Stevio

Stevio - no doubt my hubby will be in the casino as well.

Lucie14, tell hubby to give the casino a miss for the first couple of days so that Mrs Stevio & I can fill it up ready for him. :D

Just had a look after reading your post and on the website the wording is UPTO £75 off SELECTED cruises and typically doesnt include the one we want to do.:(

Offer now showing £75 for all cruises between 1st November 2015 and 31st October 2016. You would be needing a short notice cruise for it not to apply now.

Please restrict your 'cruises to come' graphics to only 2 wide. Any more and the whole topic has all the posts wider than my screen. This applies to images as well, actually even worse for them because you get some enormous images. This is a cruise critic 'feature' which autosizes the topic width according to the widest content. We don't all have wide screens, some of us still use 1280x1024 :mad:

Innit funny how my main PC with 22" screen gets the same trouble yet my little 7" android on the same web version page shows the countdown clocks all neatly piled up on top of each other.... Must be a browser thing :confused:

Don't torture yourselves. I booked a week on Thomson a Spirit, cruise only from Malaga for October 2016 and it's just gone down £75pp. I've got what we want with a drinks package and we'll make sure we get our monies worth. Just enjoy

 

Glyn

No worries. I still think the current base price (£700pp) for an eight day all inclusive cruise is a cracking price... It is odd though that Thomson haven't stuck to their tradition of hiking the prices up just before offering a discount code :eek:

I like to torture myself and have just seen this and with the cruise that we have booked it is still free all inclusive as well. Just in case anyone has been waiting for specials.

You are not the only one to torture yourself & check up on already booked prices... Not content with the £50 off offer of a couple of weeks ago, they now have that near record breaking £75 off.. :mad:

Never mind, swings & roundabouts as my next NCL cruise has shot up by a few hundred (they now have a "free" drinks offer that "costs" more than we would ever pay for drinks). :)

Anyhow, will see you aboard the Maj' next April... I will be the one trying to win back the £75 in the casino ;)

probably sold herself a last minute bargain:D

Hadn't thought of that...:eek:

Last April on my Majesty cruise, I had done my homework and pre checked all the prices of any future cruise I would be interested in to see if there would be a bargain price offered on board. On the first sea day, Mrs Stevio & myself went down to the reception armed with all the printouts of the prices and ready to haggle... Only to be told that the future cruise lady was on holiday so there would be no bookings that week . :o

Well done Stevio that's a good tip. It must have been your £42 on my print out as I had two when only one was required for the selected cabin

Cannot claim credit for using the contact us link. I seem to remember ridiculing the idea when Mrs Stevio sent off details, assuming it would take 6 weeks for an automated irrelevant response.

One thing though, we also seem to be lucky in that our ATOL certs are the old fashioned one page variety. :)

Well despite being given the information below a couple of days ago a revised confirmation arrived by email this morning

We too have had all the fun of the new booking system. All went ok until we booked the cabin on the phone, which went as normal until told we would get E Mail confirmation.... Which didn't arrive, and so was later told they now come by post.... Over the next few days we received a myriad of amended confirmations & new booking references together with a new ATOL certificate with each one. We received a couple by post and at least three by E mail. But each one came with slightly more degraded information such as address spellings & £42 still outstanding (which it wasn't) etc. All a bit worrying but with the cruise not until next April, no cause to panic.

Now credit where its due, Mrs Stevio fed up of the 10p per min phone charges put all the details that she wanted to see corrected on to the "contact us" link from the Thomson site & within a couple of days received another amended booking confirmation with all spellings corrected, payments listed etc. including the booked cabin number. It was such a joy to think that someone at Thomsons actually read our mail & handled it efficiently.... Well pleased :) If not a little shocked :eek:

The last minute deal is traditionally the way to go to bag a bargain at Thomsons. Unfortunately having to fit cruises into my annual leave means that I never have the nerve to leave it late enough for the big price cuts... However, unusually, this time I have already booked Majesty's 8 night Iberian Adventure for April 2016 as the current £700pp for flights & AI seemed a fair deal to me. :)

Well done Linda. Your method sounds too stressful for me, but isn't it nice to have that all booked up feeling.:)

Funnily enough today we received Two separate Thomson old style booking confirmations by post, and two new style E-mail booking confirmations with the new and improved reference number containing wrongly spelt addresses etc. Still plenty of time to sort it out etc. I have made the happy discovery that if you take a page or so from each of the confirmations it may add up to one correct one.;) Anyone want to buy one of my many spare ATOL certificates. :D

Anyhow well done Linda, and you may still have all the fun of the new system multiple confirmation mails to come. :D

Prices always used to be lower on Tuesday, wednesday and Thursdays....don't know if that is still the case....seemed to go up at weekends!

