piper28

3 hours ago, pinotlover said:

When we’ve had issues our TA has always taken care of it.In fact, on one cruise were issues were abundantly happening, she emailed everyone asking them to have her do the tour bookings. It was less effort for her to do it upfront than to straighten out the mess afterwards.

 

We have a TA and know how to use her. Unlike for other posters here, a TA’s sole purpose is not providing kickbacks.

I've got to be honest, I would never even think of talking to a TA to deal with booking shore excursions, it's just something that *should* be pretty simple.  Oceania just needs to fix things so that it shows properly.

(And calling a TA to work on it in this case is likely to only work out well if that TA is experienced with Oceania.  In my case, the TA I used to use for cruises retired during the pandemic, and while she worked for one of the larger places online, I suspect from what she tended to book she'd have been pretty knowledgeable.  The one that I've used for the last few cruises I've been less satisfied with, and probably will need to start looking for a new one.  That said, I haven't really decided where my cruising is going to be going forward either, so picking one that specializes in a particular cruise line might not be the best option right now. )

4 hours ago, Ski Mom 2 said:

We are first timers to O (but not to cruising) and I am trying to sort through the shore excursion dilemma today. The numbers do not add up in the YW column and it's driving me crazy. Your thoughts that they take the discount off one is right on for me now that you pointed it out. However there is still a $66 discrepancy between the shore excursion total and the amount due. 

I found that the individual sub total that they showed for each of the two people for us was higher than it should be.  The Total that was then listed further down was actually correct.  I spent a lot of time adding various combinations of numbers together trying to figure out what was going on.

For that matter, the summary that was emailed to me is also wrong, showing the higher number in the per-person spot that we saw when checking out (in our case, it was $806).  The amount charged to my credit card was the right amount, which is also what the correct *total* was on the checkout page, which was $1109 - which was the $1509 correct total, minus the $400 onboard credit.  (Our proper total per person was like 754.50)

On 4/23/2022 at 12:24 PM, tallnthensome said:

We have a cruise from Seattle in early August. We are flying from Michigan from Detroit. We are getting costs in the $600-$800 range round trip per person. Are these typical for Seatlle ? I mean, I know prices have gone up but these prices are like international costs. Whis is everyone paying from which city for which time of the season? Am I looking too early at four months out or too late? $3000 to fly is more than the cruise cost. Any thoughts? 

Historically, I'd say that that's probably up slightly, but not necessarily a huge amount.  I'd say $500 for dtw to sea in the summer was not all that unusual of a price from my past experiences, and I've done that route a couple times, so $600 to $800 depending exact timing, yeah, probably not that far off these days.  But realistically, yes, airfares are up right now.  Airlines are still flying fewer planes than they were, and quite honestly, are largely happy with that because the lack of available flights lets them push the prices up.  Add on high fuel prices, and that doesn't help.

And I don't know that I'd say you're looking too early.  If anything, you might be on the late side.  My guess though is it won't get any cheaper before that flight, and could very easily get more expensive.  Looking at the flights I have for my trip to seattle this summer, coach fares are higher than I paid for first class fares back in february for the same flight, but there's some where the coach fare is lower, but the cheapest for my dates is about $633, and includes some really lousy timings for the westbound flight.

I know the people that have done Oceania don't necessarily find it that confusing, but the OP definitely has a point - for someone that isn't used to Oceania, there are a number of places that they seem to go out of the way to make things difficult to figure out what the costs are.  They could be a lot more transparent.

As for the shore excursions, I know for me, it took quite a bit to figure my way through what those pricings meant.  They could make life a lot easier for people by including a link right next to those acronyms they list for the prices to what those actually mean.  Instead, you have to go hunting through the website to eventually find some explanations.

And I have to admit, I found the idea of there being 3 different prices to be pretty weird myself.  It made sense once I finally figured out what they meant, but that wasn't something I felt was easy to figure out.  And to add to the confusion, when you do the YWC pricing, when you get to where it summarizes the cost, the page is just plain wrong (in our case, rather than it showing discounts on each excursion, it took the total discount price off one of the excursions, then still had a wrong total per person, but then showed the proper total for what it should have cost, absolutely ridiculous that this isn't done correctly).  Then of course you have the "unlimited" option, where they've clearly been talking to cell phone companies about the concept of unlimited, because you pay a fee, then pay more if you book excursions over a certain price (um, unlimited? nope, obviously not).  

