PATRLR

Why not? What's the worst that can happen? You get some extra sea days. No big deal to us.

As others have said, you get to chose when and where for your specialty dining. That being said, you will want to make reservations at the more popular restaurants if that's your choice. Reservations typically can be made online at the 120 days before the cruise (a fraction of availability is released at that point), or on board. If you wait until on board, make sure you get your reservations first thing when you get on. If you are flexible and don't really care where you dine, then the reservations aren't so critical.

After I looked at the Prima menu, my thinking was I could tolerate about 3 nights of that menu so already thinking if it gets implemented we'll need 4 nights of SD. Highly doubtful it will be implemented for your Oct 30 cruise, but if it is your 4 nights will make it tolerable.

No sarcasm at all. Having been working on systems since the days of ARPANET I've seen plenty of boards and other social media technologies fall by the wayside (many of these technologies existed and were heavily used long before the term "social media" was coined). Some were due to advances in technology causing critical mass to be lost, others due to their signal-to-noise ratio getting to be too low. So your statement that "internet discussion boards of all flavors will continue to survive" may be correct but I don't care about "all flavors", I care about this specific flavor (Cruise Critic). As we prepare for our return to cruising I've spent a lot of time coming back up to speed after nearly 4 years off. I've looked at a lot of other blogs, vblogs, "expert" sites and of course FB. CC is so far above all the others (especially FB) that I think it's worth the effort to correct misinformation. FB is an interesting example. Clearly far more active users on the various cruise related groups than here on CC, but my goodness are those groups full of misinformation and and other BS. I really don't want to see that happen here on CC. I am thankful to the mods for keeping the BS at bay. We, the users, need to keep the misinformation at bay, to the extent we can.

Not the first, I am sure it won't be the last. I do believe this is a systemic problem at NCL - customers do NOT come first as they typically do with business known for the best customer experiences.

They were thinking about the design and building of a slide and absolutely not thinking about anything else.

What you write above is indeed ridiculous. But, so far the only one taking it to that extreme, is you.

I agree. Maintaining a high level of accuracy and a minimum amount of BS will be important for the survival of these boards.

This is not correct. It's about 24-36 hours from the northern most Leewards. The British and US Virgins will be impacted this weekend. While still only forecast to be a Tropical Storm, I suspect most cruise lines will want to avoid the areas as soon as tomorrow and certainly over the weekend.

We have a 8:30PM flight after our Sunday return. Looking to spend a day at hotel/resort. Spent a lot of time on resortpass.com and others and have narrowed it down to: Ritz Carlton Coconut Grove Savoy Hotel and Beach Club Confidant Miami Beach Anyone have any experience with these locations, particularly their pool and/or beach areas? We'll be there for the day so we want decent food and drink availability. Another thing we want is decent, clean lace to change out of bathing suits. Doesn't have to have showers just clean and comfortable enough to change in.

Right, a "credit". Agree, nothing to sniff at and not a joke. I did not call the credit a joke. What I called a joke is NCL's representation of "free excursion".

Thanks to both of you - looks like I don't have any. 😞

but wait, help me understand. I was expecting that if I had no coupons I would still see, somewhere, a table like this with nothing in it (I stole this image from the OP). If I have none, would I therefor not even see this empty table?

Can someone please nudge me in the right direction to find these "coupons"? When I log into NCL with my account, I don't find coupons listed anywhere. Obviously, I'm not looking in the right place.

Shouldn't this be in the "NCL Cabin Information Compilation -NO CABIN QUESTIONS POSTED HERE" topic? Maybe OP you can add it there too?

If NCL would call it what you called it, a "credit", I don't think I'd be calling it a "joke". It's the fact that they call it "free excursions" that makes it a joke, IMO. I wasn't joking. I also didn't mean to imply that the $50 wasn't helpful. I'll be using the credit on my upcoming cruise where we actually booked NCL excursions!

The implication here is that there is exactly one inaugural cruise. I don't think that's correct. You used the term "inaugural voyage" and I'll accept that there probably is only one of those, but there certainly can be an inaugural cruise to Europe, inaugural cruise to the Caribbean, etc. CC itself seems to think there can be more than one inaugural cruise (although they modify it with the word "mini" which I'm not sure I understand): https://www.cruisecritic.com/articles.cfm?ID=3070 Looking to Oxford for help, it seems to me that they agree there could be many inaugural cruises: in·au·gu·ral /inˈôɡ(y)ərəl/ adjective marking the beginning of an institution, activity, or period of office. I'll be the first to call out NCL for their antics but I don't think they are incorrectly using inaugural for the 10/10 cruise. Or for any other cruise that's new to an area. I don't think they are stretching the boundaries at all. I think it's unfortunate that the first paying customers on Prima had no festivities or acknowledgement but, don't assume that there will be no festivities on these other inaugural cruises. I was on the June 2018 "inaugural" cruise of the Bliss in Alaska. This was the first with paying customers leaving Seattle for AK. Wyland (the artist who painted the bow) was on board to help celebrate and there was some sort of "welcome" at each port (at least a couple had escorts with fire guns going). NCL referred to it as the Bliss's inaugural cruise to Alaska and I think that was absolutely correct.

The "free excursion" is a joke. As others have said you get a $50 credit in each port for use by one passenger. It's a struggle to find an excursion that costs less than $50, especially if you want an excursion that's worth going on.

Just curious, is this the first NCL ship stopping in Portland this season?

I'm glad someone said this. I don't KNOW the above to be true, but, I assumed it was.

I don't think it's a case of US consumer being put off. It's a case of the competition can position their cruise cheaper than mine if I use the UK model, therefore, I have to use the US model (only to reference the numbers you presented). If the US government would regulate the pricing the way the UK does, I don't think that would impact people cruising one bit. But we'll never see that here, you know, free country, free markets and all that BS (yeah, right).

Who said they weren't happy because of too much pampering? I read a lot of people saying they prefer not to be pampered. Why do you need to turn everything into a negative? The OP asked a very legit question, it's been a very reasonable discussion and now you are trying to turn it negative when it hasn't been negative.

Agreed. I used to think that handing cash was a sure fire way to be sure the person you handed it to got it, but, I've even seen people claim that isn't true either.

Why wouldn't you just politely let the Butler know that you didn't want or need any of their services? My wife and I are about to bid on Haven. Neither of us likes the idea of anyone fussing over us, we'd already discussed that we'd intend to tell the Butler that if we need anything we'll seek him out but otherwise don't worry about us.

I didn't think this thread was discussing the bump out that I'm pretty sure at this point all the NCL ships have. And no one mentioned "expecting an unlimited view" until you just mentioned it. If I booked one of these rooms, I'd have no basis for complaining about the bump out. I maintain however that I would have a legitimate complaint about that slide being in my face and that NCL should be forthcoming about the fact that it is there an it will obstruct your view.