European_CruiseGirl

The missing payment is the problem. Op the application will stay forever in a pending status unless your son finds a way to pay it. See a previous answer about payment issues through the app. The worst thing you and your son can do is just wait. There is a problem with the non-payment and it won’t resolve on its’ own.

I’ll be in a week on RCI Rome 7 day rt and we have their drink package. Interesting to see how they handle it. The cruise is Italy-France-Spain. Here it seems NCL has started to issue an invoice for the drinks for them to be able to charge the value added tax. Which btw is not a European or EU value added tax but each country has their own. Well doesn’t really matter. And then NCL reverses the charge but keeps the VAT charge on the account.

There is usually a significant discount during black Friday sales. However the problem is there is usually also a significant price increase around 2-3 weeks before black Friday sales starts 😆 So for example the UDP used to be $300pp for a 7 day cruise when I checked the UDP prices in October 2022. Then in the early days of November the price suddenly became $375 and voila - on black Friday sales there was a 20% discount making it $300 for the black Friday sales 😂 Thats not to say there wouldn’t be any real discounts during black Friday. For example I booked very nice excursions with a real discount during last black Friday but you really need to know the numbers preferably from 1-2 months prior to black Friday to know if a sale is truly a sale.

Google the tour operators. If they have been in the business for a longer period of time you can be sure they will make sure you are back at the port on time. Being late even once would kill their business forever. I would avoid though ”a tour with a local” kind of things where the tour is not operated by a company but by an individual. They could simply change names/platforms/whatever and continue their tours even after some mishaps.

Yes RCI has very high prices too on their new ships. And their drink package prices are horrible: around $70-90/day/person and they are never included on the cruise prices 😬 For me it is either some other cruiseline (for example MSC on a better cabin/experience) or land based vacations which for me (situated in Europe) seem really appealing right now. 14 day all inclusive in far east (Thailand) or Mauritius/Seychelles is much cheaper than a 10-11 day balcony cruise on a new NCL ship. Heck any NCL ship. I can for example get 14 days at either Thailand or Mauritius at a 4-5 star hotel (all inclusive) at a price of 6000-7000e for two which includes also flights (!) whereas balcony cabins on NCL would be in minimum around 7000e plus daily service charge - excluding flights! 😶 Now which one to choose is my choice obviously and well my choice is currently to forget NCL and concentrate on enjoying my life in AI’s as mentioned above.

That is simply too tight. You need to be at the airport latest (and I mean latest) at noon which means you need to leave from the city latest at 10/10:30 to be sure you are at the airport on time. Istanbul traffic is a nightmare - if you have not experienced it first hand you cannot imagine it. The airport is huge and has two separate security checks (one even before you enter the building and it has long lines too) and getting through two securities, bag drop, passport control and walking 15-30min to your gate takes time. Add to this that also Hagia Sofia has long lines and you need in minimum 30mins to reach Hagia Sofia from Galataport (oneway, on a Sunday, if any other weekday morning and it takes much longer) and it is simply not doable to go there if your flight leaves at 3PM. At 6 PM maybe. But at 3PM not. Any chance on staying one extra night and flying out the next day?

Hey knowledgeable Cruisecritic folks - first RCI cruise upcoming although been on 20+ other cruises. Our planner finally shows our sailing’s production shows and they can be booked in advance (Symphony). However I am noticing some discrepancies with AquaTheater. See below pic. It seems the venue is double booked (on several occasions, this is just one example). Would I be right to assume that the pduduction shows will go on as advertised on the planner and the Outdoor movie is cancelled? Can’t see how they could have the Outdoor movie and Hiro at the same time at AquaTheater. Wouldn’t have even noticed this but the kids (teens) have their hearts set on the Outdoor movies…

OMG OMG OMG - thank you!!!!!! It was written is such a small font that we didn't see this text. Thank you so so much 🥰🥰🥰

Hi there, first time RCI cruiser here, have cruised many many times on other cruiselines but this is our first Royal Caribbean cruise which departs at the beginning of October. On Monday (this week) we bid a cabin on Royal Up. We chose only one cabin type to bid as we weren't sure yet if we'd want to bid other cabin types. Well now we do but when I go to our cruise planner it shows only the bid we made; not the other cabin categories anymore. I can change our current bid or cancel it but nothing more 😕 Does this seem normal or is it a computer glitch? Does it matter that we did our online check-in on Friday? Please help a clueless lady whose DH is not very happy about the fact that we are stuck on just the one bid and cannot do more of them...

It’s a ship with around 6000 passengers at any given cruise. And you don’t know almost any of those people. Most of them are most likely nice folks. Others are not. The ship is like a small town: there are all kinds of people there. So the question in my opinion would be: would you let your 10 (or 11 or whatever) year old child wander around alone in an unknown town full of bars and rowdy people (as we know some people start drinking first thing in the morning on a cruise)? I wouldn’t but every parent makes their own decisions.

Op you have already booked your comped dining. You can use it in any of the three speciality restaurants you have already booked. When you go into the restaurant on the ship they will ask you how you’d like to pay (free at sea dinner, additional meal plan if you bought one of just pay a la carte). Just say you’d like to use the free at sea dinner and you are all set. They can see it when they swipe your card.

