_tacocat_

valiant is reaaally bad right now - there were apparently swells on the atlantic side, so we took the long way around cuba. it's STILL so bad that i can't even imagine what or original course would have felt like haha. our room is on 12, and we've been wobbling for the past 2 days. the bigger issue seems to be that some shows like duel reality have gotten cancelled, and excursions are being cancelled left and right. i'm skeptical about the excursion thing because they don't seem to be weather related. almost everything was showing as sold out before we boarded. some of the excursions disappeared on day 1 and a ton of new ones that hadn't been on the list were added. then more got cancelled. there are 2 ships when we're in st croix (i guess this is a rarity?) and apparently a bunch while we're in san juan, so i'm thinking that someone dropped the ball on actually securing the tour companies and now we're at the mercy of whatever is left. if so, this is pretty annoying because VV initially sold themselves on either going to ports where no one else did or going to ports when they were not inundated with other ships, and their itineraries are like 95% in their control.

some of that might be due to november's food & drink month. they had lots of special items for that. the galley also seems to have a couple specials every day, and there are some secret items on the restaurant menus.

so i'm on valiant right now and wish i brought popcorn watching this unfold (guess i could get it from the social club though!). everyone in the FB group traded info, and now everyone's dining reservations, shore excursions and show tickets are getting cancelled. it doesn't seem like any of this is malicious (although posting personal info in a FB group - even private! - is kind of a risky proposition, as i believe anyone could just cancel your reservation entirely with that info!) the way the app is built, if you have referral people, they can add/remove you to reservations/tickets. if they end up booking something for the same time as you, the app thinks that they're "with" you. say if they're 2 people, both groups had a show at the same time, and they want to move their reservation, the app will prompt them to cancel "just you" or "whole group." any logical human would think that whole group would just mean you and the person on your reservation, but the app thinks both 2-person parties are one reservation so cancels all of you. the intent of the program was to link actual friends, not interwebs strangers, but even still, i wouldn't need to eat and go around the ship with my friends 100% of the time, and i certainly wouldn't even want my friends to be able to cancel my stuff!!! bottom line - proceed at your own risk. there's apparently a way to delete people from the app, but some folks have reported them coming back, and others have reported the app crashing every time they're trying to do that. YMMV!

yep, exactly! all the voyages i've been on have had it the 1st and 2nd nights, but i've noticed a couple have had it later in the voyage (~4th night?). i personally don't think it's worth it at that point because you'll only have a short time left on the voyage to hang with your new friends, but i've done it 2 or 3 voyages on the first night! another fun way to get to know people night 1 is to go to gunbae for dinner that night.

silly question, but was your charm a whale/mermaid tail? i was on this summer and saw LOTS of people with red, silver and gold tassels (assuming the color either represented their comp level or tied them to a specific promotion company), but i saw lots of silver mermaid/whale tails in october. wasn't sure if that was just a lot of people that wanted to nautically jazz up their bands or casino stuff!

yep, as we were waiting for over an hour in customs, a couple groups just skated right to the front of the line with porters escorting them. we were already trapped in the queue, otherwise i would have aaaabbbsolutely done that to gtfo out of there! off topic, we sometimes do this on amtrak if we're getting on at busy stations even if we have only a carry on suitcase - "red caps" have a heads up which track the train is coming on, so for a few bucks, you can position yourself on the correct platform and have a slight chance of getting a seat next to your travel companion instead of playing the "is this seat taken?" coat/bag game through every train car!

I think it’s refundable within 7 days like other payments, then any cancels go back to you as FVC. I don’t think “lock it in” rates get this grace period.

if you're running a lot of other ram-intensive apps, it'll probably crash. my husband has an iphone 12 mini with i'm sure a wildly-out-of-date OS and it works fine, as long as he's not running FB, instagram, reddit, games, a million browser tabs, etc. if it's buggy, close out of all those big boys and reopen the app. i have a 13 pro and only ran into that issue once or twice on 10 nights of back to back. re: wifi settings, it works best if your phone is in airplane mode because the meat of the app needs to be connected to the ship wifi to function. not super intuitive while you're sitting in domestic waters at the port, but as soon as we tried that, we didn't have connectivity issues. the other thing is that iphones (i think newer-ish OS) have a private wifi setting - wifi > select the network > click the little info "i" next to it, then untoggle the private wifi address option. if you're still having issues, there are IT resources either on 7 or 5 depending on the day that can usually fix whatever issues you're having in like 30 seconds.

