There is no tax. The 18% is the built in "gratuity" on top of the 77.99 per person per day. Based on two people it would be about 1288 for two for a 7 day cruise. You did not mention how many people or how many days you had for your 1550.16 total.
If you have UDP you can't book anything in advance, only once you're on board. I have also read about some people that would go to Izumi as soon as they open for appetizers and then go to another specialty venue a few hours later for dinner.
Carnival, Celebrity and Princess have both traditional as well as their version of MTD and handle it substantially better than RCI. So obviously these cruise lines have been able to handle the two types of seating with substantially less hiccups that Royal.
If MTD seems to work for almost no one, then how do you explain the fact that NCL operates with 100% MTD and zero traditional early/late seating?
The problem is that RCI doesn't know how to do it properly like all of their competition. Start it at 530 instead of 645 and then when all of the people start lining up at 600, they can be seated instead of having to wait 45 minutes.
There are other options on other cruise lines in order to get to the ABC's, such as September of 2024 on the Carnival Celebration for 8 days out of Miami with a pair of sea days front and back.
No thread. It's pushed back to 2025 and supposedly will be slightly larger than the first two. There will be a few tweaks with the Viva and with the pushback there will probably be many more with #3.
But it was a general statement made with no specifics to back it up. Give me a handful of things that occurred to make your entire cruise horrible and it's more believable than just an all encompassing statement.
There are varying degrees of good vs bad from ship to ship with every cruise line. Many people write off an entire line because of one bad sailing or because of second hand information that they have heard
Carnival currently has 11 ships in their fleet that are newer than her. Thank goodness there are people that enjoy sailing on the rust buckets. I would only consider sailing on one of them if it was offered for free and I could drive to NYC or Baltimore for embarkation.
There are multiple 12 day cruises on the Spirit between Tahiti and Honolulu that occur when she is not down under in Sydney. That ship is 23 years old, we would never cruise on her.
Since when? My DH wore shorts all 12 nights of our B2B last June on the Oasis in the MDR, Chops, 150 Central Park and Giovanni's. Izod shorts and a collared golf shirt. No problem whatsoever
I wouldn't know since the only time I step foot in the casino is to quickly spend my 25.00 free chip. But I do know that the casinos on the two Excel Class ships are substantially larger than any other ship in the fleet.
But it is a bonafide fact that it's their first cruise on Carnival and as we both know, blue card holders will spend more on board than more experienced cruisers. Combined with the gamblers that lose in the casino means that both of these factions add to the bottom line and that is why Carnival's marketing campaign is aimed at these two groups of cruisers.