donaldsc

This thread was started in 2007 which is 17 years ago.. Enough already!!! I suggest that the moderator should lock this thread. DON

Not sure why any of us our wasting our time answering this question but no - bigger is never better and the bigger the the ship the worser it is. My sweet spot is less than 500 people but I will go up to 1000 if the itinerary is great and there is no alternative. I did a cruise once on a ship that held 22 people. DON

I have been on private tours where the guide told an interloper that this was a private tour and to go away. I guess that if they did not go away there was not much that the guide could do about it but they did. If it was me I would at least make sure to jostle them or step in front of them every time they tried to take a picture. DON

Yet another advantage of using a good TA. When I call my TA and ask her about what is available on a few lines that I am interested in she can immediately tell me what is available. DON

I would respectfully suggest that the OP do a search on CC for Pool Hogs. There are a fair number of very long and vociferous threads on the issue. The general agreement is that a solution is never going to be implemented although I have not seen much of a problem on high end cruises. DON

I have several questions about the Atlas ship excursions. We almost never take ship excursions but the ones listed for our Mediterranean cruise look sort of interesting and are reasonably priced. The cruises we are taking are the Oct 12 - 7 Night Bilboa to Lisbon cruise and the Oct 19 Lisbon to Canary Island cruise. 1.Are the excursions and the guides usually pretty good? 2. How large are the tour groups? I would not want to be on a bus w 40 of my new closest friends. 3. Do the tours waste time on shopping stops or will I spend my tour time actually seeing stuff. 4. Did I forget to ask anything else about the Atlas excursions. 5. Do they ever cancel tours because of an insufficient number of booking after I have booked the tour or especially after I am on board? DON

You might be able to able to get a key card so you are not being tracked on the ship. However do you have a computer or a cell phone. If you do you are being tracked everywhere else in your life so was I do not see why being tracked on the ship is so awful. DON

I was on a Princess ship with my kids and grandkids a few years back. Remember Swanson frozen TV turkey dinners. They were better than the dry turkey with minimal fixings we got for our turkey dinner. DON

If I interpret the OP's question correctly they plan to prepay their what you call "suggested" gratuity in advance. I see no problem w that. I do see a problem w people who board a ship with the prior intent to stiff the crew members because they can. DON

How come nobody has not yet commented that this is a really silly souvenir - a key think w a fake bullet and your name on it. There has to be a cheap souvenir that is more Alaska that one could buy. DON

We are doing a cruise that includes several stops in the Canaries. The ships stops in Arrecife for 1 day but only from 12 noon to 8 PM, then Santa Cruiz de Tenerife for 2 days and ends in Las Palmas on Gran Canaria. I want to spend several days post cruise seeing a bit more of the Canaries and I am torn between several choices. 1. Spend more time on Gran Canaria. This would be the easiest since we are already there. The problem is that looking at some of the excursion sites as as GetYourGuide or Viator there do not seem to be too many interesting excursions there. It also appears looking at tours that many pf them start from locations that are a distance from the city of Las Palmas where we dock. 2. Spend our days on Fuerteventura which is an island that we have not visited at all. I really do not know what there is to see and do on Fuerteventura. 3. Go back to Lanzarote and spend more there as we have not a full day on our cruise stop there. I do have some ideas of what there is to see and do on Lanzarote but and ideas would help. You need to know a few things about us. We have traveled a lot. We are into nature, scenery and wine and food excursions. We are TOTALLY UNINTERESTED in spending any time at any beach. We like smaller tours as opposed to a tour on a bus with 40 of our new closest friends. Plane connections are sort of important since we will be flying home after our Canary visit. Any thoughts or ideas to help me make a decision would be appreciated. DON

I hope that it is right. If so it shows that the kid is smarter than his parents. It should also teach the parents a lesson although I doubt that the parents have the mental capacity to learn their lesson. DON

I would sort of disagree w this statement. Some guides may work for a tour company and they may or may not get a salary. However many guides who are on sites such as ToursbyLocals and some of the GetYourGuides are independent contractors who get paid only when they are actually guiding. On the days that they are not guiding they do not get paid. They deserve a bigger tip. DON

I go against the glow w regard to wheels. The four wheel cases are only good if you are on completely smooth surfaces. Anything irregular, carpeted surfaces or if you have to pull the suitcase over an edge and the 4 wheel cases w tiny wheels fo not work. Give me a suitcase with big wheels any day. Obviously suitcase opinions vary. DON