(Hmm, adding, ok, they do have a spot above the port listing where there's a brief description of the acronyms.  I still think it would be worth having that link out to somewhere that goes into it in more detail - especially for the unlimited where they don't mention restrictions there).

So yeah, I can definitely see why people could get confused by this.  And if your TA isn't someone that basically specializes in Oceania, they might not be in much better of a position to know anything.

17 hours ago, Cutigerlady said:

Today when I tried booking a test through CVS it asks a set of questions and said based on my answers I don’t qualify for a free test and it will be $139 per person. I can’t book Walgreens out as far, so I’m curious if they are changing their policy as well. I saw a news article saying the free tests will be ending, but I didn’t see a specific date. It said free vaccines are ending by 4/5. 

I think in some areas of the country, CVS always comes back with that if your reason for testing was travel (as was true in my area, and then it also turned out the closest CVS that was doing any testing was well over 50 miles away).  Walgreens indeed for me never asked about that, and there was no charge.  (And as others have reported, while they ask you to bring your health cards, they never asked for mine at the test.)

On 3/22/2022 at 9:48 AM, SightCRR said:

Very similar although not quite as bad as calling the stop in ANC when in reality it is Whittier (1 hr drive, 60 mi) or Seward (2.5 hr drive, 127 mi). Most people know but that doesn't make it right. sightcrr. 

For these I've generally seen them listed as Anchorage and then in parens the location, but that might be just the ones I've looked at.  Princess has always been very forthcoming that you're docking in Whittier.  But I agree, if it's not listed, it's the same as this, and worse even since it's generally the beginning or ending of a cruise.

All they need to do is list it as Ketchikan (Ward Cove) (as apparently maybe RCL is doing), and that satisfies my argument.  Europe locations already generally do this, so they have the capability.  

On 3/18/2022 at 5:23 AM, alohayall said:

The ride to town on a greyhound-style bus took about 20 minutes, which went by quickly. It dropped us off right in the middle of the tourist area. And buses were waiting at the end of the day. Our ride was complimentary - but I wouldn’t be surprised if a fee is imposed at some point in the future (perhaps after ships are full again and tourism is back to normal).

 

Docking at Ward Cove had no negative impact on my vacation.

I could certainly argue that using up 40 minutes of your port time is a negative impact.  For some people this might not be an issue, for others more so.  And obviously, if they start charging, that would be an impact.  If you're booking a private excursion for right after you arrive and miss it because you aren't where you expected you'd be, that'd be an impact (although I'd hope the private excursion companies would recognize that the info you provided them shows that you're not actually in town).

You might scoff at my last part there.  But I would guess that a large number of people probably have no clue that they're actually docking outside of Ketchikan.  With my cruise, I honestly can't find anything that says anywhere that the Ketchikan stop is Ward Cove, so how on earth would one really know?  The only reason I know is that I spent the time to look up what dock we're going to be at in various stops because I like to know that info.  I'm guessing well over 50% of the people on a cruise (expecially an alaskan cruise) wouldn't even know that's something you can do.

To me, when you look at what they want to do with Ward Cove, they're looking to try to ultimately keep people captive in that area and not really visit Ketchikan.  Right now without the infrastructure, they really don't have much choice, but if they build up more of what they want, they'll be able to use that as an excuse to charge people for shuttling to the stop they were advertised as visiting.

As I've said though, I don't necessarily have a problem with this existing.  However, the lack of transparency on cruise companies that say they're going to Ketchikan when they're not is a real problem.  They just need to advertise what they're doing properly.

Thanks, just seemed a little odd to me, and as I noted, first time on Oceania for me. And yeah, when I asked me TA about it, he sent me the Oceania statement that indeed shows it under amenities and gifts, so I wasn't *too* concerned about it.  Just mean I'll wait to do the upgrade to the higher package on the ship.

On 3/13/2022 at 9:42 AM, Glaciers said:

I wonder how many will be surprised when they don’t dock downtown.

