baz48

Thank you all.  On our very first cruise back in 1997 the ship's emergency alarm rang while we were at breakfast on the second full day.  We did return to our cabin to get our life vests and medicines and reported to our muster station.  Of course, it was obvious we would be able to do that.  It was a smaller ship and easy to get back to the cabin.  If water was coming in, that would be a different situation!  In our case, it was an engine fire and no one was hurt, but the ship was dead at sea for 12 hours.  We were towed into Victoria that night.

My husband would rather have access to the life vest, if possible, than rely on there being enough at the muster station or waiting for someone to hand them out.  

I can't find this topic addressed in this forum.  Are life vests provided in the cabin on Regent ships?  We've always had them in the cabin until our recent Viking Ocean cruise where they were not.  

We're doing the World Cruise on Regent in 2020.  Our travel agent checked with them and was told we should allow for 12-15 blank pages.   My current passport has fewer than that, so I will get a new one (with 52 pages)  even though it it doesn't expire until 2027.  Oh well.  I'd rather be safe than sorry later.

For those of you who bought a rotating globe in the gift shop, how did you get it home?  The sales clerk said it has some liquid in it so it might be a problem for carryon bags with TSA.  I don't want to put it in checked luggage if I don't have to.

Thanks.

Does anyone know the cost to add another login? Can't find it on the website.

Are the included excursions interesting enough, or do you feel that you really need to purchase the optional excursions? If you didn't have the big onboard credits, would you still have purchased the optional excursions?

Yes, besides having to cancel for both covered and non-covered reasons, we experienced something similar. Our connection into Seattle was late, so we missed the last flight of the night home to our town. The airline said it was weather related (the delay of our incoming flight) and we were on our own. Of course we had to book a last minute hotel, and then the light bulb went off - I wonder if the cruise insurance would pay for that hotel? Yes they did!

This happened to us in Seattle also. Did you buy your flights through the cruise line? We didn't so I'm thinking they won't pay for our hotel.

I'm going to be the odd one out here, but we faced that very same decision. We are taking our family (3 cabins) to Alaska next June and there will be 3 kids ages 6-9. We opted for Royal Caribbean for a couple of reasons. The first was that it was a lot cheaper, but also because I think the RC ship (Explorer of the Seas) will have more for the kids to do. I may be wrong, since we've never sailed on RC, but we are Elite on Princess so we know the ships well and I just thought we should do RC this time.

I would still be ahead to cancel, take the $100 penalty and re book. I would save another $300.00 for the two of us.

This is exactly what we did when our price dropped $500. But beware, you can't cancel and rebook the same cabin in one phone call. We had to book the cruise again, pay the $1,000 deposit again, reserve a different cabin, and then send an email cancelling the original cruise. Fortunately our cruise agent watched for our original cabin to come available the next day or so and moved us back into that. But we could have lost the original cabin. Plus they had our first $800 deposit (net of the penalty) for another week or so until it was refunded. Such a ridiculous way to handle the situation in my opinion.

We booked a cruise direct with VO. The very next day the prices went down $250 pp. I am used to Princess who will let you rebook at the lower fare (before final payment), but got nowhere when I called VO. I tried emailing and pleading my case, but again was politely told that there was nothing they could do. So we decided it was worth it to cancel, pay the $100 pp penalty, and rebook at the lower rate since we'd ultimately save $300. This time the agent thought to ask us if we had been referred by a former cruiser, which we had, so we got the $100 pp discount for that, meaning we ended up getting the full $500 discount.

The agent couldn't just rebook the same cabin, but had to book us into a new cabin with a new $1,000 deposit, then we had to send an email cancelling the original cabin and wait for the refund on that. Fortunately, the agent kept a lookout and moved us back to the original cabin when it was returned to inventory.

This seems like a ridiculous way to handle this situation. We are taking this cruise as a test to see if we like the line as we might consider their World Cruise, but we aren't off to a good start!

I'd suggest to Princess that if the wait time for Elite laundry extends beyond 2 days, they should give us tokens to use the laundry machines for free. I agree that $6 each time you wash and dry is pricey. This small gesture might go a long way towards ameliorating the anger over long laundry wait times.

A few years ago we dined with a couple from Ft. Lauderdale who cruised quite a bit. She told us of the time they arrived at the dock for their Carnival cruise on Sunday morning only to learn it had sailed the day before! Since they were all packed and ready to go she called Carnival who said if they could get to Miami within 2 hours they could sail on a cruise leaving that afternoon. Of course, they had to pay for that one, but Carnival did give them a voucher for a future cruise (with restrictions) for their missed cruise, which was very generous I think.

We had our OBCs posted to our account within 24 hours of faxing them for our cruises next March, but I didn't get an email confirmation. I saw them on our Cruise Personalizer pages.