Very true, you would normally book on a Friday before the weekend price hikes.

Which reminds me...

Of course if the cruise has gone up again by tomorrow, it's back to the drawing board :rolleyes:

 

Nearly midnight, I shall check and print off the price ;)

How did the September cruise booking go today Linda, or have you decided to gamble on a further price cut?

Cor look at me double quoting and stuff, does it notice that I have the day off & its too hot outside to paint the shed?

:( but I don't want to book online and then find only L shaped cabins left. Dilemma!

 

 

Know what you mean about booking on-line being a bit of a cabin lottery Linda….. Here is my cabin booking review from last Friday… Booked the Majesty for next April 2016 & on phoning to book a cabin was told by the nice man that all my list of first choice inside plus had gone already… Don’t believe them really, I think this far out they save the 4 berth cabins with extra storage for families. Fair enough but they make you call out the first half a dozen numbers before they give you a random list of the numbers that they are prepared to sell to you, leaving us to scrabble about with the deck plans to find if they want to put you above the night club.… The next hurdle is that the system is “very slow today”. I must just be unlucky as all our bookings have been on a very slow day. In fact on this occasion it cost £2 odd on the 10p per min call rate where the nice man said he would be sending the confirmation e-mail straight away… After a wait of half a day Mrs Stevio called back to ask where the e-mail had gone and was told by the nice lady that the earlier nice man had got it all wrong & that while introducing the new booking system they no longer send E-mails ….. Then she said she could see the money had been taken but there was no indication of which room had been booked so she had to re book the originally booked room again, the confirmation of which will be sent by post. We were well relieved (but at a further cost of £4 odd for phone call).

So to sum up, it has cost me a £42 booking fee & £7.64 in call charges to secure a room I did not want in the first place. :o

I would rather they got rid of the Dream ;)

The motion to get rid of the Dream and keep the Majesty for a few more years is seconded.... :D

The bear was in the shop on the Majesty a couple of weeks ago, but the wife pulled me away before I could find the price.

Have just booked the Majesty and received confirmation email. It has a section about 'online check in' ............ I have never done this before, just always arrived at desk on the day with e-ticket. So question is, Do I have to check in online ????? Your wise knowledge is much appreciated. Thank you.

I think you do nowadays as they want you to print your own boarding passes.

Someone much wiser will be along soon. However if you are without a printer I guess a Thomson TA would be able to help.

What I want to know is how does my printer always know it has an important document to print just before it clogs up? :confused:

Nice report Stevio I agree about the safe but don't forget if you haven't paid for it you are not insured and they can override it and remove your items it did happen to one of our fellow passengers so just be careful :rolleyes:

I had not considered that. I still think that you would have an argument for not knowing about the safe charge & just follow the instructions stuck to the door that has no mention of a charge for using this safe... However Mrs Stevio would have no truck with any such shenanigans & would pay up front every time.

The Thomson safe charges just get to me since April 2013 when on the Dream (oops mentioned it again). we had a digital safe that regularly got stuck shut since day 1 & was opened for us by just about everyone from the uniformed safe man through to the steward & the bag dropper... it just rankled a bit that it seemed everyone could get into a safe that I had paid for except me. :mad::D

Great review Stevio :) Glad you enjoyed the Maj and you had the added attraction of a hot flushing loo - ooh er missus!

 

Don't mention the Dream April 2013 :eek::D

 

We had 5 towel animals last time on the Majesty :)

 

I can assure you that P&O staff are very friendly. They are mostly Indian and lovely. Only one towel animal on Oceana and that was on the day before the questionaire arrived - hmmm:rolleyes:

Oops sorry, forgot about not mentioning the D****.

I think our mainly Ukrainian cabin staff were rushed off their feet. The inside corridor I was on did not have its own steward, and so the line of 8 cabins were divided amongst three covering teams taken from other sections of deck 4 so I was lucky to see any towel animals. It led to the odd anomaly such as no choccies on pillow on first night, with a nock on the cabin door the next day with the two chocs from the night before & an apology.

No different service prior to the questionnaire, but when we gave a tip the day before departure, our two new toilet rolls were put to the back of the shelf and a third new much better quality thicker & softer one was put on the holder... I may tip earlier next time... Funnily enough I think the same decent loo roll for tip manoeuvre happened last time on the Thomson Dream. Oops sorry said it again.