I have to admit, it was a shock for me when I started researching what piers we're scheduled for on an upcoming Oceania cruise.  When I saw the listing for Ketchikan I was was kinda like what the heck is Ward Cove?  Then when I realized it was well outside of town I was pretty disgusted.  Calling it a stop in  Ketchikan is borderline misadvertising.  (And I realize there are often ports, like in europe, where it's listed as visiting a port, but then in general they put in parentheses the actual name of where you're docking since you're not in that city really.  That could easily be done here to clear things up.)

I've done it once where I took the public bus up to the airport and rented from the airport.  At the end of the day dropped the car off back there and bussed back to town.  Does chew up a fair amount of time doing that, but depending on what times you're in, you can still have enough time that it's not an issue.  I think on that day we were able to hit most of the sites we wanted to, including mendenhall, and also taking the road as far out of town as you can.  As I recall it was also significantly cheaper to do that than to try renting anywhere right down near the cruise piers.

Kinda wondering about an oddity that I'm finding with what I find online for my upcoming trip, and since this is our first oceania, cruise, not sure if it's normal or not.  As part of the booking, we selected the house select beverage package for the olife option (seemed a reasonable choice since it offered some discount over buying it, and we plan on upgrading it to the prestige).  Oddly though, online I'm not seeing any indication of that, and when I look at beverage packages it shows nothing purchased.  I do have the statement confirmation from oceania from my travel agent that shows it, so I'm not hugely concerned, if it doesn't show up when we get to the ship I'll take that and look for an explanation then.  Just kinda wondering if this is normal, or if it should have shown online already.

13 hours ago, AnyWayIsGood said:

I Well, every time I tried to set up a 'my chart' I got a notice that it "could not verify my identity". At times really weird questions would come up..."are you associated in the past with any of these phone numbers"...."did you ever own any of the following car models"....  I mean, seriously?  

What this tells me is they're probably trying to confirm you are who you say you are by matching info with a credit bureau.  If you've ever tried pulling a credit report for yourself, you get these types of questions when they're trying to verify you are who you say you are.  Might sound crazy, but it's not unusual at all for setting up access to medical records for this type of confirmation to be done.

Count me in the category of bigger is not better in Alaska.  Now, admittedly, I haven't sailed the Royal class ships, but just from looking at them I don't feel they have the viewing capabilities of the Grand (which I already feel is too big anyways 🙂 ).  If the Coral or Island was in Alaska, I'd say one of those, but the Grand is in my opinion the next best Princess ship.

Personally, even with as many Princess cruises as I have behind me (something I don't see as much of going forward), I decided on Oceania for Alaska this summer, on an R class ship.  I've done Alaska on an R ship with Princess before, and it was a tremendous experience.  (Ok, I know we don't get Glacier Bay with Oceania, but at least I've been there before, I am getting 3 stops I've never done before, which is unusual in Alaska.  I will say Glacier Bay on the R class was absolutely incredible, we got far closer than I've been on any other ship, even our naturalist was amazed).

On 2/22/2022 at 11:46 PM, rj59 said:

I wouldn't do a Baltic cruise this summer, not only because of the uncertainty over the Russia situation, but because it visits so many countries with their own Covid/vaccine policies. It would just be a hassle of they're going to screen everyone in a port, particularly in a place where you have limited time, like Warnemunde where you have to take a train to Berlin and back. It looks like the Enchanted also has to dock at a city outside Stockholm that handles larger ships, which requires a bus ride to the city, and unfortunately you miss the truly amazing sail in and out of the Stockholm archipeligo. 

This was why we canceled our Princess cruise a couple of weeks ago even before the Ukraine stuff became an issue.  While europe is starting to open up more and more, there just hasn't been enough indication of how cruise ships are going to be handled on all these stops to make me feel it was worth the potential hassle.  Way too much to spend if we were going to have to deal with a lot of extra covid nonsense.  (And the problem is, that might not have been an issue, but we wouldn't have known by the time we had to pay - heck, the ship we were going to be on hasn't even restarted sailing yet.)

Switch to Alaska instead, trying Oceania because I'm not dealing with Princess' oversized ships in Alaska.  

