azbirdmom

I see the new 32 day cruises as well as the newly released cruises from Galveston and LA. Had to be logged in to see them.

I'm wondering if that is only part of the issue. I've listened in on some of the Princess marketing webinars with TAs and on more than one occasion the Princess folks were urging TAs to book their clients on San Diego cruises since there was lots of availability. So maybe demand wasn't enough to keep these early cruises. There are still more later cruises from San Diego so we shall see,

The cabin size is about the same but the Riviera balcony is much wider than the one on Aloha deck. I'd go with the one on Riviera.

Actually the description says that you transfer to another boat and land on the sand. We've been all over the Caribbean but have never been to Tortola so I've been looking at excursions and this does look interesting. https://www.princess.com/cruise-excursions/tortola-british-virgin-islands-excursions/jost-van-dyke-island-beach-break-and-scenic-cruise?portCode=TOV&portDate=12132022

I somehow missed that there was another slide on Friday that did damage to one of the shipping crates used to protect pedestrians. https://thepointsguy.com/news/skagway-port-rockslides/

Very interesting. I just checked the port schedule and 4 ships are supposed to be in port with the Royal at the closed dock. Hope you report back to let us know which ships are in port as it does seem like another ship cancelled their port stop in Skagway for this to happen.

We paid less than $20 for the two of us in early June but then an almost tropical storm had just blown through and Fort Lauderdale had tons of flooding. It was closer to $15 in February. So it will vary a little but still less than the cost of a transfer and so much easier to not have to wait.

Yes there are plenty! We've used them twice this year so far to get to FLL and both times were were several ships in port but still we were able to get in a taxi immediately after walking up to the taxi area.

Skagway News only published the docks for cruise through August 14th and your cruise is August 17th so my response related to the schedule for the date you would actually be in Skagway. And yes, it does appear that either way you SHOULD make it.

That was posted by The Skagway News on their FB page. The only other public info is here and hasn't been updated since June 30th. On your sailing it is likely that you'll either be at RRA (and tender) or move to the open ORE dock. There's only 3 ships in port so they can do some maneuvering, as long as RRA remains viable!

Good thing they closed that dock. This just happened a couple of hours ago. There's YouTube videos out there too.

Actually Future Cruise Credits can be used for a few things, this is from the Princess website: https://www.princess.com/plan/fcc-onboard-cruise-credits/

Our cruise departed on July 17th and the casino had a final payment date of July 10th which was a Sunday. On July 11th I got a Booking Confirmation showing that the entire amount was paid in full so the casino seemed to pay their portion 6 days prior to our cruise. Agree with you that this process can create headaches, especially the occasional final payment notices that we periodically received and were advised to ignore. Sometime in me isn't wired to ignore final payment notices....

Per the Skagway News FB page on 8/13, the Grand will dock at RRA : UPDATED SHIP SCHEDULE THROUGH 8/14 8/1 Millennium BRD Silver Shadow ORE Ovation RRA 8/2 Solstice RRA Crown P BRD Koningsdam ORE 8/3 Noordam BRD Radiance ORE Encore RRA 8/4 Nieuw A BRD Serenade ORE Discovery P RRA/Tendering 8/5 Jewel BRD 8/6 Zuiderdam BRD Viking Orion ORE 8/7 Grand P BRD Silver Shadow ORE SS Mariner RRA 8/8 Ovation RRA Silver Muse BRD Radiance ORE 8/9 Solstice RRA Crown P BRD Koningsdam ORE 8/10 Nieuw A BRD Millennium ORE Encore RRA 8/11 Noordam BRD Wonder ORE Quantum RRA 8/12 Ruby P BRD Carnival M RRA/Tendering Jewel ORE 8/13 Grand P RRA Zuiderdam BRD Carnival S ORE 8/14 SS Mariner BRD Silver Muse ORE Regatta RRA

The first line on the invoice is the total amount that Princess is charging for the mini suite. Since you are paying $500, the difference between the amount shown and what you've paid is what the casino will pay a couple of days before the cruise. You should have already paid the $500 upgrade fee along with port fees and the $200 deposit. Unless you decide to add insurance, EZAir or transfers to the booking, you are paid in full and the rest will be paid by the casino. I've included a screenshot of what the invoice looked like right after I booked a cruise that I've just returned from. If your's looks similar to this and if the Total Amount Received equals what you've paid you should be fine. And an important tip - only deal with the casino reservations number for any changes or additions to the reservation or you may risk inadvertently cancelling the booking. Lots of horror stories on CC about this (including mine).

