cruiseej

Of course. No one here suggested that it isn't. The issue was whether it's correct to label a menu item as "Fresh Alaskan Black Cod" if the fish is not, in fact, fresh caught but frozen. I would think it should be on the menu as "Alaskan Black Cod" if the fish was frozen.

I know the focus here has been on the recent upswing of the three cruise company stocks, and hitting 52-week highs, but what I'm interested in is a slightly longer look going back to the market highs about two years ago... 5/27/21 6/21/23 Change NCLH 32.42 19.22 –40.7% CCL 30.00 15.89 –47.0% RCL 94.76 97.35 +2.7% ^DJI 34,464.64 33,951.52 –1.5% ^SPX 4,200.88 4,365.69 +3.9% Why is is that RCL has recovered to where it was two years ago, the Dow and S&P have basically done the same, but Norwegian and Carnival are still down 41% and 47% over the same time? That's not a minor difference, that's a night-and-day difference. I wasn't a student of the cruise line stock prices over time, so what am I missing or not understanding?

Terry, to connect the dots, you just need to look back at one of your previous posts (April 22) about cruise lines attracting younger people: "Move Over, Retirees: Millennials Are Coming for Your Cruises". Of course, millennials are working, not retired, and many cannot take two week (or longer) cruises for vacation. So attracting younger passengers and offering more 7-day cruises go hand-in-hand. I've noticed that Seabourn seems to offer a large percentage of their cruises now as two or three 7-day cruises which can be stacked back-to-back without repeating ports, so they can serve both those who want short 7-day vacations as well as those who want longer 14- or 21-day cruises. I suspect that world cruise sand grand voyages are offered in more, shorter segments than in years past, for the same reason: trying to appeal to those who want short and long cruises.

I found this in the Terms & Conditions for this promotion: Air credit is available on select sailings for flights booked through Seabourn’s Flight Ease® program. Air credit is available to the first and second guests sharing a Suite and is non-transferable. Air must be booked no less than 30 days prior to sail date in order to be eligible for the air credit. Seats are limited and may not be available on every flight. I'd note that it's showing me the Air Credit Promotion is $2,000, but I see you're in Canada, so that probably accounts for the difference. But it does appear that for this promotion you need to book the air through Seabourn.

If you can go to Seward and have a full day there, taking a Kenai Fjords Tours boat trip (6) into Kenai Fjords National Park, to the foot Holgage and Aialik glaciers, is a great experience. Yes, you're about to board a cruise ship for a week at sea! But it's different in a smaller boat going up close to the base of glaciers, and you'll likely get to see sea lions and other marine wildlife. Even if you stay overnight in Seward just one night, you can take an 8 am boat tour, get back around 2 pm, pick up your luggage at the hotel, and board the ship.

We just returned from a cruise which we started with three days in Barcelona on our own. I found it easy to book tour guides — we did two half-day walking tours through Tours By Locals with a fabulous guide (Gothic Quarter, Sagrada Familia, Park Guell, etc.) — and to book entry/audio tours/guided tours at a number of attractions (Barcelona Cathedral, Picasso Museum, Casa Mila/La Pedrera, Casa Amatller, Palau de Musica Catalana). And there's plenty more to see; we just ran out of time before we had to board the ship! It did take a bit of planning, so if you don't enjoy doing that, booking a comprehensive multi-day tour can make it easier — at the expense of being locked into where they decide to take you, how long you spend at each attractions, etc. I suspect it's hard to go too far wrong in a city like Barcelona!

On Seabourn, it is one concurrent connection per person. That's a much better approach. (They also sell a premium package which allows multiple devices per person and higher bandwidth.) For one thing, it allows us to message each other when we're in different places on the ship, which is impossible if one person can have a connection and the other can't.

I was too busy trying to fit the large bottles of Molton Brown bath products into our luggage! 🤣

Reading this thread reminded me that there was no bath mat, just a towel, on our recent Sojourn cruise. I'm happy to say it did not negatively affect our opinion of the cruise, nor make us think Seabourn is in a state of decline! But I think our towels were in good condition. 😂 We had a great cruise.

