mahdnc

This might be worth reading as it was just discussed during the past few days:

The guides are free to set the price for their tour through TBL. When they get paid for doing the tour, TBL keeps 30%.

Then I worded it poorly. If I buy a tour from a guide through TBL for $500. The guide receives $350 (70%). It also means that I could likely buy that tour for $350 if I hired the guide directly and did not go through TBL. It depends on how the guide decides to price things.

So maybe that's why drug dealers don't do customer surveys either! I mean that is what I've heard.....

That's a good choice as well and we have booked through them for our Dec Asia cruise/Africa trip and we have booked a couple TBLs for next year's Trans-Pacific sailing. Many of the private guides that we have hired outside of TBL do not require any up front payment. TBL charges the guide 30% so some/all of that fee is passed on to the customer (versus hiring the same guide outside of TBL) although you have pointed out what that buys you.

I have to correct myself. This is what is currently posted on Celebrity's website (if you tap or click on the screenshot, it becomes much more readable): And that is why you got 30 CC points because that was the conversion formula for what 1 sailing credit was worth = 30 Club Points.

I would think they would be wearing visors!

When we were hiring babysitters through Guest Relations, the eligible sitters were limited to Celebrity crew and it did not include subcontracted employees like the ones that worked in the spa/salon or casino which is why we made independent arrangements with those people on occasion. I wonder if that limitation is still true today.

Environment may be stricter now but when our kids were really little 25 years ago, occasionally we independently hired salon/spa employees to babysit the kids in our cabin when we were unable to get a sitter through Guest Relations..

I have three things-got-exciting-but-we-didn't-miss-our-ship stories. 1. Horizon, Mar 29 2005, Puerto Limon (cannot remember the port times) My family of 4 including our two young children decided to hire a taxi driver to take us to a zip line that was about 40 minutes away from port. In the middle of the activity, my wife crashed into a zipline platform and severely gashed her lower leg that would later require two layers of sutures. It was late in the afternoon at the time. While my wife was being worked on by the guides to stop the bleeding on the zipline platform, I was already thinking about what we would have to do if we missed the ship (Roatan, Honduras was the next port of call). Our ziplining was aborted because of the accident but we were out in the middle of no where in the Costa Rican jungle and couldn't just get back to the parking lot in a couple minutes. It would take several ziplines to get back near the parking lot (my wife had to ride in tandem with one of the guides). It was a slow process partly because of the kids. We finally got back to the parking lot where our taxi was waiting. The driver drive through downtown Puerto Limon like we were in the French Connection movie. We ran/hobbled down the pier just before the gangway was taken up. Whew. 2. Constellation, Oct 23 2022, Toulon France (9:30am - 5:00pm) We (party of 4) hired a private driver/guide to take us to Aix-en-Provence which is about an hour away from the pier in Toulon. In the early afternoon on our way to Cassis, the passenger rear tire on our van blew out while we were on a going at a high rate of speed on the highway in the middle of nowhere. Fortunately the driver was able to control the van and pull it over to the shoulder. Amazingly, the driver did not know how to change a tire and neither one of us in our party were really able to help him (that is a long story in of itself). It probably was around 2pm and so we had time BUT the driver (after consulting YouTube) could not physically change out the tire and we were stranded. Our driver tried to call for a taxi, but they were over an hour away. Uber was over an hour away as well. We were lucky: a good Samaritan stopped to help us and he got the tire changed. We were probably stranded by the road side for at least an hour and by the time we were back on the road, we were all frazzled. We asked the driver to take us directly back to the ship because we were just done. We got back with an hour to spare. By the way, the blown tire was horribly bald and was not roadworthy. 3. Solstice, Dec 28 2023, Phu My, Vietnam (7:00am - 5:00pm) We had just concluded a very nice private tour of Ho Chi Minh City and I was walking on the gangway to board Solstice at about 4pm when my phone rang. One of the members in our roll call was on their private tour and they were stuck in a massive traffic jam about 7 km away from the pier. The pier is 1.3 hours away from Ho Chi Minh City by car, so it could have been worse. This person asked me to let the ship know about their situation which I did. Fortunately they were able to make it back to the ship 20 minutes before it was scheduled to leave at 5pm. As it turned out, Solstice did not leave the pier until close to 7pm because a large number of Celebrity shore excursion buses (like around 20 of them!) were extremely late getting back to the ship.

Your Med cruse is a good opportunity to make use private tours at your ports. You will have less people with you. The tour can be tailored to what you want to see. The tour will be more time efficient allowing you to cover more sights. And your tour may be cheaper than doing it through Celebrity depending on your group size.. My advice is to check out the Europe Ports of Call forum (link) to ask/get specific recommendations for guide/drivers. We used RomeCabs when our ship stopped at Civitavecchia and were pretty pleased. But there are other great ones out there. My preference is to try to book with the guides directly to avoid paying the markup associated with ToursByLocals and Viator. When we stayed in Rome before our transatlantic cruise in Nov 2022, we hired a private guide with an archeology education and work resume' to tour my wife and I through the Roman Forum and Ostia Antica because we had more time.

No quiz at the end.

Of course, Horizon is gone now. Scrapped,

40 minutes according to Harris!

Watching.....

Yes, it was waaay back. Like around 2000 and earlier.

Also cabin categories didn't matter either (early on). So 3 night cruise with inside cabin = 7 night cruise in a Penthouse Suite

A couple of articles about the potential issues with full face snorkel: https://thesnorkelstore.com/full-face-snorkel-masks-maui-hawaii/ https://www.businessinsider.com/full-face-snorkel-masks-heres-why-they-could-be-dangerous-2023-4

Actually the number of Club Points possible for those 2 years were 40 (2022) and 19 (2023). The number of opportunities to earn Club Points for those 2 years were 17 (2022) and 7 (2023). I did receive an email for all 24 opportunities in those two years.

On our Xpedition sailing in November, full face snorkel masks were “not recommended”. Here is the orientation slide:

Well, I guess you are a Zenith to me.

You Zeniths get all the breaks!

I have updated the summary statistics. Number of PUP Activities For Each Calendar Year Since Inception Club Points from PUP Activity Broken Down By Year & By Activity Type

News flash: It's now in my total. I got my "one".

Not in my total yet, but I still claim "first"!