Gordoncruickshank

Having finally been able to review the prices they are more expensive for the Feb 24 cruises we booked earlier this year. Not a genuine sale or offer from what I can see.

As is mine. I had to get a copy of it from our TA this week.

That is why I always travel with a copy of my Celebrity invoice for the cruise. It details everything you should get on the cruise if you can decipher all the codes they use. It also gives your Ship obc.

This ties up exactly to what I have been told over the years. I would add that the Sommeliers are paid the same way as the BTs.

I always make sure that I take a copy of the Celebrity invoice for the cruise which shows your obc from Celebrity and all packages that you have included in the cruise.

You can't compare what you would tip in the UK because you are not in the UK on a cruise ship which is US owned and the cruise company sets the rules. The auto tip is probably now 20% not 15% and that is on par with what you would be expected to pay if you were in the US in any hospitality setting. If you are in a restaurant in the US the bill gives you a little schedule with different tip levels so that you do not need to take your phone out to do the calculations giving you a 15% tip as $$. an 18% tip and a 22% tip or it is added on before you get the bill. 15% is regarded as you have received poor service and it goes up from there and if you leave 15% I wouldn't try and go back there during your stay because you will go hungry and thirsty! This is just part of your holiday cost. You paid for a PH in the past. The additional tips are so small in comparison to the PH cost that they are not worth getting upset about.

Those workers in Blu, the MDR, Luminae and the speciality restaurants supply the cover in Oceanview on a rota basis when they are not working in their own restaurant. And those in the coffee place get gratuities on their sales just like bar people.

I would only use it if someone could show me the log as to when the filters were last cleaned and it was just before our cruise. Other than that it will stay a useless blockage on the balcony to us. You have no idea what turns up in the filters of Jacuzzis when someone get round to doing them.

I have always wished that the would remove the bath and make the balcony more useable on the RS.

You do get what goes with the cabin type so in a RS you get the two bottles of spirits, free laundry and free speciality restaurants. There are usually spaces kept for suite guests to book either via shoreside concierge or on board.

The cabin stayed available for a couple of weeks after you cancellled and disappeared for a while. It reappeared on sale for a day at the start of last week and disappeared again. You never quite know when these things happen what is going on. I will let you know if we end up there but failing one of the bids 1110 will do us perfectly well. I have made a couple of restaurant bookings which will get credited back to our account if we get a R/S or PH

You get a form from customer services and tell them to charge tips of $xx to your onboard account and allocate it to those staff members or locations i.e. Luminae or Blu, you want to tip and the amount gets to the individual staff members or in the case of the restaurants into their tip pool.

If you do a cruise from Southampton all the cruise companies wrap up the gratuity for drinks into the price and it is the same in Australia. It the drink is $10 plus 18% it is priced on the Southampton and Australian menus at $11.80 because it is easier than having to deal with the complaints about adding a tip. That is done purely because of the UK and Australian attitudes to tipping. Tipping is all part of the structure of the cruise companies as those companies are all American bases and owned. In the US you have a standard 18-20% plus tax usually so your $10 drink becomes $13 when you get the bill. If you are in a bar is the US the norm is to leave at least a $1 bill per drink, which will sit in front of you untouched until you leave. That is just the way it works. Where the Americans get an issue is if they join a cruise from Southampton and they don't twig that the prices are tip included and they add their normal tips. The drink package limits change as well from $15 a drink to $18 to include the tip. I hope that helps.

If we are doing a CS it is on an S class and we have a preference for cabins 1110 or 1233 which have the much larger balconies. We don't really like those on the deck above as they have more overhang. On the other CS cabins on deck 10 have balconies that, if you take into account the amount of space the tub in the RS takes up, are similar to the useable RS balcony. We are in 1110 in 3 weeks time, unless we get a positive result from our MoveUp bids for either a RS or a PH (neither of which are currently available).