With all of the other problems that the Crown Princess has been experiencing they at least have been scheduled for the Broadway dock with isn't affected by the closure. One less thing for those on the Crown to stress over.

The last time we used EZAir was for a May cruise and it appeared fairly quick, maybe a couple of hours. I had problems with that one as the flights shown weren't the same as were on the United website so I had to call. They finally fixed it to get the flights in sync and ticketed it at around the 30 day mark.

You can see this on the Travel Summary that you can generate through the Cruise Personalizer on the Princess website. There's a line for ticket numbers in the section that shows your flights. If the space is blank it hasn't been ticketed and if it has been, you'll see the ticket number.

For those who have been trying to find Live Chat using Chrome, I recall that it didn't appear for me until I cleared cookies. I hadn't done that for a very long time and after I did the Chat option appeared as did the newer interface for booking a cruise.

I think you'll make it to Skagway. On August 18th there isn't a ship scheduled to be in the aft position at the railroad dock so I think they will simply shift the Discovery from forward to aft. You'll likely have to tender off but you should be able to enjoy Skagway on your cruise.

Very interesting. And I think the following answers why we haven't heard anything more about the first Sphere class ship: Up until the pandemic, Carnival Corporation and its major rivals such as Royal Caribbean Group had long pursued a strategy of ambitious growth that involved ordering new ships almost as fast as they could be built. The arrival of new ships at major brands, often with new features, seemed to be always around the corner, and it drove both excitement and bookings among cruising fans. It was at the core of the rapid expansion of the industry. But since the pandemic began, such orders have been on pause, and restarting them at Carnival Corporation carries new risks given the company’s high debt level. When asked whether ship orders could soon resume, Weinstein is noncommittal. He notes that the company is determined to get its debt level down and rebuild the “fortress balance sheet” that it once had. To do that, the company will have to divert a significant chunk of any profits it generates in the coming years to paying down debt, not buying more ships. Any ship orders that are to come are likely to be for delivery several years into the future, he suggests. “I will say that our order book is set for the next few years … [If] everything works out the way we hope, we’ll have the opportunity to pay down debt in a meaningful way [in the coming years],” he says. “That doesn’t preclude us from doing what we think is appropriate in the growth profile … [But] we’d be looking at ships [scheduled to arrive] in four, five, six, seven years down the line.” The good news for cruising fans who love new ships is that several of Carnival Corporation’s biggest brands including Carnival and Princess still have new ships on the way — vessels that were ordered before the pandemic began. But the pipeline of new ships on order for Carnival Corporation brands is quickly running dry. The company has just seven ships on order across its nine brands, all but two of which will arrive by the end of next year.

This is where it is on my laptop using a Chrome browser (tried to circle in yellow highlight but with the dark background it doesn't work well)

A gentleman was so unhappy with the the CDC's relaxation of the Covid rules for cruise lines that he is sharing Covid data reported for each ship. Some of the charts are tough to decipher but if you're interested in seeing what the numbers are on each ship, here's the source https://observablehq.com/@andy-bloch/andys-cdc-cruise-ship-covid-outbreak-tracker

We boarded in Seattle two weeks ago and I did fill out the trip information within 72 hours of boarding. Very easy. You do need to indicate Victoria as the Canadian port and the location is something like Ogden Pier 1 & 2. There's a lot of other dropdowns that appear but having been there before I knew that was the right one. We did show it to our steward and he said he just checked us off the list. It's all electronic so other than being asked at check in if we had completed ArriveCan, we didn't have to show it to anyone else.

Would have been more appropriate to have toilet flushes trigger prize entries. A win is if the darned thing works!