_tacocat_

they ended the sailor loot referral 2/14. now i think they just give each cabin a bottle of champagne. do you see sailor loot in your booking?

Not a "restaurant" per se, but you can get snacks up there from i think 12-5, with some exceptions (not on embarkation day or bimini, maybe some other days - can't remember). they have some small sushi/sashimi plates (different than the galley sushi), sweet/spicy popcorn, plus the bao buns/poke bowls that they bring over from sun club. Nope. There's a site that has the daily lineups posted - i don't have it right now now, but if you search "spark" in this forum or FB/reddit, you'll find it. You only pay for drinks in bars/restaurants if they're above $25/drink (that's really hard to do! we had to get creative to maximize our value haha) or if you get bottles of wine above your limit (2 bottles per cabin per day up to $90 each). if you go over, you just get either 20 or 25% off the price - you do not get a $25 or $90 credit against the higher value.

nope, they're not set up for that, unless you're a mega rockstar. you have to sit down and order whatever from the wake or razzle dazzle. i guess the crew wouldn't physically stop you from leaving with a plate of food, but that would be a bit weird to do.

echoing others, it's extremely clear that only drip coffee/basic tea/soda/water/iced tea are the included bevs. if by "well" cocktails you mean dive bar plastic bottle liquor cocktails, yeah, that doesn't exist on VV, but i thought it was really reasonable for $7 (including tip!) for a vodka soda - can't remember if that was titos or absolut, but fine either way. i'm past my popov days, and i'd like to think most VV pax are as well hahaha. you could theoretically get off the ship with a $0 folio - i know others have! there are no obnoxious announcements trying to get you to part with your cash. there are plenty of free activities (trivia, fitness classes, gameshow type events, karaoke, dance class, etc.). the charged activities usually the ones that have alcohol. you're basically paying for the booze. VV is certainly not gaugin, nor have they ever marketed themselves as remotely comparable. i've never been onboard gaugin, but i had the pleasure of having what seemed like the entire ship full of passengers on a flight from SFO>PPT. a bunch of cranky 65-and-ups that complained about literally EVERYTHING for the entire 9 hour flight - seats, food, airport experience, delays. that was enough to prevent me from ever wanting to book on gaugin. if i want to hear a bunch of old people kvetch for a week, i can go visit a retirement community.

yep the charge never even shows up on the "checkout" page of the room service part of the app!

i've been on with 2,300 and was STILL able to move reservations around on the first day. while not officially full, that's pretty close!

i can attest this doesn't really happen - i've sailed as RS many times and mega twice and we've ended up with meh tables a few times, like right by the kitchen door in pink agave for instance, and when i was mega, we weren't able to get the middle table by the window at the wake, despite it being empty and set for just two! i didn't think it was worth complaining so didn't bother.

they've actually had this for a while! i haven't done it yet because it's always smack in the middle of prime pool time (probably by design haha)

over in april for now though. they've already extended them once late last year, so we shall see if they keep extending them as a band-aid until they finally figure out their loyalty program.

latest loyalty update through the grapevine... sailing club is apparently not launching april 1 like we all assumed it was given the march 31 deep blue end date, and there's no word on them extending deep blue perks again yet. wompwomp.

i don't recall seeing any onboard, but wasn't specifically looking for it either.

11330A (Scarlet Lady) Not bothering to write a whole other post because all the other attributes are the same as other XLs I've stayed in, but there was one difference. This XL is a 3-person cabin, so it has the extra bed that converts between ottoman and bed. In the 2 other 3-person XLs I've stayed in, I've liked this setup because it give a good daytime seat while not taking up a ton of floorspace. In all other XLs, this ottoman thing has been in lieu of a separate chair. Cabin 11330A had both the ottoman and the chair. The chair just takes up space and isn't actually functional, as it's squashed between the ottoman and the closet by default. Plopping it in the middle of the room would take up most of the floor space. I'm not sure if you can ask to remove it, but it was pretty annoying to have to climb over the chair to get things out of the closet.

yep that changed sometime between the end of october and beginning of december 😞

nope those are king beds, not separate twins smushed together

totally depends on how compliant the first voyage passengers on. i noted this on another thread, but we had to wait until almost noon to get off because of two idiots who probably didn't even start to pack until 10:45, evidenced by the fact that half of their crap was shoved in garbage and shopping bags...

my phone and my laptop felt like they were on 2 different ships last week!!!

shows, activities, and brunches can only be booked once on the ship & connected to ship wifi 🙂

i'm guessing everyone assumed because the wifi was good in the caribbean and okay in the med, that it'd be fine in the TA. i've been on 11 times and have worked a few days here and there - that's how i've been able to go on 11 cruises so far haha. work a couple days/play a couple days, and escape the unusually chilly and wet southern california winter. no way would i attempt to work on a TA. that would need to be a full-on vacation!

interesting! on the voyage i got off of, it seemed like they were metering bandwidth that went to phones (or at least iphones). my husband and i both have iphones, both on the premium version, and it was almost unusable. that's the first time i'd ever run into that. web pages would get stuck, instagram/facebook/reddit wouldn't load (first world problems for sure hahaha). i had no problems on my microsoft laptop with browsing websites, sending huge files, teams video calls, etc. so weird. wifi was also totally out at bimini, which i've only experienced once, when it was like monsooning in key west in december. the crew said that they'd never seen the wifi out on a clear, sunny day before. minor annoyance, but we had to connect to resortsworld's public wifi for internet, so no one was able to see their dinner reservations or anything else in the app!