We have done one cruise on the Edge in February 2020 and we decided that we didn't like the balconies on the CS and RS and booked one of the Sky suites at the rear corner. They have a huge balcony and worked well for us other than not quite having the same storage as the other suites. The only problem if there are mobility issues is that they are at the rear and Luminae is at the front. We found that while we liked the experience that it was not the same as on the S class ships. Luminae and the lounge are bigger and it was harder to relate to the concierges (who were all very nice but you always got a different one every time you wanted to ask something). The experience moving from there to the Silhouette on the second part of our B2B was night and day. I suspect that we done to us being in the PH but the concierges and the retreat manager were all over us. I am sure our butler had everyone on the ship letting him know where we were and when we came back on the ship or when we were on the retreat sundeck or into the lounge. He probably sussed out that we always, after a trip on shore, went straight to the sun deck for a drink.

We always tip a bit extra for the butler, the room attendant, the bar person in Luminae and the staff in Luminae but probably not much more than $250+£300 over them all which probably doubles up on the autotip. The largest part of that goes to Luminae which is at least $10 a day. We have never tipped a concierge and very rarely the sommelier (not because they don't do a good job but because their pay, like all bar staff on the ship, is based around the number of drinks they serve and the auto gratuity on those so they more they serve the more they earn. They do also get a share of the notional gratuities on the beverage packages for drinks delivered). If they are very good they probably get the same as the bar person in Luminae. But this is just what we feel comfortable with. You have to make your own mind up about what works for yourselves. We will on our upcoming cruise use the $1200 obc that we have that we will struggle to use with the internet and premium drinks already included. It will go to the staff if we haven't spent it. That may get worse if either of our MoveUp bids are successful and we get either a RS or a PH as we won't need it for speciality meals.

The crew don’t care what currency you tip in if it is GBP, US$ or Euros as they have their own ways of getting it converted into what they want although it their next few cruises are in Europe we would usually us euros for tips but they are happy with any currency. for some time we have used obc to do a transfer to the Luminae as the do pool all tips there. Over the course of a week or two we are usually server at some time by every staff member there and it is easier to do it that way rather than chasing them around the restaurant with an envelope. We tell the staff and the Maitre to make sure they get it.

We do have MoveUp bids outstanding.

I just downloaded our edocs this morning and our tags are at page 10 for our cruise on 9th October.

I think you may be thinking of Cyprus which was invaded by Turkey in 1974. The island is still split in two.

Fairly sure there are no suitable cabins available.

It depends on which terminal the Reflection uses. If it is 21 that is just across from 25 which I presume is where Beyond will be and is an easy travel. We did from 25 to 21 in March 20 and it is just across the road but the exit from 25. The walk is a few hundred yards. The problem is that the terminal you are going to will not be ready at the time you will arrive because the Reflection will have you off the ship by 9am. We went from 25 to 21 and the organisation in terminal 21 then was dreadful. You may be better going to 25 as it is better organised there. If it is 18 that is a bit of a walk but it is walkable, probably around a mile, as we have walked on a b2b from terminal 25 to downtown FLL albeit we were 10 years younger when we did that. Celebrity will transport you but shoreside is usually a mess and you as has been commented already have to hang about waiting for the last airport transfers with little seating available but you are going to be waiting anyway as terminal you are going to will not be ready. Look on Google maps to see if you fancy the walk. If you arrive at terminal 18 then you need to take a left onto SE 19th ave to the next crossroad and the left onto Eller Drive. It took us 45 minutes from terminal we to the port gates but that was with no cases so it is perhaps 30 minutes walking. Good luck

I missed at the weekend. Had to call them to fix but still waiting for my cash back.

Two decks up to the Mast bar or the Oceanview bar or you can take the lift

We haven't done AQ for at least 8 years and always found the regular sized cabins, which is what AQ's are, a little tight especially at the end of the Bed, although the CS on the S class ships is the same in the bedroom although you can bail out through the bathroom. We are on the Silhouette in October in a CS and the cruise looks almost sold out with no RS an PH available, but our max bids were similar to your minimums so I will let it play out and see what happens. We decided on our only Edge class cruise not to do the CS because of the balcony. We did an S1 at the back corner and the balcony was huge and the room very good.