Stosh68

Thank you for sharing your blog.

One post says starting September 1st, another says September 14th. As I have a sailing that leaves September 1st, it affects me since I've already made my reservations. Why are we merging posts that contain different information. Figure out which is correct and remove the incorrect information.

Remind me where Icon of the Seas was built and where it's inaugural cruise sailed from. I forget.

While I'm not telling you to not book ahead, I certainly would and do myself. However there were no available reservations while I was on the Discovery in February, and for the entirety of the meal over half of the tables in the the Crown Grill were empty. I've never been in a Sabatini's or the Crown Grill without half of the tables being empty, perhaps Rudy's is different but I'm not a seafood person. Secondly, if you read the casino threads, there's always talk about players being comp'd meals at the specialty restaurants, that wouldn't be possible if they were totally booked before the cruise left the dock. I would be surprised that even without a reservation, if you showed up as a party of two just after 5pm, that there would not be an available table. I'd still try to make a reservation though.

Wife and I always book private tables for two. We've never been forced to sit at a group table. We've been asked many times if we would like to wait, or accept a group table. The only difference is that I always make 5:20 reservations. With an average time of 90 minutes per dinner service, everybody with 5pm, 5:20 and 5:40 reservations will still be seated.

Those ambulance chasers aren't even lawyers, they advertise themselves as writers, community managers and marketers. And the same people have multiple websites. https://season4.io/ is another run by the same group of people who claim to be diligently working to protect the vulnerable amongst us from the horrors of dangerous chemicals like Dihydrogen Monoxide.

There's more variables to the problem than stated, and you'd have to do a monte carlo simulation of several million $1000 bankroll sessions to give you a bell curve that would be useful. First, 95% payback on a cruise ship is extremely unlikely. A more reasonable assumption would be between 85 and 90%, but even that is still unknowable without insider knowledge. The second variable is the volitivity of the machine. If you get a lot of smaller wins, then you have a low volitivity machine which will stretch out the number of spins your bankroll will last, if there are fewer, but larger wins the opposite will be true. Again, you can't know this information for certain on a slot machine, but after a decent amount of play you can make an educated guess. But some quick and dirty numbers using middle of the road settings from an old program a friend wrote shows that with 95% payback you'd get 6700 plays in the middle of the bell curse, compared to 3200 and 14k on the high and lower ends. At 90% payback, those numbers change to 1900, 3400 and 5600 plays. So a $1000 bankroll could get you between 1900 and 5600 points on a 90% slot machine. Keep in mind, there will still be instances where you get much less than 1900 points, and if you hit a more than expected amount of jackpots you could get a lot more than 5600 points if you played until you went broke. If I had a limited bankroll and wanted to maximize points, I'd stick to video poker. Assuming a fair game, you can calculate exact paybacks and optimal strategy for each game and variation.

I've never seen children at adults only pools. I've had more issues with adults acting like children in the adult pool area.

I wonder how much this has to do with beginning of "election season". Gone are the days where you could put up lawn signs, bumper stickers or where a pin supporting your candidate or cause without having wo worry about your car being keyed, house trashed or being physically threatened or worse. Agree to disagree is a forlorn attitude to a certain percentage of the population and verbally and physically confronting people is becoming more and more common. I can see Princess just not wanting to have to deal with it, and it's just easier for them to ban everything than for them to have to become the arbiters of what is or isn't acceptable, especially when 95+% of the crew aren't from the USA and don't know, care or want to involved in anything political involving guests. It's easy for us to say, sure no "Vote for XXX" signs. I see plenty of Canadian flag stickers on doors, and nobody gets offended by that. But what happens when somebody puts up an Israel or Palestine flag sticker that we all know will "offend" a percentage of the population? You can't possibly expect Princess to have a list of acceptable and unacceptable country magnets. I'm not saying I agree or disagree, I've never decorated my door, but I've considered it for future cruises. I'm just saying I can understand why Princess would say no door decorations and say it's because of a fire hazard, because it's easier to give "fire hazard" as a public reason instead of "We've found that more and more people have stopped acting civilized over material put on doors, and we're tired of having to get security involved over a bunch of upset Karen's and Kevin's.

They all serve the same exact menu. The biggest difference to me is that Allegro is isolated and can only be reached via the Aft stairs/elevators. If you have an aft cabin, you might enjoy it. If you have a cabin in the front half of the ship it will be a "longer" walk to get there.

Was free last month, even had free detergent available.

Both the old and new app show the drink totals per day, I used both interchangeably earlier this month on Discovery. Additionally, if the bar is not crowded, I find that you can ask the bartender to take the extra second to charge my wife and my drink package's separately. When crowded, they just aren't going to take the time to and will charge my account for both drinks. Since my wife won't go to the bar, she will usually order drinks for both of us on the app during the day. Ordering drinks is typically faster in person at the bar at night when crowded which I do, but during the day the app service isn't appreciably slower.

Nobody cares. My experience over the past year is that half the people sitting in lounges are drinking bottled water.

I booked a Hawaiian retirement cruise while on the Regal last November. Other people I talked to during an excursion said booking on the ship would get me access to deals and OBC. There was no benefit whatsoever, no OBC, no price deal, same price I could have gotten using the Princess website. I booked it anyway, with the intention of finding a TA to take over the booking. In January, I saw the fare had dropped by over $800, so I called my CVP and re-fared the trip through her. If you're likely to book on Princess again, buy the future cruise credit while on board. Since other people claimed to have gotten better deals while on the ship, perhaps they are available for certain cruises, but that wasn't my experience.

I put on the medallion, and instantly I felt a tingling sensation in my fingers. I think it was reprogramming my DNA because all I want to do now is go to art auctions and buy my wife jewelry at Effys.