop giving you OBC and it was a gift card to the store. Nice, but I could also take that card to my store and cash it out. Now that is not allowed. That is not really what I want, but ok, I can deal with that. I'm not booking much Disney anyway, but all of sudden when I have a Future Cruise Certificate to use, I can't get in touch with them in a timely fashion and they have cost me the cabin category I wanted. Now, the service has declined to a point, that I'm no longer satisfied, so I'm out. I think a travel agent should provide you with a helpful, satisfying experience. If they have no interest in facilitating that from the very first encounter, I don't see any future in our relationship. If your only travel is cruising and maybe a few nights before or after a cruise, no matter how long the actual cruise is, it might work for you. I do a lot of travel but it is not all cruise related. Often, now that husband is retired, we are traveling, could be by air or land, and we will add a cruise because it's leaving from a nearby port. It might be 1,2, of 3 weeks. Most travel agents don't want to deal with helping me with that kind of travel. I would love to give an agent my itinerary and say find me hotels, restaurants and a great cruise too, but I have found that I have to do all the work and then they get the commission (after trying to get me into some kind of package), give me a bottle of wine and maybe a little reduction in fare. But what they didn't do at any point was find out that I could have left on Tuesday and saved hundreds of dollars in airfare. They didn't find out that if I stayed in this town on the weekday instead of the weekend, I could have saved hundreds on my accommodations. So, in essence, they haven't really given me anything at all. At the end of the trip, they have cost me money. I'll be sure to look for you on my next cruise. Start carrying a prepared sheet of paper that you can just hand me when I ask. I'll be happy to try them and see what they can do for me. I'm not averse to a travel agent. I'm just saying they don't really work for me.

I have constantly changed agents and agencies. Yes, I have approached one of those, only to call back to ask her about the cruise she had recommended, and never receive a return call. My experience is that some people are reluctant to tell you who their agent is.

Honestly, I just have never had good advice or assistance from a travel agent. My very first cruise was in 1980 and, of course, I had a travel agent. There wasn't really another way to book a cruise at that time. She, at no time told us she was booking us into a guarantee cabin, nor did we get any perks. Ok...live and learn. Next cruise, I contact another agent. Actually she booked me on an agency rate and included me in some of their activities on a travel agency agent meet up, but they did not appreciate my opinions when I was asked for them. Apparently when you are going on a cruise to gather info for future sales, anything negative is frowned upon. Anyway, this agent and I did a little cruise business for a few years. Never received more than a bottle of wine. In fact, she sold me my first HAL cruise in a Pinnacle Suite on the Zuiderdam, when it was brand new. Did I get anything? A bottle of wine. Ok....moving on. Next agent booked a HAL cruise for me and put my husband and my daughter's boyfriend, at the time, as the leads on the reservation. Guess who got the spend credits for the Mariner Society? Ok....finished. I won't even go into the other travel I do outside cruising. Just suffice it to say that my husband was born in another country and I have had to do every bit of work to have a satisfactory trip when we go. When I have to scrutinize every plane change because they don't care whether I'm running through a foreign airport with 2 kids, I'd just rather do it myself from the beginning. They can keep their bottle of wine.

I just open the door and leave it right there. I never step outside my cabin. I don't have the need to line it up against the hall wall. I almost never leave my cabin after I put the luggage out, so it's not in the way for anyone. Obviously there are situations that don't work for this method, but if you're a lady and traveling solo, you definitely think of ways to avoid being stuck outside your stateroom in your "sleeping costume".

I'm glad you have found an agent that works for you. Unfortunately, I have not. In fact, I'm dealing with a situation regarding a canceled cruise at this very moment that is lacking. Neither the cruise line nor the travel agent in charge of the reservation, have sent me a confirmation of the canceled cruise and it's been over a week. Now, in addition to the hours spent just trying to cancel the thing, I probably will spend hours contacting the agent to follow up.

Maybe they are like me and can't find a good travel agent. I've been looking for one since the 1980's and none have been more than perfunctory.

Absolutely! I hope some of you will volunteer if one becomes available.

I think that is wise. It doesn't appear to me to be a good decision to get to the port early. My experience on my last cruise was that they were letting people check in, but not boarding people without a significant wait.

I think it is a significant variable in getting sick enough to be hospitalized or dying. I wouldn't say it is significant for catching covid based on the people in my sphere that have caught covid.