Have arrived back from a one week “Colourful Coasts” cruise and I now have a new favourite Thomson’s ship in the Majesty.

Following the tradition of a review preview on the cruises threads here is a copy. Studying CC, our experience of this ship is just about the opposite to most of the common points made by others in the review section, & thus will only serve to confuse the new cruiser.:confused: However here is a brief rundown of what I found as opposed to what I had read both good and bad….

“Really tiny cabins” ….. Inside plus 4 birth deck 4 had bed made up as double & we could actually walk round both sides of the bed & with both a double & a single wardrobe with a total of twelve draws this cabin had more storage space than anything I have seen since Ocean Village 2. Mind you I would steer clear of any standard cabin either inside or out as they did look small, & I would have been heartbroken to have paid extra to “upgrade” to a standard outside much smaller cabin.

“Everything spotlessly clean”… Cleanliness good in public areas, but in the cabin have seen less dust on a building site. You could write your name in it under the TV. I foolishly put a folded pair of dark trousers on the top shelf inside the single wardrobe & they came down with one side covered in a prefect thick layer of light grey fluff from contact with the shelf. Elsewhere, thick white dust on the skirting & dust bunnies all round edges of carpet.:rolleyes:

“Serviceable bathroom”… Bit of fun here. Virtually no bathroom storage apart from the iffy looking shelf under the sink below the iffier looking pipe work. Generally resorted to toiletry bags that can be stored in one of the many cabin draws, and flannels hanging on the shower washing line. There were the remains of a long extinct hair dryer on the wall (working replacement in dressing table draw) & the odd blown tile with black mould to shower floor edges. On arrival could not get any cold water from bathroom tap, which was reported & presumably rectified while we were out & cold water working by evening. Same problem of no cold water following morning that was self rectified by leaving on cold & running a few minutes. Same problem intermittent for most of week until day 5 when I was alerted by the steam, to the lavatory flushing with Hot water. Now the hot water backing up the cold system did not seem to be right to me but at least we could speed up the arrival of cold at the tap with the assistance of a couple of flushes, although by now teeth are being brushed with bottled water just in case. Found at least one other couple on deck four with same problem. On the third day the shower drain backed up flooding the whole bathroom floor but no damage done to the wet room style facility and the waters subsided within minutes. Shower itself was normally rock solid in both temperature & good flow. The last day was the problem day. Wife luckily managed a not too hot shower and then calls out that the loo was dry & no water to tap or shower. Several calls were greeted by an annoyingly "surprised to hear of any problem" receptionist promising urgent plumber attention. At breakfast found a small percentage of passengers had not yet showered with same lack of water & with promises of complimentary cabins to families. They had run out of complimentary cabins for myself but I managed to get repairs & to obtain at least a cool shower by holding the room to ransom in a “I want a shower or you’re not getting the room back” standoff. Supposed to have vacated by 9 but we were eventually out showered after 10. No idea what the earlier flight or excursion before flight people did without water, but the problem seemed to only affect only a few of the central cabins of decks 3 & 4. :eek:

“Very poor choice of food” … Mainly ate in San Marco Buffet & for lunch on the last day there was chicken, beef, pork & two types of fish. I do not think it possible to have a greater choice within the limits of serving space available. This food was up to Island Escape standard (that’s a good thing) in fact I think Majesty had the edge on puddings. Most unusually they had a good supply of both hot & cold plates available & food temperatures were good. They were let down a little with their vegetable selection which was normally a single tray labelled “seasonal vegetables” which consisted of micro diced carrot & peas in season every day, mange tout (big old stringy pea shacks) in season for three days, French beans one day and drum roll… Brussels sprouts for two days. I am guessing that the “seasons” in question are the sell by dates on the catering cans in the galley but the results were acceptable (apart from the old pea shacks). Cabbages ,parsnips & Swedes etc did not seem to be ever in season at the buffet but that suited me fine. The other minor quibble was with their hot puddings with custard which mainly turned out to be the same sponge containing a micro amount of something different every day. So a portion of dried fruit sponge was found to contain a single raisin, but no doubt someone else had all the fruit and no sponge. Rest of puddings consisted of a wider range of pastries & fancies to the highest standards I have seen on a ship. (NCL often look fantastic but taste of bland nothingness.) Soft scoop ice cream in various flavours also available on a couple of evenings. :)

“Very friendly staff”… It wasn’t just me that noticed it, most of the Eastern European staff, while polite, just did not seem happy to be there. No problem with that, for their money & workload neither would I. But if Thomson staff are that much friendlier than P&O, then the P&O must be verging on downright hostile.