But personally I'm guessing the odds that any cruises make it to SPB this summer at this point are all but non-existant.  Unfortunately, I'm not sure there's a lot of realistic choices to replace that as a port without having to completely re-order the rest of the cruise, which wouldn't make people happy either.  There's just a limit to how many places that they can visit in the eastern baltic, and in general, those cruises are already hitting a lot of them.

FWIW, there's also a few videos that have been posted by a crew member from inside the ship on youtube if you search for them (sorry, no link at the moment).  I think the username they were posting under was "the crew" or something like that.  The ones I saw included the suite area and the main dining room.

More double-posting.

Ugh, double posting issues.

21 hours ago, John&LaLa said:

 

No Mama Mia, of course. 

Heh, the one good thing I'd have said about Cats is that it's not Mamma Mia.  🙂

Then again, I may be a bit biased against Mamma Mia after having stayed at Mandalay Bay a few times back when it was running there, and constantly having to put up with the music everywhere around the property.  

Cats came through at the local venue here as part of the broadway subscription, and since we had that, we went and saw Cats again.  Nope, sorry, it's not any better than it was the first time I saw it.  First act largely lousy, second act mildly better.  Not something I'd go out of my way to see again.  Didn't help that the previous show in the series was Hadestown, so you went from a truly incredible show to something that's just meh.

I think way back in the day Cats was somewhat innovative.  It was certainly a bit hit initially at a time when I don't think there were many huge shows.  My understanding was the staging in New York was really quite impressive.  Probably one of the first big "spectacle" shows. So it built a lot of initial hype that drew a lot of people to it.  Apparently, it was always pretty popular with people visiting NY that weren't strong english speakers, a lot of people seem to feel it's not a show you really need to be able to follow the lyrics on.  After that I have to wonder if there's an element of "Well, I had to watch it, so I'm going to convince other people they have to watch it just to make them suffer too".  🙂  

On 8/26/2021 at 7:41 PM, lindberg said:

I was booked on the Diamond Princess March 5 2022, Buenos Aires to Los Angeles and according to Princess I could do a 'Move Over" to one year later.  But I've already booked two Princess cruises to Australia during  March 2023.  

Personally, with the way Australia has been going, I'm not sure I'd be overly optimistic that they're going to be open to cruise ships even in March 2023.  

On 8/27/2021 at 2:35 PM, loge23 said:

Likewise. We're booked on the July 2022 Fire & Ice sailing. Not optimistic - about this ship or the cruise line for the matter at this point.

We're booked to do back to back starting on June 29th (for our 25th anniversary), and I've just about reached the point where I figure it's unlikely to go - or if it does, it'll be with enough restrictions on it that I'm not going to pay to do it.  (I'm not paying that type of money to deal with a cruise where I'm having to wear masks all the time, or take only cruise ship excurisons, or things like that.)

I'm not overly convinced this is really a Princess cruise issue at this point though.  The issue is more that countries are still trying to figure out who and how they'll allow people in, and often aren't even thinking about how that will apply to cruise passengers much.  Some of the Caribbean countries have done more thought on it, but they're also far more incentivized to do that.  For trips like the European sailings that the Island is supposed to do next summer.  World cruises this winter would have been a laughable proposition at this point. But realistically, at this point, there haven't been any "normal" european sailings by any cruise lines so far, visiting a "normal" range of countries.  So realistically, the earliest that that's going to happen is probably going to be late april or early may - by which point we're pretty close if not past when we'd have to make final payments for that end of june cruise, and it's going to be very hard to judge at that point how things are going to be.  So definitely not optimistic myself.  I've already done some looking, and they do offer the same 30 days that we wanted to do in 2022 in 2023, so might have to move to that, but with it being 2023, there's also a good chance we might have moved on from Princess largely by that point anyways.

On 8/27/2021 at 2:35 PM, loge23 said:

Something has to go, and the Island and Coral (2003) are among their oldest in service now (the Caribbean Princess is now the oldest, 1998). Princess has all but ceded their Caribbean cruise business to Celebrity for now.

Hope I'm wrong here, but this isn't looking too good for the Princess Cruises we all knew and loved. The latest cancellations really hit home for us - or I should say, kept us at home. 