Getting someone onto the helicopter isn't risking their life. (Well maybe if it was in the middle of an intense storm… But if the weather is within the helicopter's operating parameters, I don't think it's a life-threatening risk lifting someone onto the helicopter.

On our recent cruise on Sojourn, there was a Chef's Dinner which turned out to be one of the best meals we've had on Seabourn cruises, even through the printed menu didn't wow me in advance. We had no problems with the pace of the meal, although I'm sure that depends on how packed it is in the Restaurant and how on-the0-ball your server is in firing and fetching each course.

Well, if that's a change going forward on all the ships, it's a good step in the right direction, as far as I'm concerned. Thanks for that report! Perhaps management is listening to feedback from passengers after all! 😀 On our recent Sojourn cruise, there was a guitar player who was in the Club before dinner; our group always gathered in the Observation Lounge, so we didn't really spend time with the guitarist. He also played in the Club in the early post-dinner slot, before the band or DJ took over, but we were at dinner and/or at the nightly show, so again we didn't see him. I might prefer the former trios, but a guitar player with a diverse repertoire who can take song requests would be okay with me. And they could turn the jukebox back on for the in-between times when there's no performer in the Club.

We and friends are booked an a Galapagos cruise next year on the Silver Origin. One suite on Deck 5, suite 520, is shown in a lighter color on the deck plans than all the surrounding Classic Veranda suites. Does anyone know why this suite has this different color on the deck plans? Thanks.

No need to cancel and rebook excursions. Seabourn Square can have the accounting manager reverse the prepayments and charge the existing excursions against any non-refundable OBC, so only refundable OBC remains.

As a mostly-rock guy from the 70s and 80s, I can give you lots of examples of music which is stripped down/reworked classic rock/pop/ballad in a format a trio or quartet could easily do. Here are links to a few random examples from the top of my head: Miley Cyrus doing Metallica John Legend doing Bruce Springsteen Sara Bareilles doing Elton John Jon Bon Jovi singing John Hiatt Brandi Carlile doing Elton John Miley Cyrus doing Tom Petty Carrie Underwood doing Ozzy Osbourne Alison Krauss doing James Taylor Heck, Miley Cyrus doing Sinatra Outkast (hip hop) done acoustic Louis Armstrong by pop stars Camila Cabello and Shawn Mendes The above artists and many others can shift from Sinatra to Broadway to rock to pop. Carrie Underwood has sung with Guns 'n' Roses. Lady Gaga sings with Tony Bennett. Musicians can reinvent songs from any era and do them in their style — and do them justice! And I'd rather hear an original take on a classic song by a live performer(s) than the original track (often with boosted bass or drums) played by a DJ.

I guess we've never experienced that. It's generally been just the people from the four suites with doorways together, with maybe a quick hello to the people at the next cluster down the hall — and I don't think any of ours lasted more than 10 or 15 minutes of chat. In any case, our three most recent cruises have been block party-free, so perhaps they're a thing of the past. 😀

For what it's worth, there was no Block Party on our Sojourn cruise in the Mediterranean earlier this month, nor on our two Odyssey cruises in the Caribbean last year and the year before. Perhaps Seabourn has quietly retired them? Or perhaps only certain long-time cruise directors do them? In any case, I don't understand making a big deal about them, as anyone who wished not to participate could simply remain in their suite. This would not rank in my top 1,000 questions about sailing on the Venture! 🤣 As of this month, Seabourn has retitled the Cruise Director position as "Entertainment Director", and the Assistant Cruise Director as "Entertainment Manager". (At least on the classic cruise ships.) Who knows why someone in Seattle felt these changes were needed or beneficial, since CD/ACD titles are used throughout the cruise industry.

