3rdGenCunarder

Yes, which is why I love Cunard. Cruising for grownups. HAL is for grownups, too, but they seem to be forgetting that we like to use our brains sometimes, not veg out all of the time with nothing to do. I was on Queen Elizabeth in Sitka a few years ago. When I left the dock, we were the only ship there. When I returned a huge NCL ship with an amusement park on top was also there. Someone returning to our ship asked an officer, "Why don't we have one of those?" pointing to the water slide. He put on a very serious snooty expression and said, "Because WE are Cunard." I could tell he was joking. Sort of.

Is it just HAL? I looked at other boards and didn't see anything about this. I only looked at titles, so it could be drift in another thread.

I just refreshed and got a blue screen with "502 origin server" error of something like that.

In some small ports, HAL will lock in contracts with all the local vendors, so it's just about impossible to book anything independently.

I got bicycles on Telecharge the other day. Some sites use wiggly numbers and letters. I find those worse than the pictures.

No, mine was bags.

But the cruise lines don't count it that way. I'm not sure they ever sail at full capacity counting all the bedhs. Quads may have only 3 people in them (I think the rules allow that), so there's an empty bed. Singles travel in a double cabin, so there's a cabin sold but not "full." I suspect guarantees will be getting quads on ships that have a lot of quads, especially If it isn't a school holiday with lots of kids. HAL won't sell quads to couples, but when quads are left over, HAL might put couples with a guarantee into a quad.

Yes, that happens. They distribute cabin inventory to the various combinations to avoid double booking a cabin. I saw it on my winter cruise which had a B2B with the one before it and a B2B with the one after it. Different cabins were available on the different cruises--18 day B2B, 11 day (my cruise, the middle child), 18-day B2B. The 11-day showed less availability going back to the summer, and HAL did not shift any cabins from the longer cruises to the shorter one.

Ironically, I got the message when I clicked on this thread! 🙄

That's surprisingly late. Hotel group blocks usually have a 60-day release date.

Could be that the third party was holding cabins and HAL's own inventory was gone but the third party's was still under their control.

Where are your hotel arrangements being changed to accommodate the Eurodam passengers? Are you being "walked" to a different hotel? And were the excursions part of the hotel package?

Where will you be boarding? Not all ports honor the priority and in some cases it seems to be the whim of the person you ask. In Southampton, friends in a lower WC level were able to go through priority with us. In NYC, they weren't.

Final payment for my Caribbean cruise was yesterday. Last week, the 11-day cruise and one of the longer B2Bs that included it were sold out. The other B2B had a few insides and one Neptune. This morning, my cruise has plenty of cabins in the lower categories--inside, OV, veranda. No suites. So how much of this is due to agencies having to release blocks they've held? Can an agency hold cabins as late as final payment, or must they release the block earlier than that? And how much of this is due to people with $1 deposits deciding to let it go? I hate those $1 sales. People book cabins thinking, maybe I'll go, maybe not. What the hell, it's only $1. Not much risk. But for people who genuinely intend to sail, the choice of cabins is reduced. For my cruise, there were just a handful of verandah cabins available since summer. Now there are plenty.

From what I can find online (and there isn't much) the Holland America Line Foundation is their charitable arm that collects and passes on the "On Deck for a Cause" donations. So the money you don't get refunded will go to a worthy cause. At least, I hope so.