I will still maintain that if one person is sitting in a room with 100 people, they may infect 7 people. If 25 people are sitting in a room with 100 people, now everyone has possibly been infected. There may be things about covid we still don't know about, like why some seem to get it and some don't. But to throw your hands up in the air is not the answer to slow covid. So travel smart. But it takes more people to buy into that and that's what we don't have. So the travel industry will suffer for as long as it takes for something to change and what that change is. How long that is...I guess we will wait and see.

I'll disagree. Those people that utilize all of the protocols and are diligent about them, in my experience don't get covid. Those people that followed sound medical advice as it changed due to the nature of covid, don't get covid. If I had a dime for every time I heard someone say that they followed protocol, except...... That's not how it works. I'm retired, so I can plan my exposure. I have traveled by car across the entire US coast to coast, staying in hotels for a 5 weeks and eating in outside dining. I have been on a 7 night cruise and a 21 day cruise. I spent a month in a condo at the beach. I have spent months on the road in a RV, that spent a lot of time in random repair shops during our travel. I've moved one daughter from her home to my home to her new home. We shopped for furniture. None of us have gotten covid. Everybody says it's just luck. Well, I'm here to tell you that I am the least lucky person I have ever known, so my number should have been up. What I have been is diligent. I don't want covid. I know what my Mom experienced as a post polio sufferer. I have a compromised husband and my only granddaughter has a rare immune disorder. I don't want them to get covid. I guess it really just boils down to whether you care about getting covid or not.

The color code business was a minimum number of passengers and crew that were infected. But when the numbers of sick passengers got high, we saw cruise lines transferring passengers to other ships and disembarking passengers to isolate. My opinion is that strict protocols will help slow the spread of covid. Public Health has been around a long time. It works. But we don't have enough data to drill down on every case of covid on a cruise ship. Initially, the crew were vaccinated with an inferior vaccine that didn't prove to be very effective. They were fine on crew only ships but trouble began when they were exposed to passengers on cruises where even though the most strict covid protocols were implemented, yet the passengers did not always cooperate and the staff did not enforce. The bold part is key. If you don't participate, then the strict health protocols are diminished and so are the results. How's the increased occupancy while infecting passengers with covid working out for the industry, though? I think for every cruiser that doesn't care about covid, there is one that does. I will sit and wait to see which group puts the cruise industry back in business. I was speaking of the cruise industry in general. I'm having issues with CC today, but you can see the chart I referenced on Cruzely. I didn't take screenshots either, which in hindsight, might have been interesting to have.

I'm so old that I was drinking before plastic straws were invented. Paper's fine.

. Yes, thanks for the reminder. I even followed that thread. It's a great timeline. Thanks for your contributions to that thread.

Unfortunately, now that the cruise lines have decided that covid isn't worth mitigating, this is our new reality for who knows how long. If I didn't have expiring FCC from canceling a cruise at the last minute when HAL dropped their mask requirement, I wouldn't cruise again for years. I had cruised safely in August for 7 days and in November for 21 days when those protocols were in place. We didn't get sick and very few people had covid on our both of our cruises. Yes, the virus wasn't as transmissible and the cruises weren't packed. Yet, once the most transmissible variant we have experienced rears it's head, the cruise lines decide they can let more people on ships, more unvaccinated people on ships, require testing 3 days before your cruise and quit requiring masks, at the same time understanding that many people are traveling to ports on packed unmasked airplanes, while taking virtually no protections to prevent coming down with covid, such as going out to restaurants to eat, getting manicures and visiting friends and family on the way to the port where they will get into a congregate housing situation on a cruise ship. SMH

Everyone hammers on this in virtually every post about covid. There is no one on the pro-mitigation sides believes that there will be no covid on ships. What the goal is, is to have less covid on ships.

I was going to make a post of the remarks to the OP just on the first page. It's no wonder they didn't come back.

Actually on the day after masks were discontinued on planes, I have in my notes that there were 24 ships sailing green. 76.5% were non-green, either orange or yellow. Just 2 weeks later, there were 18 ships sailing green and the non-green ships were up to 80%. By July 15, 100% of ships were sailing with non-green status and actually were in the orange zone, which is just below the worst designation, red. The ships have never recovered. The chart of the Green Status for ships is available, if you want to search the internet. To summarize, it started off in Aug with about 40 ships sailing green. It rose steadily until the end of December to 80 ships. Then January showed a big drop down to green ships numbering in the teens, but began to improve, while Omicron was raging, to about 55 green ships. After the mask mandate was removed from the airplanes and the cruise ships followed shortly after, the green ships went to 0 by early July. The cruise lines have chosen the route they have and even though it doesn't seem to be improving their business much, they've dug their heels in.