Well, they're really twisting things if that's the justification! As noted, the trios had contracts for months at a time, just like other performers and crew, so I don't see what the length of the cruise segments have to do with it. Was Handre saying that people who cruise for only 7 days don't care about having live music? And what about all the people who do 2 or 3 back-to-back 7-day segments; why don't they deserve live music? I've never met Handre, but if he's the one who made this decision, I think he made the wrong call. All I can say is that we just got off a 10-day cruise, we missed the trio, and we didn't enjoy the DJ. While I applaud flushing the "Girl from Ipanema"-era focus, we're not disco fans either, and the DJ played almost all disco music — loud! — in the Club when we were there. (We've never had Ross as a CD, and there hasn't been partying on the deck behind the Club on the cruises we've been on.) If they're trying to cater to a younger generation of travelers, those like us — in our mid-60s — are probably in the sweet spot…and we don't all love disco! There's a lot of other music (rock, country, singer-songwriter) from the 70's, 80's 90's and today which not "sedate", is more to our liking, and is certainly viable for a trio. They could simply direct the trios to update their playlists without tossing them entirely. I realize this is the decision they made a few months ago. Our initial impression of this change was negative, and now that we've experienced it on a cruise, it's still negative. So that's the feedback we gave to Seabourn, and we hope someone in management — perhaps someone other than Handre — will receive that feedback and decide to make further changes.

We saw, but did not interact with the captain's wife. But we were very impressed with Captain Elliott. He was out and about a number of times, and he would stop and talk. His announcements from the bridge were concise and informative. He is indeed personable and a pleasure to sail with. We hope to sail with him again in the future.

Yes, it tends to be busy and louder. For some reason, I enjoy that energy, so we often go there pre-dinner. There is a guitar player in the Club at that time (rather than the former trio). The DJ comes in later, and also replaces the trio for some of the poolside events.

We sailed on the Diamond twice. As @labonnevie mentioned, the coolest thing was coming back on a tender to the ship at anchor and having the tender run under the ship. Our second cruise on the Diamond was in late-spring 2005, the very last cruise before Radisson handed her over to the new owner to take to Hong Kong. One of our best cruising memories was the day they were grilling lobster tails on the deck and encouraging everyone to eat as much lobster as they wanted because they needed to empty out the freezers. I can neither confirm nor deny whether I had four lobster tails that day!

@Techno123 Well, in the interest of accuracy, or at least complete reporting, it turns out that the newspaper story posted above has been refuted by Zendaya and her assistant. The assistant said their group simply changed their mind about where they wanted to dine. "[The story] this is a bald head lie. We never got denied anywhere. We walked into the building [and] realized we ate there before when we seen the stairs. The same stairs Zendaya slipped on last year and posted about. We all wanted to try a new restaurant and went somewhere else to do so. We actually never went upstairs and interacted with anyone. We talked amongst ourselves in the downstairs lobby. This whole story is a lie." Zendaya also made fun of the rumor on Instagram by posting an illustration of a person asking "Source?" along with the response, "I made it up." So the search for a dress code enforcer goes on… 😉

I wasn't objecting to frozen fish, as I know the technology works well. But there is actual fresh fish on the ship at times, depending where it is sailing, ports, budget, etc. We've seen the chef bring on fish on some cruises, and on our recent Sojourn cruise, the chef told us all the meat is frozen but some of the fish is bought fresh in various ports. I just think if they are going to label it as "fresh" on the menu, it should be actual fresh (recently-caught) fish. If it's frozen, that's fine; just don't call it "fresh" on the menu. 😀

Well, that's baloney Handre is peddling. The band or the trio can be directed to play more "modern" music, and or music in more modern styles. (I had a drinking game with my wife that required a drink when they played The Girl From Ipanema or Beseame Mucho. 🤣) A trio can play music by any singer songwriter from James Taylor to Ed Sheeran. It's not disco music, which is mostly what the DJ seemed to play, but it can certainly be modern/more contemporary music. That seems like baloney, too. Are we really supposed to believe that a DJ gets paid the same as three musicians (plus the cost of an extra cabin and food for two additional people)? That doesn't pass a simple logic test. I don't know if there were technical improvements. The music the DJ played was much louder, which drove us over behind the glass and closer to the bar and made conversation more difficult. But if there were other "improvements" they were lost on me. One time when the room was pretty empty and the DJ wasn't there, I went over to the jukebox machine and punched in a few requests (rock and roll!) ; a little later, a waiter came over to apologize that the system was set to pay from the DJ's computer instead of the jukebox. We spent less time in the Club than we ever have on any prior Seabourn cruise.

So if I'm in a restaurant and I ask, "is the fish fresh?" and they answer yes, it can mean the fish is fresh or the fish was frozen. You may be right, but it just seems wrong. 😀