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mahdnc

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Everything posted by mahdnc

  1. It's very satisfying for the system to work like it's supposed to.
  2. The table below should give you some idea for the answer to your question. In terms of Power Up Point activities, the frequency used to be once a month. However in 2023, it dropped off to about once every two months. Surveys usually are worth 1-2 Club Points while webinars are worth 5 Club Points, but sometimes just 3. That might help you figure out the answer to your question about webinar frequency.
  3. Just another data point: on our Dec 22 2023 Solstice sailing out of Singapore, the Future Cruise forms require a $100 non refundable deposit for Book Later (photo). Also Celebrity's online Book Later form has the same non-refundable language: link
  4. We brought magnets and they stuck to our cabin walls very well.
  5. My 5 points are showing, too. I feel very special right now.
  6. When you create your online account after you get on board, you are given an array of WiFi options to choose from including any complimentary loyalty club minutes that you are entitled to (240 minutes for us).
  7. You can just take screenshots of the video file and save those.
  8. While on board Reflection on Jan 17, 2019 (almost exactly 5 years ago), I booked our Asia sailing with Future Cruise Consultant Mr. Sergi Popov (Ukraine) who is pictured above. Originally it was to be a 14 night holiday cruise on Millennium sailing out of Hong Kong on Dec 20, 2020. An interesting aspect of that year's itinerary was the double overnight stay (= 3 days) at Bangkok. Since this was a booking for my family of 4, we reserved a nice FV cabin. Of course we all know that Covid hit in early 2020 which eventually cancelled all cruises (Celebrity Cruises Suspension of Sailing). We Lifted and Shifted to the 2021 holiday cruise on Solstice. When they first came out, the Lift and Shift rules were quite strict and required that the new sailing be on the same ship (or same class of ship). Since Solstice replaced Millennium for 2021, Celebrity made an exception to the "same ship" rule. However we could not get into an FV cabin because the ones on Solstice were slated to be converted into suites, so Celebrity put us into two adjoining balcony cabins so now we have two bathrooms! The new 2021 holiday sailing reduced Bangkok to a single overnight stay (2 days) and added a 5th sea day to keep it as a 14 night sailing. By the time final payment was due, we decided to exercise our option to Lift and Shift and we moved it to the 2022 holiday sailing (all Asia cruises were of course later cancelled by Celebrity). Unfortunately the 2022 holiday sailing had been chopped back to 11 nights by reducing three overnight ports to just single days each (Hong Kong, Bangkok, and Singapore). Also the sailing was reversed and we would be going from Singapore to Hong Kong. I really thought that the 2022 cruise would actually sail because things were opening up that year and cruising had re-started in a big way. In July 2022, Celebrity decided to cancel the entire Asia season because Asia (e.g. Hong Kong) was still not completely open. As a result, we were now booked on the holiday 2023 Solstice sailing. That cruise, of course, sailed although it sailed with just my wife and me because our two kids were each in serious relationships and now had jobs which meant that we no longer fit in their busy schedules.
  9. This link will take you to the current Exciting Deals flyer: link The pdf file that this link points to gets updated weekly, in other words this link should be good for next week, the week after that, etc. I like the format of the information in the pdf better than where the links in the Exciting Deals emails take you.
  10. I am looking at the thumb drive files. There is only one file on there and it is an MP4 video file. No separate photo files included.
  11. Dr. Pam, Thank you for your kind words and it is good to know that the two reviews are helping you with awesome upcoming trip. If you are flying in lay flat seats, then you should be good to go for your over-the-water flight to Hong Kong. We flew business for the first time ever during our trip back to the USA from Hong Kong. Let's just say, I now understand the attraction of business class. Like you, I also emptied out our Marriott points to book our hotels. Because we stayed there, I know from personal experience that you will be very pleased with St Regis Bangkok and JW Marriott Singapore. I have some tips for those hotels. When we were checking into the JW Marriott Singapore, I asked the front desk agent if we could get a room facing Marina Bay, she said she could do that (and we would still have the same category room) and she changed our room assignment. I was very happy with the view which includes the cruise ship pier. The Executive Lounge is amazing and spacious. I have never seen so many employees dedicated to such an area. Marina Bay Sands (left), skyscrapers from the Central Business District (center), and the cruise ship pier (in between the two) were visible from our room at JW Marriott Singapore. When we checked into the St. Regis Bangkok, among the Welcome Gift choices was free breakfast. Take the free breakfast, the food and venue were also amazing and paying for it is quite expensive! One other tip--if your room reservations are award stays--constantly check Marriott's website for price reductions (favorable changes in the number of points needed). Now that Marriott has changed to a dynamic pricing system, you should do a mock booking through your smartphone Marriott app periodically to see if the price has dropped. When I booked the JW Marriott Singapore for 5 nights, I originally paid 207,000 Bonvoy points. My records show that through pricing fluctuation, I modified our reservation 13 times including on the evening we were waiting to board our flight to Singapore. In the end, I was able to get our 5 night stay down to 177,000 points. Same thing with our 5 night booking at the Ritz Carlton Hong Kong. I originally booked our 5 night stay with a whopping 424,000 points. By the end of Nov 2023, the price slowly slid to 316,000 points. I found that the award points for our St Regis Bangkok single night stay also fluctuated (got it for 42,000 points and I used a 35,000 point certificate from our Marriott AMEX card). The nice thing is that Marriott makes it easy to modify your reservation to get the points back without having to resort to cancel/rebook. All you have to do is go the "modify your existing reservation" route which also preserves the booking number. It works best online with a desktop/laptop. The mobile apps don't allow you to get your points back through modification (or I couldn't figure out how). By the way, Grab does not work in Hong Kong, but Uber does. As far as international calling goes, we took the lazy and expensive route of adding an international plan through our existing carrier, Verizon Wireless. I don't advise that for most people since it is definitely not a cost effective solution. For us it cost $100 per person per month. Doing an e-sim with a foreign carrier is the significantly cheaper way to go, but I cannot give you the benefit of my experience there. David
  12. Hi. No problem with the questions, that's what this thread is for. I am fairly sure that the thumb drive contained the slide show only. When I get home, I will check the thumb drive just to be sure and, either way, I will let you know for sure.