“Very Expensive Excursions”… I thought they were OK. I make the same trips on NCL about 10% more expensive. We also booked online in advance and got them a bit cheaper still, for example a £64 per couple excursion was £70 to purchase on the ship. That particular tour was La Palma Out & About which was cancelled. However refund for the trip was back in the bank within 2 days as opposed to previous Island Escape cancelled tour which took a three week investigation to regain cash so good work there.

“Outrage at £15 for a safe”… OK I was silly enough to pay for the safe when registering to board the ship where they give you a bit of paper to take to reception who would then issue you with a code to unlock the safe & follow the instructions to set own code… However the safe was already unlocked so one could have just followed the instructions on the safe and used it for free… Tip for future cruise, see if safe is unlocked before you pay. More annoyingly I had read this on here somewhere before but forgot. (Just for fun there are differing instructions on the cupboard door to the ones on the safe door but they both work). :o

So reading through the review above tends to make it sound like a cruise from hell, but it certainly wasn’t (that was the Dream April 2013). Outstanding food, nice ship, good well run casino (due to Roberto the casino technician) with 5 tables & 60 slots, a good sized cabin with generally good if a little small on suite equipped with an intermittent hot water loo flush that no doubt other cruise lines would charge more for. I can handle the cabin dust bunnies especially as it made up for the poor showing of only a single towel animal for the week.

If I can’t get a good deal on NCL we will definitely be back for more of the Majesty.:D

The link shows deck plans for Discovery:

 

 

Casino royal is now casino and bar with roulette plus 3 card tables and some slots, plus additional seating etc.

 

 

 

Roulette plus 3 card tables :mad: .... Just got off the Majesty & even she currently has a roulette with four other tables & 60 slots... Cannot work out the advantage to Thomson of all this "additional seating" when they could put this seating in front of a slot machine so that people like myself could subsidise the ticket price for everyone else.:rolleyes:

Yes, big hug from East London... Remember to take care of yourself during this stressful time. Mrs Stevio & me call it the hospital diet, where the one in hospital (normally me) has the easy bit but that visiting lark really takes it out of you.

So remember to look after yourself, & have another hug from us.

I just did a mock booking and the drinks package is free. It has already been selected for you as it is free so perhaps you didn't notice.

 

What an amazing price! You got yourself a bargain. You can always buy nice teas and coffees in the coffee bar, have some wine with dinner and soft drinks if you don't drink much and it is all free :D

I too did a quick mock booking and you are right that is an amazing price... 8th Dec' return flights from Gatwick lowest price inside room Thom's Majesty 7 nights £1,212 including AI for two :eek:

We would hope to eat in MDR each evening including formal, so looks like it will have to be buffet if we did P and O as there is no way I will get him into a jacket.

Absolutely no personal knowledge of P&O dining regs, but I did read that jackets were insisted upon on entry at dining rooms, but then often removed & hung on back of chair... I read somewhere that a jacket was provided at the door to a jacketless customer in order to be hung on the back of the chair throughout the meal :confused:

I believe on some of the P&O ships you have to be dressed correctly to be served at some of the bars on formal nights.:eek:

I will be sticking to the buffets on Thomson & NCL, you always get the joker that'll turn up in shorts & a string vest just because they can, but at least everyone can sit where they like, (away from the bloke in a string vest:o) & dress comfortably.

That's it. Start the petition, it's gotta be the Thomson Geosprout. :D

We can tell people that the name "Geosprout" is from ancient Greek mythology... That'll have 'em googling for ages. :confused:

 

There is also a possability of the Legend of the Seas leaving the RCCL fleet.

Thomson's Leg End of the seas... That sounds about right, send her over. :D

Sometimes I just fancy macaroni cheese or something simple like that. What about a nice British pub with pub grub?

I was just scrolling through and I thought it was a suggestion for the name :o

The Thomson Macaroni Cheese ... I like it.... would vote for that.

Hi darling. I broke the news on this very subject yesterday.

there will be NO rock climbing wall, and the Casino will be made smaller.

 

Do keep up Darling Stevio:D

.

I have no doubt as to the fact that Thomsons will make the casino smaller, as I mentioned they have plenty of past form for it.

But my question is why?? :confused: ... Every time I go on an NCL ship I meet fellow Brits forced off Brit cruise lines in order to find a decent casino. It appears that the big U.S. cruise lines look to make most of their profits from the casino.

................ However I can exclusively reveal that the climbing wall is definitely staying at the request of the Thomson ships doctor who is in line to make a few bob out of it :D