BWIVince

I can relate completely... I had the same kind of experience with one of the restaurant managers, who my family knew not only Crystal's whole history, but also from Princess, before NYK was event dreaming of Crystal. 😊 Vince

I don't mean to take away from that point at all, or from your experience... Mine is just the opposite so I was just engaging for discussion, but that's not meant that my experience is any more valuable. I appreciate you sharing that. Vince

You really don't experience that in a local restaurant? Twice last month the GM of two different restaurants made it a point to come to my table and greet me by name and chat because they knew me as a regular for years. In both cases they walked by and checked on other tables, but I was the only one greeted by name and got the extended chat. I wouldn't have thought anything of it if I was in anyone else's shoes (how would they know me), but I also wouldn't have taken offense to it. If I tried to engage them and was rebuffed, that would be a different story, but that doesn't seem to be happening in these examples. Vince

People who frequent a business, especially in travel and hospitality, develop personal relationships with their service suppliers, and those relationships are different than the ones the staff have with new guests. 🤷‍♂️ That's inevitable and happens everywhere. If Crystal was structurally putting in service aspects that hindered the new guests from developing the same relationships, or management was somehow disrespecting the new guests, I'd be concerned... But there is just no way a staff member who has sailed with a guest 50 times is going to have the same relationship with a guest they just met. If a guest is really sensitive to that, there are a couple of newer lines out there which might be a better fit for them as a higher percentage of guests are starting off at the same point with more of (but not all) of those staff members. Vince

You certainly will if these other suppliers get it. 😉 If they don’t, they’ll come down. It works both ways, and neither is in a vacuum. Vince

Not really…. We’re seeing the same thing in 2025 group contracts for hotels, so I imagine it will bode similar for other segments of the travel industry as we get closer. If they get it, good for them (costs are up), but if they don’t (and they certainly may not), prices will be back down. Capitalism in the travel industry is alive and well. Vince

My pleasure! I liked the Plaza’s original look too…. That was my era of decor. Lol. Comfy, overstuffed things. Here was the Cove’s original look, just to round out the peek of the Plaza: Vince

Some Crystal Harmony memories, from her first couple years in service… The aft elevator lobby on Tiffany Deck 6. This area changed a lot on the subsequent ships. The Vista Lounge at Sunset. The Trident Bar when it still dipped down into the Neptune Pool. The sunken bar-top on the right-hand side of the photo (beyond the white tiled pool surround) served the swim-up barstools inside the pool in its early years. The Crystal Plaza’s original furnishings, and with the fountain in action. Time flies… Vince

Many resorts in the US have been doing the rotating venue thing on slower weeks (which are thankfully getting more rare) since Covid started, and it works pretty well. The concept is that most guests at a resort are there for more than one night, so if you rotate the restaurant that you close, just about no one is inconvenienced because they still get to enjoy the venues they want, they just change the order. When occupancy is low enough, you just can’t run everything in the same frequency you do when occupancy is 3 or 4 times higher. It just doesn’t work, as much as guests want to say “that’s not my problem”. Using food prep as just one example, it takes a crazy amount of food just to prep the full menu even when you reduce the number of portions as low as you can cut it. If you only get a handful of tables that service, that represents a LOT of waste. Regarding Waterside, anyone here who knows me knows it takes an act of Congress to get me to eat in Marketplace, and I’d rather starve to death than eat at the Trident on my vacation…. But closing Waterside only makes sense these days. On my last two cruises (2019 and 2021), lunches in Waterside were excellent, but no one wanted a sit-down lunch. The 2021 cruise was extreme because of the roughly 280 passenger guest count — there were literally lunches with myself and 7 or 8 other guests. Not tables — guests. They prepped food for menu items that weren’t even ordered once, besides all the prep for the other items that went mostly to waste. Servers were denied shifts off just to stand around and stare at each other. Everyone went to eat upstairs, despite the excellent execution, because the sit-down plated lunch just isn’t a popular thing these days. Trust me, no one bemoans the death of the dining room luncheon as much as I do, but it just doesn’t make any sense to manage it the way they used to. The demand — at this scale — just isn’t there all the time anymore. Vince