  13. I think I still have my old FORTRAN card decks from college. And maybe some old punched tape paper rolls from my high school's PDP-11.....
  14. Oliver, I should have prefaced my remark by saying that having met you from our cruise, I know that you did not mean it in a mean-spirited way because I know you (and Birgit) are very nice people! I just didn't want your remark to be taken the wrong way. I am sorry to imply that you were personally demanding justification.
  15. Probably re-filled by the casino......
  16. If I may politely make a rebuttal on your behalf: I don't expect that you have to justify where you choose to go and whether it is the real Singapore or not. I know people back here in the USA (who have never been to Hong Kong or Tokyo) make a trip to those places with time allocated to solely visit Disneyland at both cities. The vice president of my employer has taken several extended land vacations to Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. He doesn't understand why I saw Vietnam by cruise ship because it seems so superficial to him.
  17. It’s also not unusual to see both ATMs “empty” towards the end of extended cruises.
  18. Yes, Constellation will have an ATM. One located at Guest Relations and one at the casino.
  19. That's why I saved the promo information. Didn't need it though.
  20. You might be pleasantly surprised. Our bonus points for our Nov Galapagos trip posted the first time around. No correcting calls needed. I also noted that the words "bonus points" appeared next to the sailing when I looked at Points History.
  21. Thanks for your review. My wife and I will be booking our first E class sailing some day soon.
  22. I was favorably impressed with Ethiopian Airlines. They appear to be a very professionally run company. It's my first time that I have flown on them, and I admit that I was apprehensive when I first booked our return flights with them about a year ago. Also in the back of my mind was the 2019 crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 outside of Addis Ababa which, along with a previous Lion Air crash, ended up famously grounding all Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft for a couple of years. The well known root cause was the aircraft's faulty stabilization software but Ethiopian Airline's flight crew performance was also faulted by investigative parties outside of the airline. So there's that. But I can only judge based on what I have seen. The whole customer experience was excellent. At no point did I feel like I was flying in a 3rd world country's airline, which I actually was. Nothing weird like seeing live caged chickens in the aircraft or tents being used as terminals. We were in a Boeing 787 aircraft with nothing broken in it that make you question their maintenance. The airport and terminal was bright and new-ish. Flight attendants were very professional. Ethiopian Airlines has an app although it could not display your boarding pass (so there's one inadequacy). Flights pretty much took off on time and arrived on time. The only significant thing that I thought was sub-par was the length of time it took to get our bags from baggage claim--about 2 hours. If you stripped all of the Ethiopian Airline's logos and hid the ethnicity of the passengers and crew, I would have mistaken the whole experience for a USA flagged airline. I realize that there are better airlines in the world than the USA carriers, but that is the standard to which I am accustomed. One measurement of an airline's quality is how they handle problems. Well, they left one of our bags back in Africa when we took off for Chicago. I filed a missing bag report at O'Hare Airport and 30 hrs later I received a telephone call from Ethiopian Airlines asking me to confirm my home address because the bag was sent to Chicago and they were going to deliver it to our house. That's pretty good (as an unnecessary side story, the most impressive lost bag experience I had was with Delta in 2016--the previous time we had a lost bag. They had a Delta agent looking for us at baggage claim in Santiago, Chile to tell me that one of our bags didn't make it on the plane--this was before I could even figure out on my own that it was lost). So I would fly with Ethiopian Airlines again, but I wouldn't necessarily seek them out first. If we were flying to Africa again, it is likely I would have to fly an African carrier if a connection was required, I would be fine with Ethiopian Airlines. On the other hand the airline you flew, Singapore Airlines, is well known for years as being one of the best run airlines in the world and they are famous for providing an awesome flying experience That is an airline that I would seek out preferentially over any USA carrier if given the opportunity.
  23. I agree although I didn't see as much of the airport as I would have liked because we were flying in and wanted to get to our hotel. Singapore's Changi Airport (SIN) consistently ranks very high and was judged to be the #1 airport in the world according to Skytrax (link). The Jewel waterfall is something you don't see every day. The shopping center attached to the airport is pretty good, too. However it was this place that really caught her eye: I am shocked that we didn't buy a dozen of their donuts. We will have to catch the butterflies next time.
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