no - tips included means tips included. it seems there's a very vocal minority that insists on continuing the tipping culture and has to walk around with wads of cash (literally the only way to tip someone on VV, if they'll even accept). i have been to the spa plenty, and i've never heard of someone tipping there. we had a group of older folks on one of our voyages that haaaad to make sure everyone knew they brought a stack of $2 bills to tip bartenders. guess what? we got better service than they did because we weren't being obnoxious! we (gasp) politely waited our turn to order a drink (not long), transacted and had a drink in no time. we've also seen reports of people tipping their rockstar agents/roadies many hundreds of dollars, and, again, making sure everyone knows that they've provided such a great amount. this seems to be a mostly a US-centric "savior" move to make themselves feel good about interacting in the service industry. your higher voyage fare already pays VV's crew's higher-than-other-lines salary, and your feedback + onboard spend provides them with cash bonuses + perks like time off during their contract.

We were told rockstar had 0 fee and i saw somewhere else that someone said if you went to the cage there was no fee to convert loot to casino chips/slot $, but I’m not 100% sure about that

Yeah I think part of the “socialization” aspect is also not having to dodge lap swimmers while trying to have a conversation. there’s always that ONE guy sans goggles who nearly bonks into everyone in a packed resort pool… happy VV doesn’t have that!

Even if they do make the pool bigger or add a pool, I highly doubt they’ll add a lap-sized pool. They’ve designed the whole ship to encourage social interaction, so taking up a pretty decent chunk of real estate for a somewhat single-purpose solo activity doesn’t seem to jibe with what they’ve gone for so far.

Good food, awesome crew, no one force feeding you BS activities designed to make you part with your $ or telling you how to have fun 24/7. Tips, 99% of food, soft drinks and brewed coffee/tea, WiFi, group fitness classes all included. You’re essentially pre-paying for all of that via the higher voyage fare, but I much prefer paying more up front vs getting nickel and dimed every time I turn around for a week.

We had a sea bed in our XL terrace on the last voyage. We had it made up to a couch during the day and re-made into a bed in early evening some days. You click a button in the app to switch either way, and someone comes and sets it up/makes the bed. Yes, they only clean the room once a day, but they’re available for extra towels/bed setup/dish removal, etc. all the time.

Yes, unless you’re ordering premium coffee. So a $3 espresso waives the $5 fee!

Imagine the perpendicular mattress is folded in half towards the right- that’s what it looks like. The existing “sea bed” platform is still there, and the square folded mattress is on a movable square ottoman platform.

You were in a suite, right? Suites get regular daily cleaning in the morning and turndown in the evening (plus our cabin stews seemed to come in at some point in the afternoon to freshen up towels if needed. Normal cabins are just once a day, but you can press a button in the app to get extra towels, collect room service dishes, etc.

They aim to reduce waste, so not printing 1k+ flyers every day helps with that. They didn’t start offering them until (what im assuming were) experienced cruisers requested them repeatedly. Plus if anything changes last minute, the app/TVs around the ship have the most up to date info.

I don’t have a pic, but it’s the normal sea bed (can be set up as a couch/2 twins or together as a king bed) plus a square platform with a folded up cushion. If you want to leave it as an ottoman, that’s it. If you want to make a bed for pax #3, you have the king bed config, scoot the ottoman platform over to the near end of the sea bed and flop the cushion open to be a mattress.

We had the ottoman version and actually really liked it! We specifically booked it again for an upcoming voyage. It's couch height because the mattress is folded in half into a square, and we thought it was nicer than having a chair.

this guy is an absolute clown. he worked for another cruise line a while back and now considers himself a financial expert and proselytizes this garbage to his followers on facebook and youtube. do yourself a favor and don't watch/give him ad revenues haha. he also constantly posts negative comments about VV in every VV facebook group i'm in and has to make sure everyone knows that richard branson maintains very minimal ownership in VV (which is well-known and weird that he keeps bringing this up).

it may have been a print-to-pdf from each menu's website (pdf) while onboard.

weird - we were B2B at the end of Oct/beginning of Nov and it was amaretto both times. i saw one of the happenings cast post EV too and they also had amaretto. i don't love either of them, so no major loss for me either way hahah

nah i mean like plain old red bands - i'm in 485c and we get black rockstar bands + another fabric wristband.

worth reiterating this - you order anything with a charge and that waives the fee. so if you order a $3 espresso, you don't pay the fee AND you get an espresso! fee is waived for rockstars too.