CruisingWalter

On Mardi Gras the New Moon was amazing in the Fortune Teller bar. At the Havana Bar I could drink the Cuban coffees all day. 🙂

On Mardi Gras in March it was watch a video on your phone or stateroom. Then go to the assigned muster station after a certain point, I think it was 1 or 1:30 to be checked off that we completed the muster. Get it done early so you're not one of the guests they have to chase down so the cruise can start. 🙂

Looking at his Twitter Profile, he lists the official Celebrity Cruise Lines Twitter account as one of the accounts he manages. So he's either a brand ambassador or hired by the cruise line to manage at least their Twitter social feed.

He wears a Celebrity social shirt in many of his posts and he travels almost exclusively on Celebrity ships. He gets access to everywhere and everyone on Celebrity ships, much like John Heald at Carnival.

According to the person who posted the test, pricing has remained exactly the same as it was before. Two tiered pricing, 'regular' and 'high speed.'

Yes, if you read my first post, this was on the Celebrity Beyond which is currently sailing almost full on the President's Cruise. This test was run on that ship that has deployed the system live to guests.

Obviously the speed will depend on how many receivers the ship has and how many folks are using it. I know Freedom of the Seas was testing with either 6 or 12 receivers. Not sure how many Beyond has onboard. And according to Ade who shared the test image, the pricing has NOT changed onboard Beyond. Same pricing structure for 'regular' or 'high speed' internet as it was before. That's the other supposed advantage to the Starlink service for the cruise lines, it's actually cheaper to operate than the current service. Installation of the receivers may be more expensive, but the internet service itself is supposed to cheaper. I guess that's how they're able to hold the internet costs while making the switch

Celebrity Beyond is the first Royal Caribbean ship and the first cruise ship period to officially launch SpaceX Starlink High Speed internet for guests. The speeds Celebrity brand ambassador Ade is showing via his iPhone exceeded 117mbps. Almost as fast as what I get here at home (125mbps). He did not post the pricing information so we don't know yet if Royal will be requiring a second mortgage to get these speeds. 🙂 If any of y'all are on any RCCL ships that are offering the service with posted pricing, please let us know. It certainly looks promising for remote work from the ship.

I believe Ade is a brand ambassador for Celebrity as he is on a Celebrity ship about 40 weeks a year. Beyond is the first cruise ship to officially launch SpaceX Starlink High Speed internet and the speeds Ade is showing via his iPhone exceeded 117mbps. Almost as fast as what I get here at home (125mbps). He did not post the pricing information so if any of y'all are onboard Beyond right now, I'm curious to know if we have to mortgage our house to get the high speed service. 🙂

I think that's standard practice that most of the eateries will be closed at dinner because the restaurants are so popular. I believe they basically rotate which food stations would be open on any given night in part to conserve on food waste.

I had to reinstall the VV app on my Android phone a few times and update it a few times to get the app to work correctly. They push out updates fairly frequently. It's not the best app in the world yet, but it's a heckuva lot better than when they launched and the app was basically useless. 🙂 As other's have mentioned the add-ons should appear in the "Me" section and in your booking. If they don't, login via the website to see if they are on the site. As someone else mentioned, once you have your add-ons booked, print them out just to have a hard copy backup just in case. Once we got connected to the ship WiFi in Miami, everything showed up exactly as it should have. The app actually worked quite well for the week we were onboard, certainly better than it does on land.

Thank you so much for the kind words! 🙂

Travel agents are the way to go for this very reason. They would have to be on hold for you and they have a separate line and separate agents to call. Travel agents are free to you so I would recommend you use one for all your future cruises. We had to rebook our Scarlet Lady cruise three times due to the pandemic and each time we just had to tell the agent what we wanted and they handled everything for us, usually within 24-30 hours.