long reply alert! you can book together or separately. the one i just got off of, we had the second part booked for months (had booked onboard last summer), then added the first part after the bar tab offer started and combined with a MNVV offer (we booked that one directly onboard too). they compare the manifests and give every B2Ber a notice under their door before the last night with instructions. you can book online too, but you do it individually and get luck of the draw with rooms. if you call them or go thru a TA, you can try to get the same room on both legs. that makes it a lot easier, as you don't have to pack a thing between voyages. if you do change rooms, it's not the end of the world, but you have to pack everything, they move your bags to your new room, then you have to unpack again. for this one, we actually moved our original room so we could stay in the same room the whole time. if you want to do a suite as part of it, you might want to try to snag that one for the first leg, then you can use the rest of your in room bar in your non-suite cabin. did that once (seriously to an XL) and it was fine! confirming that in miami, you have to get off the ship, but they walk you to customs, customs looks at your passport, and the VV crew tells you to either go back up to check in in the terminal or to go to miami for the day (but then you have to wait through the whole check in process again, kind of defeating the purpose of a B2B!) the annoying part is that this should take maybe 1 hour total. you meet at sip at 10:30, and you should be back on the ship by 11:30 latest. i've done 3 B2Bs, and i've only had that experience once though. the first time, we had to test between, so that took a bit of time, then we had a decent contingent of passengers that were arguing over their bills and not getting off. we still got back on before noon and had a decent amount of solitude on the ship. the second time was easy breezy, no testing and got off the ship at 10:45 and were back on before 11:15! the one i just got off of was absolutely bonkers. we got down to sip at 10:30, and the disembarkation line went all the way from the door to the red room. apparently no one stuck to their departure time, and everyone wanted to milk their vacation for a few more minutes. that line finally got past sip by like 11:15, and the crew member said we'd be off in a jiffy. nope. they have to get to zero count passengers before they let the B2Bers off. two rogue passengers decided the latest 10:45 disembark time just wasn't suitable for them. at 11:50, the crew finally rounded them off and got them off... over an hour after everyone was supposed to be on the ship. they should just start blasting classical music at top volume in the offenders' cabins till they get off hahaha. as these idiots glacially made their way through the terminal with overstuffed suitcases and garbage bags full of whatever (plus a few of the to go containers from the galley - they really took "to go" to a new level), we all had to stay behind them while they putzed through customs. we finally got back up to the ship after re-check-in close to 1pm - a 2ish hour ordeal. they should really start incentivizing middle-of-the-period disembarkation and penalizing late people. like if you get off between 8:30-9:30, you get $25 off your cabin's bill, if you are on the ship after 10:45, you get charged an extra $25 per person. hotels have late check out fees, why can't virgin for these self centered dolts?

It seemed like they were everrrryyywhere during the day though! I seem to be a magnet for this type of stuff- got the chili’s management offsite in Maui one year, oracle top sales incentive trip another time in Maui (but that one was cool bc we got to creep on a free rob Thomas show!), and a southeastern regional bank offsite that bought out 75+% of a very very small resort in Big Sur with 1 restaurant- we had to sit through their sales hoorahh and congrats dinners 😖

They’ve continued to increase pax counts, while they’ve continued to raise prices and decrease the amount of freebie voyages they give to casino players. I had 2k passengers on the first leg of my B2B last week and at least 1900 on the second (someone told me 2,300, but the checkin tablet showed about 1,900)

Now that I think about it, the sailing I just got off of that they had stopped selling DID have a very large virtuoso TA group onboard. Maybe they had a similar capacity restriction. It was kind of annoying, as the conference attendees were always clumping things up on the ship in large groups, always dressed in business casual or straight up business attire, and felt the need to wear their conference lanyards 99% of the day, so it was like we were third-wheeling at a conference for half the cruise. I really love my vacations to NOT feel like work 🤪

You don’t have to book excursions at every port! On the key west itinerary, I’ve always just done my own thing. It’s easy enough to Uber, walk or rent a golf cart anywhere you’d like to go, and you’re able to do what YOU want to do, not what a tour operator wants you to to haha bimini is super nice and relaxing. The beach club is only open to the virgin guests when they have a ship in port, food and soft drinks are included. There are a ton of chairs on the beach and two massive pools there. besides booking dinners and bringing Pjs and something red, my best advice is to try to get your bearings on the ship the first night- what’s forward, mid, aft, and where all the bars/restaurants/venues are. It can take a while to get the hang of it directionally, and that 4 night itinerary FLIES by, so it makes your voyage a little more enjoyable if you get that down early! if you’re not sure what to do on the ship, ask one of the happenings cast members. They introduce themselves at sailaway and are really helpful in pointing out cool things to do throughout the voyage or in port!

We were just talking to some RS sailors who had the same agent we had in October. She was super weird about swapping anything with us then. These people told us that she told them there was no more Tito’s so she couldn’t swap, every other person around said they were able to swap Tito’s in. It sucks that it’s SO inconsistent. Either have rules/guidelines or don’t, but when service differs so much between agents, it’s not a great passenger experience!