I'm not overly convinced they're going to be in a big hurry yet to get rid of the Island and Coral.  I guess part of that might depend on whether they want to give up the idea of world cruises at all.  I'd make the argument that the Island and Coral are already a little on the large size to do these types of cruises (and continue to allow more interesting ports on the trip), but if they dropped those two ships, I'm not sure how practical that'd be on a 3k passenger ship.  Realistically, I've always been somewhat underwhelmed by the Princess world cruise offerings anyways (110 days or so, and typically over 50 of them are at sea, there are other lines with much better ratios).  Admittedly though, since they're no longer limited to these two ships for the Panama Canal, that does make them somewhat more expendable.  

If they do drop those two, Princess will definitely move further from my first choice for a cruise.  Even now, that's started to waver because of losing the Pacific.  I recognize that my other choices for smaller cruise ships are more expensive, but realistically, a lot of those Pacific Princess cruises tended to cost more anyways.

Personally I'd guess they're not really making any significant changes, otherwise they would have made some announcements about it.  I suspect this is more of a case where they had the opportunity to get it's routine drydock requirement out of the way when it wasn't being used for passengers anyways, so it just made sense to do it early.

Figured the Island christmas cruise was inevitable the way things were looking.  Personally, I'm getting real concerned about the chances that the 30 days we have booked on the Island for late June will happen in a manner that I'm willing to put up with (ie, no restrictions on excursions, no masks).  Realistically, there aren't many european trips it's going to be doing before our cruise, and I have to wonder if those countries involved are going to be ready and willing to take cruise ships in - with as many different countries as those trips hit, all it takes is for various countries along the route to require tests for entry, and it becomes completely impractical.  And I'm especially concerned that we won't really know enough to make a reasonable decision before final payment is due on that cruise.

For the OP, how far out is your cruise?  If it's one for next summer, especially later in the summer, there's probably not a lot listed yet.  Airlines generally only post flights out about 300-330 days, and of course, right at the moment, anything that's actually posted that far out is probably about as likely to be reality as the tooth fairy.  Personally, I'd just check it weekly or so and see if you find anything that looks good.

And as others have mentioned, you almost certainly want to be searching for business class in ez air, because first really will be looking for just first class flights, which internationally are almost non-existant these days.

On 7/23/2021 at 2:12 AM, Steelers36 said:

The new WC ship is the ISLAND and it has done the Christmas/NY voyage you mention prior to the WC.

It's doing it in Dec 2021 and Dec 2022.

Yeah, and to me, that's not what I'd call a great substitution.  Oddly I'm not seeing the 2021 version at the moment although I know it was there (maybe it's been dumped), but the 2022 one is an uninspiring itinerary that lacks what you used to get on the R ships - namely stopping at smaller less traveled islands.  

My expectation is that we'll start looking at Oceania, Viking, Azamera, lines along those types.  I know there's an argument that they might be more expensive, but when you looked at what those R class 14 days trips at christmas cost, I'm not sure the argument holds up there (yeah, other times it's more pronounced).  Probably means we'll get to cruise less as a result.

December 2022 trip doesn't fit our vacation schedule anyways, so we wouldn't have been able to take it (and I'm too skeptical to believe that the 2021 if it still exists will operate in a manner I'm willing to deal with, hell, I'm skeptical that my 30 days on the Island next summer will operate normally enough for me to deal with it).  I'm seriously considering a wind star trip for december 2022.  There's an 11 day itinerary that looks interesting to me that's similar to what I would have expected for the 14 days on Pacific.  

I'm not going to actively avoid Princess, and if I see something that I think looks interesting, I'll still book it.  But that'll take more interesting trips given that I have no real interest in the largest ships they're operating now.

I wouldn't say the loyalty changes are going to be a huge factor for me, although if they took away my free laundry that'd really kinda annoy me :).  That said, a far bigger issue for me is just that Princess is moving further and further away from the product that I came to enjoy.  That's a *much* bigger problem in my book.  Right now we're booked for 30 days next summer (and honestly, I'm not overly convinced that cruise will happen), but after that, I'm not sure what we'll be booking.  Getting rid of the Pacific Princess and the 14 day christmas/new years cruise that she used to do before world cruises is a major blow to my loyalty to princess.  I'm skipping christmas this year because I still think it's going to be a mess that I'm not willing to deal with, but my christmas 2022 cruise will almost certainly be on another cruise line.