Even this won't work - I highly recommend not doing it this way. Why? Because those on OV are bidding too. To balcony, to club balcony etc. So regardless of what is available in an OV category when you place the bid you can end up in whatever OV cabin as it's a complete shuffle once they start accepting the bids: haven suite pax bid on higher category haven suites and if they are accepted open up lower category haven suites which lower category cabin pax bid and get thus opening up their cabins. Etc etc. So there is no way of knowing which OV cabins there are available at the end when all bidding and reshuffling is done. You cannot know which particular OV cabin pax are bidding to higher cabin classes and if they get their bid it will open up their OV cabin for those in insides who bid for OV. So for this reason cannot go by what is just currently available in the cabin category that you bid or you can end up very upset by the cabin that you get. The only way to avoid disappointment when bidding is checking all deck plans of your particular ship in advance and being comfortable in any of the particular category's cabin you are planning to bid that there are on the ship. You might really end up in any of them.

The package will be definitely worth for you IMO. A cocktail/glass of wine will be in minimum around $10 so if you drink 4 glasses of those in a day it is already in minimum $40 but most likely around $50. Plus tax. Soft drinks/sodas are $3.50 plus tax. A 7 day unlimited wifi is around $180 on my cruise so a 10 day would be around $250 most likely. Btw if you have the package with the 150 mins of wifi you can upgrade the wifi package to unlimited. For my 7 day cruise the upgrade would be $100. Yes you can share the wifi package. Only one device can be logged in and online at the same time though. NCL is nicer than RCI when it comes to booking restaurants. It doesnt matter if you have a package or not you can book your restaurant reservations on the app in advance. I hate RCI for selling dining packages and then making you wait until onboard to book the restaurants. Btw dining at an a la carte restaurant on NCL costs much. If you don’t have a package estimate around $90-$100/pp/per dinner…. Shore excursions frequently sell out so your choice might not be available if you wait too long. However if you are flexible you should be able to get an excursion even one day before the port. But it might not be the excursion that you want.

Op you don’t see the times available as you already have a reservation for those times 😊 The system does not allow multiple bookings for the same time slot, so if you have already a booking at any of the restaurants on a certain day at a certain time the system does not let you book again for any restaurant at the same time frame. Usually it’s like 1,5-2 hours time slot that becomes unavailable before and after the reserved time (let's say you booked 7PM: the system calculates that you will spend eating at a restaurant around 1,5-2 hours -> this means that for the 7PM booking if you try to book a restaurant again for the same day it will only show times around 8:30-9PM or 5-5:30PM; in minimum 1,5-2 hours before/after the 7PM booking starts). What the NCL rep could have done is cancel your existing reservation and then book you a table for 4 for that time. S/he would have just needed to verigy in beforehand from somewhere else that there are indeed tables left. Looking just at your reservation s/he saw exactly what you did too. It is btw the same when booking shore excursions too. Once you book a shore excursion all excursions overlapping with the reserved one disappear and cannot be booked. Only if you cancel your shorex reservation can you again see the other shorex.

Having sailed both I’d take Zaandam. It is a smaller ship than Pearl meaning shorter walks for your mother. Pearl also has much higher passenger capacity than Zaandam so it seems more busy than Zaandam. Zaandam takes 1432 pax whereas Pearl takes 2394. There are more speciality restaurants on Pearl but they are pricey, you can either go a la carte (easily around $80-$100pp/per meal) or you can get for example a 3 meal (speciality dining) package for around $160 (which is still around $55 pp/per meal). HAL speciality restaurants cost $25-$39 per person per meal. I’ll add below the menu of NCL’s Cagney’s which is equivalent of Pinnacle Grill ($39 per person/per meal) on HAL. What is also nice for HAL is that room service is free whereas NCL charges a delivery fee for room service nowadays (except if you stay in a suite). I’m not saying the NCL cruise would be bad but I’d personally choose the HAL one. However it is definitely not possible to catch a flight from Montreal to Boston at 8:15am if the ship docks at 7am. The earliest flight out that you’d be able to catch is around noon. You need to be at the airport around 2,5-3 hours before the flight departs and if the ship docks at 7am the earliest you are out of the ship is most likely around 8am. Then transfer to the airport. So look for a flight around noon earliest. If your flight would leave later in the afternoon or even in the evening it is good to know that HAL usually has post cruise excursions available where they spend 3-4 hours sightseeing in the city and then take you to the airport. Your luggage will be securely stored inside the excursion bus so you do not need to worry about them.