I can't say I've ever gotten my bags in an hour, but yeah they do have a short life span. A lot of bags go further than just from the pier to the room too though also. Most of my tags are on for 3-5 hours, and it's a pretty important 3-5 hours. The plastic or plasticized paper straps have always stood up well to this process, but even the cardboard ones have torn or been damaged sometimes over the years... So there's a lot to this seemingly tiny element. Vince

I've only taken one cruise in an Aquamarine Classic, but I picked one midships and got no noise from above. The cabin was under one of the covered areas with loungers, but in a higher traffic area. It's a ship, so every once in a blue moon you can hear something from above or below no matter whether it's a cabin or a venue in that location, but I didn't get any chair dragging noises, music, or anything specific to being under a pool deck. I wouldn't hesitate to book a suite under the kids facilities either. They're not really aligned with any of the suites, and unless you're on a holiday cruise or peak summer cruise, they're among the quietest places in the ship. (Literally, the library is normally noisier than either kids room, and it's still pretty darn quiet.) The only question mark for me, and I don't know for sure, would be the suites under Tastes (and to a lesser degree Trident). Unlike Marketplace, the chairs drag on the teak all day and evening as people push them in and out constantly. If I didn't hear the loungers and chairs in my room it's probably not an issue, but the amount of vibration generated would be higher there, so that might be slightly more of a risk. Vince

GMTA…. 😁 I literally had the exact same thoughts at the same moment. Haha Vince

I don’t understand the thought process behind mailing you a letter with the luggage tags and then making you print out the boarding document. Why not just print the boarding barcode on the welcome letter, or insert whatever document you need people to acknowledge in the envelope you’re already sending? I’m bombarded with all kinds of greenwashing in the travel industry by all kinds of suppliers, but this isn’t even that. It doesn’t save paper overall, it doesn’t save postage, it doesn’t save greenhouse gasses from shipping, it doesn’t save labor as it could be batch printed in the same queue as the letters — all it does is tasks the guests with one more chore and makes them use their paper for something Crystal seems too cheap to supply. Definitely not a great luxury experience. I’m kind of hoping they eventually move to the pre-printed luggage tags like the ones OC used starting in 2021, but I can at least understand why that’s a bigger project for another day. The poor experience of getting a mailing and then having to print your own boarding pass is a real head scratcher though. Vince

I agree with the previous posters…. I’ve flown on Icelandair in Saga Class and would happily do it again based on price and schedule. It’s not for everyone, and as Keith mentioned if you’re expecting or needing a lie-flat business product, it’s worth buying up to an airline like Delta. That said, the flight to DC is about as long as a transcon from here and the seats were similar in size and style to our domestic first class seats in the US, but I found them more comfortable. The meals were also streamlined and straightforward, but I enjoyed them a lot. Lots of Icelandic touches in both the meal service and beverages. Service was friendly and attentive in Saga. The lounge in KEF was cute and had a nice variety of tasty nibbles. Overall, I’d say be aware of what you’re paying, and what they’re promising. Icelandair is a discount airline that doesn’t offer the same business class product as full service international carriers. For the price I paid though, I thought I got an excellent value and had a very enjoyable trip in Saga Class. Vince

Come along and find out! 😁 There may or may not be other Chez patrons on the sailing. Vince

I wouldn’t put much stock in the times listed, that site just aggregates data from other schedules. It’s a great general guide, but the details may not be 100% current or complete when you get down to that level. Definitely go by what Crystal gives for port times, they will advise you of any changes when they are confirmed enough to communicate. PortMiami currently has 10 cruise ship berths, so 8 ships in port is a pretty average day for them. Miami is also used to handling some pretty massive ships, so if a Crystal ship is taking up one of those spots, it probably means there will be a few less passengers in port that day than usual. 🙂. Not saying it’s not crazy busy, just that they’re at least used to processing lots of people. Vince

I know it sounds like your and FT’s comments are at odds, but I think you both are speaking to the entire pricing integrity disaster that the airlines created a few decades ago, and have been working hard to untangle for years. You’re both correct in your perspectives, it’s just more complicated than that. I have an analysis of what makes the airlines the cautionary tale that lines like Crystal are trying to avoid, that I’ll post as soon as I get some time. It’s actually quite relevant to Crystal’s strategy moving forward. Vince

It's my pleasure... There is a lot more that goes into these processes than the average customer sees, and a lot of them are not Crystal-specific, and those I ususally have lots of experience with. I'm always happy to share background on things like this. Vince