We did an AK cruise this year that started on late April. We had no problem w Glacier Bay. Note to the OP - is your April cruise date a firm date and why did you pick that date? DON

How old are the children. That info might be helpful. Also have you tried a Google search? DON

If you are certain that this will be one-and-done and most one-and-dones end up being one-of-many remember that the until they finish the bridge construction inside Denali you will not be able to go very far into the park. DON

My next cruise will be my 1st Atlas Cruise and I certainly hope that once we get onto the ship it meets our expectations since the cruise login has been awful. Very few cruise companies have a user friendly booking site but the Atlas site is more difficult to use, is less organized and less passenger friendly than any I have ever used. Their WEB site designer probably flunked out of coding school and almost certainly did not pass their database design classes. All databases have a field that lets you find a specific record. For a cruise company this would normally be the booking number which is unique to all the people in the booking group. If you enter the booking number into the record all of the data in this record for all the people in the group should be available. If you are entering passenger data into your record typing the booking number should let you enter or modify every passenger in your group with the same booking number. Every other cruise ship WEB site does it this way EXCEPT for Atlas. Atlas does things differently. They assign a booking number that applies to EVERY passenger in the group and then a different loyalty number to EACH of the passengers in the group. Here is the way it works in practice. I had to enter then passenger data for my wife and I. I logged into Atlas to create my cruise account and had to create a password and username for the account which is normal. As part of this process I also had to enter my personal loyalty number. However and this is the kicker because the account included MY loyalty number this meant that anything I entered applied ONLY to me and not also to my wife. Now this is where the Atlas stupidity starts. Unless I missed something it was impossible to for me to enter any of my wife's data into this record at this point. I had to set up a completely new account with a new user name, password and loyalty # for my wife. Two passengers; 2 accounts; 2 passwords; 2 loyalty numbers. Imagine if a family of 5 or 6 people were traveling with the same booking # - 6 people; 6 accounts; 6 passwords, etc. To make it worse unless I missed something I couldn't even do this on my computer since when I opened the the Atlas App it automatically went to my account and I could not figure out how I could tell it that I wanted to set up a new account for my wife. I had to do it on her computer. Not surprisingly the common data that I put into my account did not carry over to her account. Before I set up her separate account I called Atlas customer service. The person who answered understood the issue and asked for my wife's passport data and said that I did indeed have to set up 2 accounts but she would take care of it. She asked for my wife's passport data and said that the rest of our common data would be imported from my account. Five days later I get an e-mail for Atlas saying the my account was OK but I hadn't created my wife's account yet. This idiocy has not occurred with any other cruise line I have sailed on. They have you enter all of your passengers into the cruise account as long s have the same booking number. Can you imagine what is going to happen when I try to book excursions on the Atlas cruise, I will have to do each reservation twice. What about dinner reservations - do you think that they will assign us to the same table? Sorry for this ranting and if I just missed something that definitely not obvious to me I apologize to Atlas. However this is one hell of a way to make a good impression on avery experienced but new Atlas passenger. DON

This is the best and most useful response of any that you have gotten so far. !! DON

Look at the deck plan. There does not appear to be any self service laundry. DON

This does not answer the OP's question but we took the train Bergen to Oslo during the winter when there was lots of snow on the ground. I am not a train person but this one was absolutely great. I can see why it is considered one of the great train rides in the world. You will enjoy it. DON

Please provide a reference on this. It seems so unlikely that this is true that I did an extensive internet search on it and I could not find any reference to this way of controlling a bear. DON

You can use Google maps to find the answer to that questions. To the person who asked "Would it be better/safer to take a taxi or is it okay to walk if we are careful?" - Bergen is a very safe city. DON

Most of the people wear smart casual on formal night. However some but not all of the people who wear normally their baseball caps backward in the MDR turn them forward on formal night. DON

+1. We did a cruise that went to just the Falklands for 3 days and S Georgia for 8 days. Not sure of the current impact of avian flu but imagine being on a beach in S Georgia with 300,000 nesting pairs of penguins on just one of the many beaches we stopped at, many many fur seals and a ton (literally and figuratively) of elephant seals. It was far and above the most wonderful trip I have ever taken. DON