According to the image provided by SpaceX/Starlink in this article, Starlink expects coverage across the world by Q1 2023. If you look at the key in the lower left of the global image, it says the dark areas will be covered by Q1 2023. https://www.cruisehive.com/starlink-will-transform-internet-on-cruises-but-not-everywhere/79849

That's interesting they're rotating them now.

The layout of The Galley is quite typical for a food hall, spreading out the venues to there is not a large queue in one spot. If you had all the counters side by side it would turn into a mass of bodies pretty quickly. I don't mind the layout at all, I just wish I could order the food myself either via touchpads or the app directly vs. trying to flag down a server. 🙂

So the new NCL PRIMA launches with their Indulge Food Hall which seems to be taking The Galley food hall concept up a notch. 10 eateries (11 with the Starbucks) but the big thing they added is a touchpad ordering at most of the tables and seating areas. It reminded me that when we were on the NCL Escape in November, Food Republic had the touch pads at every single table and that's how we placed our orders. It was easy and super efficient. Also note that most of the food locations have sit up bars so you can eat right at the food station making it more like land based food halls. The touchpad concept to place our own orders in The Galley without the need to flag down a server would be a HUGE help when it's busy. Or just put the full ordering system in the app. Just punch in your table number and place your order. We loved the Galley except the morning we were in Puerto Plata and had a hard time flagging down a server. Very thankful to the Let's Taco About It chef who came over personally to take our order. Thoughts? One look at the Indulge Food Hall from The Points Guy. https://thepointsguy.com/guide/norwegian-cruise-line-indulge-food-hall/

My pleasure!

Deleting this as I added the image to the above post.

It is the Corn, Salmon menu right now. I know my wife had Tofu and a pumpkin or sweet potato soup as part of her entrees. I have the entire meal in our food review on the YouTube channel. 🙂 https://youtu.be/pBolzKvXjMU

A tweet from Celebrity Cruises says the service will start on Sept. 5 so it sounds like at least one Celebrity ship is going to be getting their receivers this coming week. But the overall schedule per the press release is all ships in Royal Caribbean Group by the end of Q1 2023.

The cost of the receivers is $5000-$10,000 each and in the tests they were running 6 to 12 receivers on the ships. We don't know how many receivers each ship will actually require and I'm sure the amount depends on the ship size/passenger capacity. It sounds like the upfront costs might be a little higher, but the Starlink service itself will be cheaper than what they're using now. It's no doubt that if you want the 200-350MB/s speeds you're going to pay for it. But even just 20MB/s will be an improvement over what they're able to provide now. I'm hopeful Royal will now be able to offer a basic included WiFi package to check emails and such. And then they could literally have up to four more tiers depending on how much you want to pay.

Totally agree, especially having just sailed the Scarlet Lady in July that included really good basic WiFi as part of the fare. My wife was able to stream TikTok all day long, she could not stream YouTube, but TikTok no problem. I paid the extra $10/day and was able to do two one-hour livestreams from the ship no problem as well as stream from any video streaming site. I'm wondering if the Royal group may now offer a 'basic tier' WiFi for free with enough speed to check email and post to social sites and then they will have multiple tiers of speed instead of just the two they currently have. Celebrity already has the 'included WiFi' option.

Big news announced for all of Royal Caribbean Group including Celebrity and Silversea. SpaceX Starlink High Speed WiFi (up to 350MB/sec) is coming to the entire fleet by the end of Q1 2023 https://presscenter.rclcorporate.com/press-release/167/royal-caribbean-group-to-use-spacexrsquos-starlink-in-an-industry-first-to-provide-high-speed-internet-onboard-full-cruise-fleet-/

Big news announced for all of Royal Caribbean Group including Celebrity and Silversea. SpaceX Starlink High Speed WiFi (up to 350MB/sec) is coming to the entire fleet by the end of Q1 2023 https://presscenter.rclcorporate.com/press-release/167/royal-caribbean-group-to-use-spacexrsquos-starlink-in-an-industry-first-to-provide-high-speed-internet-onboard-full-cruise-fleet-/