Travel suppliers these days usually do tiered openings for booking for a variety of reasons. They generally start with the smallest group of customers first and grow each subsequent tier in size and scope. The first group or two are considered "soft openings" because of the relatively limited size of the first group (or two), and they usually don't publish a firm date for this booking release. Now, in order to minimize the testing timeline and not have to buffer in a whole lot of extra days which may end up just being wasted, it's become customary for the first tiers to just fire off emails to the first group around a target day (which is sometimes just a specified week) when everything is ready, and most people wouldn't be the wiser unless they have a personal connection at the company that gave them a heads up. After the first tier you give more structure to the release dates, including a "published" opening date that is firm and (hopefully) never needs to move because everything is normally on-track by that point no matter how the content build goes. This essentially allows travel suppliers to never/rarely miss a milestone, while at the same time rewarding certain groups of customers that need or deserve special advance privileges. Vince

At this point they're not making anyone wait, they're going to open bookings for the first tier as soon as all of the content management loading is verified and everything passes QA testing, which is reportedly forecasted to be sometime mid-week. There is always a risk that might open late if there's a delay, but that's why you have a soft opening for the first tier. I should also point out that we seldom really know what the ACTUAL first tier of a soft opening is, we only know what the first tier anyone talks about is. To your point though, we're getting closer and closer to Crystal booking berths on a normal schedule. While they were booking 2025, they almost had to be booking 2026, and key dates for 2027 and 2028. They've really had to rush to get 2025 together, but starting with 2026 they should start to be able to be more strategic with release dates, and starting with 2027 they should be able to start to be more strategic with port bookings. Vince

+1... I'd also point out that the first tier opening is a soft opening in function, which is one of the reasons they open to a limited group at first. That means it's literally designed to slip if needed... So if they actually end up needing more time, at this point it would be too early to tell. But we'll find out on those days whether the itineraries appear or not. 🙂

Keith is right... The current prevailing sales methodology in the travel industry is to tease new offers in advance, but not show the full details of the offer until as close to they can book the offer as possible. The thought process is that when someone reads all the details, if they're interested in the offer, you want them to take action on it then and there. If people need more time to make a decision that's great, but among the people who are ready to book immediately, the odds of losing that momentum grow by the day the longer someone waits. Obviously since Crystal can't currently gate the content by tiers they're going to lose that advantage for some passengers anyway, but if they release the itineraries too early they lose momentum on all of the passengers. Vince

Yeah, that’s a definite scenario too, but IME that’s been more rare than the guarantee assignments clearing in a higher category. IME, until the unique situation during the Covid restart, they usually had a specific reason to offer paid upgrades, and it wasn’t just a routine program. The upgrades they were selling in 2021 were really the first broad scale paid upgrades, but we all remember the inventory situation that made those unique. Vince

That’s a valid question…. The second step in the booking process is to review a fare quote, where the breakout would show the full construction. Part of the reason for this method by cruise lines these days is to accommodate the use of templated content management systems and the need for consistency on each web page. Once upon a time every web page for every sailing was different, but now every sailing detail page is just one page, and it populates the same fields from a data table, so the format has to be identical for every sailing. This is yet another reason behind displaying simplified final fares, adding a random notes field for particular sailings would throw off the template for non-B2B sailings, or complicate the terms block by having to have various flavors of nearly identical terms that could be easily mixed up. That said, while the detailed breakout is meant to be that indicator, there are other hacks to figure out is a “sailing” is actually multiple joined segments. The first are multiple sailing dates for the same ship — you can see your sailing is actually a combo when you see the individual segments listed. A TA would see the segments on a list of voyage numbers as well, since there would be listings for multiple durations for the same date. Some longer combos are also listed as “Grand Journeys” on the website. Finally, you can often see a turnaround port in the itinerary…. In your case the ship comes back to FLL for a turnaround day mid-cruise, before sailing to the other side of the Caribbean — that’s a pretty big tell that shows on a lot of combos. Again, there’s an actual process for this, those are just other indicators you can also use. Vince

I know this isn’t your preference, but this is EXACTLY why they have to always display the gross fare and then show the discounts now. The B2B discount should only be applied once for each segment, no matter how many B2Bs are booked, and this format shows clearly when it’s applied or missing. Applying it to the $9100 would be a violation. There’s a science to this, even if it’s not to your liking. Vince