mahdnc

Yes, ignore the stateroom name for your booking just as I am for mine. As long as your cabin is 7288, you are good. If you haven't discovered this yet, at the top of the Celebrity Cruises Cruise Critic Forum are a few pinned threads that collect individual cabin reviews along with a summarizing spreadsheet. Here is a link to the Millennium class ship spreadsheet. 7288 has been reviewed. They refer to the nice large balcony.

Ignore the stock photo that accompanies the stateroom description. They are often incorrect. If you have 7288, then your cabin has a balcony and a nice one at that! For example, here is the incorrect stock photo that Celebrity uses for the reservation I have for a balcony cabin on Constellation: and here is the actual balcony of the same cabin (Infinity):

As for your first question, here is the link to the Captains Club brochure with a screenshot of the relevant language:

Depends on the airline on whether you can select seats immediately after booking the flight thru FBC. From personal experience, I can say that United does and I called FBC to do it as it was not available to do it thru my MileagePlus account. I have read posts that Air Canada does not.

3 Club Points were just added to my CC account.

Your kids should not feel uncomfortable. We certainly never felt it when we took our kids. Sailing in August means that there should be families aboard. Celebrity runs a good kids program--excellent counselors and good facilities. By the time our kids turned 17, they weren't interested in doing the structured programs of the kids club as they were too cool for that.

No, I have not experienced this. I know a little while back changes were made where you have to sign in more regularly (esp if you are switching devices), but I have not been forced to change my password.

Here is the list of 870 sailings that the above promotion applies to: link

Here is the newest promotion coming out tomorrow: link

Celebrity is currently running a save-$500-on-flights promotion on many sailings. They also give you the advantage of not having to purchase the tickets until the final payment for the cruise is due which is nice in case you have to cancel the cruise. I have read at least two CC-ers who mentioned that they could not get their Air Canada seats assigned at the time of booking their air thru FBC. I think the seats get assigned when the tickets are actually purchased and issued. FBC's fine print says that this is a possibility depending on the airline. There are several recent threads that document problems with FBC especially when the airline cancels your flight and/or reschedules you on a less favorable set of flights after you original tickets have been issued. You have to sort it out with FBC which requires a phone call (and long wait times) and even then FBC will tell you that they have to file a change request with the airline which can take up to 30 days (!).

Yes, that closet and make-up area is the former 2nd bedroom. From your photos, it looks like they added access from MBR which makes total sense, but the original bedroom door was retained (visible in the mirror in the 1st photo) which I didn't expect.

I completely agree with @the penguins. For what you want to do, you will be far better off shopping for a private tour yourself. Toursbylocals is a good place to start. You will find it to be much cheaper as Celebrity will hire a local company to do your private tour and then add their considerable markup. Shopping for a private guide on your own gives you more control over the choice of guide.

ok

Yes, you can.

I was keying off the word "meant" in your post. You are hoping what he does. Again, no one is saying that Celebrity is not at fault here....

None of us disagree with that. It's the response and word choice. I think you are overly generous with your interpretation of "beat up". Just to make sure that I am not ignorant of the potential meaning of those two words, I did a quick look up in urban dictionary, and none of them seem to fit with your thoughts (the second meaning is interesting although I will not say that to my wife).

I remember reading your post on another thread not too long ago. Although not based on any relevant experience I have with FBC, I am surprised that they still have left you hanging. I hope things work out for you and that you don't have to resort to the actions that FBC suggested. We have booked with FBC for our upcoming Rome to Tampa TA. It's the first time that we have used them and even if things go without a hitch for us, I don't know if I will use them again after reading about other people's experiences such as yours. One of the things that worry me is that I think Celebrity will continue to offer attractive promotional discounts on FBC airfare in an attempt to minimize damage to their cruise fare structure. Obviously all of us would rather see discounts applied directly to the cruise price.

That is disappointing. Very disappointing. I wouldn't take it out on Guest Services nor the Captains Club host.

I saw that, too. As you probably know, that date itself is misleading for you and I as it doesn't represent a true joining date. Cruise Critic migrated to a new community platform in Apr/May 2000. Our "join dates" and post counts in the old platform did not transfer over. I think many of us that were active on the old platform have different joining dates in today's system because you had to manually re-register (it wasn't automatic when the new system went live). If you were a Cruise Critic member in the old platform and had a minimum of 5,000 credited posts , you were given the member title of "Charter Member - 5,000+ Club" in the new platform. But I think that is the extent of the recognition for having participated in the old Cruise Critic system. Unfortunately this is where the late @dkjretired would normally chime in and add more information to this story.

I am totally looking forward to that when we take our first TA this fall--six time changes as we sail from Civitavecchia to Tampa. As a bonus, we also gain an hour during our last night aboard Constellation because Daylight Savings Time ends (and then we gain another hour when we fly home to Chicago). I should be well-rested when I get home which is a good thing since I go to work the next day.

For this weekend (starting tomorrow), the current promotion will have its OBC bonus raised from "up to $200" to "up to $250": link

Yes. Here is a Celebrity chart showing the amenities for each stateroom and suite class across the fleet. The Horizon Suite is listed in column AE (note that the chart acknowledges that it is only on Silhouette). When I imported Celebrity's Excel table into Google Sheets, the " ✓" in the chart ended up getting converted into a "ü" which I haven't got around to correcting.

My response is similar to Ruth's. All things being equal, I feel Reflection is a better ship than Constellation for itineraries where there are a bunch of sea days--bigger ship means more venues, restaurants, etc. However we booked Constellation for our first TA in October because we liked the itinerary length and ports better.

So if you make an even money bet with a $10 OBC chip and win, are you saying you get paid $20 in real chips and you retain the OBC chip?

That is a shame. You are right, that the FV would really need to be gutted so a fresh layout could be done.