I also like the incremental purchase and will look into that.

Here's my current thinking. Viking wants $840 for their insurance with deposit to have the pre-existing condition waiver and the cancel for any reason coverage. But all I have at risk until 120 days before cruising is $200. Why would I pay $840 to cover $200? There is a company on insuremytrip (Nationwide) that will let us get the same insurance coverage amounts, with cancel for any reason and pre-existing condition waiver included, and we don't have to pay their premium of $895 until final payment. The big difference is that the coverage for the cancel for any reason is only 70% of the loss, so we could lose $2,400. Viking would give us the full loss in a travel voucher, but there are conditions to its use, which might be hard to meet.

My thinking is that it is probably worth it to use the Nationwide policy since it's only $55 more and understand we could lose the $2,400. We have had a change of plans in the past and cancelled booked cruises before final payment so I'd rather have that option with minimal cost upfront.

I'm having this problem with Chrome on my android tablet. Cleared cookies, history, everything. Closed browser, turned off device, restarted it all, and I still get a white screen accessing the boards. :(

Maybe you need to update the version of Chrome that you're using?

£££££££

 

 

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:D I know what the symbol is, I just can't figure out how to insert it with my laptop keyboard. It's easier with my phone!

I just posted about this in the technical forum. I couldn't get to the Boards using Chrome, but I could with Firefox. It was suggested I clear my cookies and history in Chrome. That solved the problem.

I noticed on the form that there's one column for USD, one for British Pounds (can't find the symbol) and one for AUD. However in the last column it lists 50 AUD and under that 100 USD and 250 USD. Is that a typo? Shouldn't it also be 100 AUD and 250 AUD?

If anyone has T-Mobile, they have free texting and data in over 120 countries, and phone calls are 20 cents per minute. Love this service - we used it on our 49 day cruise around South America with no problems.

We did a B2B on Divina in November. We didn't have to change cabins, so I can't speak directly to that situation on MSC. However, we had to change cabins once with Princess and they just asked us to pack up anything not hanging in the closet. They took everything to the new cabin so it was not too difficult. We didn't have to pack that carefully since it wasn't going to be for long. I'm sure MSC will tell you what to do as there are always people in your situation so they have a system.

On MSC, we did have to get off the ship in Miami and go through Customs/Immigration but it didn't take long and we were able to get back on the ship pretty quickly - maybe a couple of hours at most. If you wanted, you might be able to do a Miami tour in between so there would be no down time.

You also might check again with them to see if they don't have a cabin you could use on both cruises - perhaps cancellations or something have happened.

Last month in Le Muse a steak from Eately was on the menu. I found it not as good as the steak that Le Muse serves.

We agree with you. We were on the same cruise (Hi Sherry!) as well as the next one. We thought Eataly was OK, but the beef tournedos in Le Muse were better than our rib eye and NY steaks at Eataly, in our opinion. For our second week we didn't bother to go to a specialty restaurant since the food in Le Muse is so good.

Caroline (and Michael)

We got off the Divina on November 19 and during the cruise we found a piece of jewelry left behind in the safe of our Yacht Club cabin 15013. No idea how long it was in there because it wasn't that obvious. We turned it in to the concierge, and she registered it, but if you left something behind, you might want to contact MSC yourself.

I went to the lost and found for 6 days straight on a Princess cruise. All I was looking for was my prescription glasses. Nope. Went to all of the Lido deck bars as I was pretty certain I lost my glasses at MUTS. They all looked in their own lost stuff and didn't find them. Yep. They had their own bunch of stuff and it hadn't been turned in and consolidated with the lost and found at the purser's desk. Still, checking everywhere I could think of (a couple of times a day at each place) for 6 days straight I never got my prescription glasses back.

We had a similar experience with my husband's prescription sunglasses. Checked lost and found daily, checked in bars, etc. Finally on the last night when we were packing, he pulled his suitcase out from under the bed and out came his glasses in their case! They must have been kicked under the bed and we didn't see them in the dark because the case was black. We felt quite foolish.

The MSC website says you get 20% more data on the Surfer and Streamer packages if paid in advance, but that's the only promo I see.

We booked directly with MSC and our agent there called us with the offer. We were also in a rear facing balcony (Bella) and had purchased drink packages for both weeks. They refunded the cost of the drink packages and were able to put us into the same YC1 cabin for both weeks, so we don't have to move. We were looking forward to the aft facing balcony, a first for us, but figured this upgrade was worth the change. And, a nice bonus, our cost for the MSC insurance didn't go up.

In the YC dining room, do many people share tables? We enjoy having dinner with others and usually do the fixed seating dining at a table for 6-8, which isn't an option in YC.