I 110% agree with roger001. We have one RCI (Sept 2023) and one NCL (early 2024) coming up and that’s it. No more cruising for us for a while. We will instead concentrate on hotels and resorts across the globe. For almost 20 years we have always had in minimum one cruise per yer except for the covid years. But the feeling of excitement we used to always get/have while on a cruise or just when planning a cruise is no longer there. It truly is now (for us) only the feeling of anxiety of what is missing/reduced/cut/deleted since we last cruised…while at the same time the costs are getting higher (daily service charge, basic cruise fare etc). Nowadays new reductions come monthly it feels. We feel screwed…and we don’t like it. We own our feelings and make our decisions based on it. The only reason we are still cruising in 2024 on NCL is because if we’d cancel we’d lose quite much €€€ which we have already paid (NCL EU rules). So to mitigate the situation we changed our cabin from a suite to an inside resulting for our final payment of that said cruise to be only 600€ whereas for the suite the final payment would have been over 7000€. We will go on the cruise with the mindset of ”we are paying the bare minimum for this cruise and still doing our best to enjoy to the max. We still have the beverage packages, the dinners (incl platinum vouchers), the wifi, the shorex $50/per port”. This way - as the overall cost of the cruise is quite low - the things now missing or reduced/cut won’t feel so bad. We hope. After that cruise we will concentrate on land based trips for the forseeable future flying into different countries and staying at hotels/resorts etc. We have NZ, Thailand & Singapore, Japan and Chile as well as sailing at BVI (sailing, not cruising) coming up in the next few years. Cruising was fun for almost 20 years but now the spark is truly gone for us. It’s not that we’d be bored of cruising. It just feels bad to see constant reductions of the service and product while paying constantly more and more.

Which ship? If you have Ocean Blue people are raving about its’ filet mignon. It is much much better than Cagney’s people say.

Just to echo what was already said on the first answer: Thira (Santorini) is always a tender port as there is no large cruise ship port.

Things happen. We were 100% going on a Caribbean cruise last April. In late March my husband slipped while walking from the car to home (it was just a few steps but in any case he slipped)…and hit his head so bad he ended up in hospital for a week and was not subsequently allowed to cruise. So we cancelled our cruise just 2 weeks before departure date (insurance covered everything thankfully). You are op hopefully going on your cruise but things can come up at last minute. And because of those last minute cancellations they allow bids to all categories.

It can mean anything. Once we cruised on NCL and happened to mention to our cabin steward that it is our country’s independence day the next day. We talked about it very briefly only. Lo and behold - the next day after we came back from breakfast our door was decorated with a print of our country’s flag and inside there was a ”happy independence day” card with some cookies etc and fresh flowers. We were super impressed as we most definitely had not asked for anything. It was a nice gesture from our cabin steward.

This is not a problem (trust me I work for an airline). Flight tickets usually have only first and last names and an MR/MRS/MS or sometimes Miss or Mstr. But middle names would be rare to be on a flight ticket. Many people have even two middle names so having three names + a last name in a flight ticket would be way too much and reservation systems would not even be able to handle so long names.

Ahhahahaha…just waiting to see how NCL will handle my credit card details (and the details of all of us scandinavians who have Ä or Ö in our names) 🤣 My credit cards all have the Ä that is in my name but obviously NCL’s systems do not allow special characters so on NCL ressie I am instead of Ä an AE which is the official way of writing Ä when special characters cannot be used. Passport shows my name with Ä. Have sailed 7 times with NCL without a problem so far 😁

My current PCC is amazing. He answers every weekday, day or night to my emails. I wonder if he ever has time off 😄 He is simply and utterly amazing. Write an email on a Wednesday at 11AM - he responds within 30min. Write an email on a Saturday evening at 8:30PM and he answers that email too within 30mins. This guy seems to be available non stop and is incredibly knowledgeable. I hope he stays working at NCL for a long time as my previous PCC’s have been quite useless.

Thank you Flossie and Paul 😊 Flossie: yes we are still able to change without penalty. We’d miss the very lovely aft balcony if we change the cruise but then again gain some bucket list ports. Of course there is always a risk on a cruise that we don’t get to those ports for various reasons… So it’s a tough decision. Paul: yes that ”new guy” thing we have been thinking too. Will we feel awkward as others have already formed tight knit groups. But well we are two couples so have each other already. For some reason this is a very tough call for us. We have had the 17 day Voyager booked for a long time already so letting go of it is though. But the world cruise segment would just be perfect for us. The other couple are more of a ”go with the flow” people and say whatever we decide is fine for them. They just cruise for the cruise, not for the ports.

I would definitely change in US and then take a direct flight to Barcelona. This way you have a domestic connection first and immigration/passport only after you reach your final destination. So no need to worry in passport lines if you have enough time to change to your connecting flight. Passport lines can be unpredictable in lenght and are always best to have at the end of the trip. Btw if you have read it is better to change flights in Europe while going to the US that is true too as on that direction it is better to also leave the passport/immigration until the end of the trip. So it is different than when flying from US to EU 😊 There is a direct flight from LAX to Barcelona. Would that work? Or then just fly to JFK and you’ll have a lot of direct flights from there. However if you want to fly to Europe first I’d avoid the following airports at all costs: LHR -> UK is not part of EU anymore so you’d end up doing passport/immigration twice. First to UK and then when you enter EU. CDG -> the airport is just very weird with busses, going stairs up and down, more busses. Just very confusing. FRA -> read from the previous answers Munich is a very nice airport and haven’t heard of anything bad of Lisbon either.