Daghis

I think it's about a week afterward, certainly sooner than a fortnight.

I can say that I was on Independence of the Seas out of Port Canaveral two weeks ago. I was staying in a JS and did board with the suite guests.

Sure, you can find information about the tiers at this web page, but basically Prime is when you have earned 2,500-24,999 points ("tier credits") in the casino during a tier year (April 1 – March 31).

If you're talking about the annual free cruise that members with Prime status and above get, that has to be booked and sailed by March 31.

Perhaps misery loves company, but I'm a bit happy to see other people seeing the same kinds of things I did. I was on the second post-drydock sailing of Independence of the Seas, and although the ship was in beautiful condition*, the food choices (variety and presentation/composition) were generally disappointing. In general, I've also noticed that, like ChatGPT, crew members were perfectly happy to give out answers that were factually wrong. On Anthem of the Seas in December, while Café Promenade was closed (which they did each night from about 5 am until 6:30 am when they would start serving again [I'm a very early riser]), a Guest Services employee insisted one morning at 5:45 am when I was seeking clarification that Café Promenade was indeed open right then (it wasn't), just like it says on the app and in the Cruise Compass. Neither the restaurant staff nor the hotel director staff seemed to care what the other folks were saying/doing. * One thing that I noticed on deck 10 aft is that either the port or starboard side carpet seemed backwards. It was a diagonal design that seemed reminiscent of the ship's wake. If that were supposed to be, one of the two corridors had the diagonal lines pointing the wrong way (unless we were backing up on that side).

Same here. Our son got seriously ill after boarding a Norwegian cruise (unrelated to the cruise itself, just poorly coincident). The medical center bill ran about $5,500. I feared dealing with the insurance, but I sent them everything I could in terms of documentation to justify it and was quite pleased that they promptly paid the amount in full. (I'll note that I do pay for the primary medical coverage to avoid any hassles between the travel insurance and my work-provided insurance.)

For those who may not be receiving their emails from Casino Royale, I noticed on my latest snail-mail card from them that they give this address to sign up for "your exclusive offers!" www.royalcaribbean.com/casinoemail

Oh, and in terms of real messages, we were on a B2B in December. During the second week, we were explicitly told that we did not need to report to our muster stations during the second week as we were in the same cabin (more specifically, the same muster station) as the prior week. Yet, 30 minutes before setting sail, the app sent us that notification, prompting us to check to see whether we really did need to check in. Nope... it was just a blanket notification to anyone who hadn't yet checked in for that sailing, even those who were exempted. Gotta love Royal Caribbean Inconsistency.

I think we had 5 weeks of sailings with that deal, none of which we ended up going on. One was even a 2-week transatlantic! I tell you, there could be arguments made that maybe the pandemic was Royal Caribbean's reneging on their offer. 🤣

It's nice to see that the famous $18/day-drink-package intern got themselves a job in software development. 😆

I think it's perfectly reasonable when starting the session to set expectations by letting the crew member know that you're aware they're supposed to recommend products but you're really not interested and you thought you'd save them the trouble and time. By acknowledging their situation (it's not like they necessarily want to be upwelling), I think it becomes quite non-confrontational.

This talk about the mattresses does possibly confirm something for me. When we first sailed on Liberty of the Seas in 2007, one of the things they were touting back then was their amazing mattresses and luxurious sheet sets, which they sold separately so you could continue to enjoy the cruise (bed) experience at home. I found that those mattresses were really quite comfortable. On recent cruises, though, it seemed that the mattresses were much firmer than I recall from the past. Based on comments like these above, I would now believe that maybe they've switched to firmer mattresses in order to gain more life out of them.

I'd been seeing some comments about Independence of the Seas looking rather worse for wear. I managed to get a comped cruise on her next month, so I was using comments like yours to help set expectations so that I don't start off disappointed by well-worn furnishings and such. I just discovered that she's returning from drydock on the sailing just before mine, so that finally explains why my junior suite was listed at ~$2,500/person for a 4-night cruise. The pricing on this February 20 sailing has even gone up since then, but since I now see it's one of the very first return-to-service sailings, that explains the higher demand. So, hopefully the things that have been pointed out over the past year or so will have been addressed by the time I see her. 🤞🏻

Looking at the menu names, one appeared intended for what you can get from Giovanni's Table while at Vintages as its filename was GIWB (Giovanni's Italian Wine Bar?). Originally, Vintages offered their own tapas menu. Then, some time ago, they gave that up on restaurants with Jamie's Italian and changed the menu to be a selection of Jamie's items that you could get delivered to you at Vintages. This appears to be a further continuation of that linking between Vintages and the Italian restaurant, which makes sense since I have noticed that the Giovanni's Table menu now seems to include items I think I recognize from Jamie's menu. That makes it seem like they're trying to make it more uniform.

That's what it was! I was on Anthem of the Seas last month and one of my go-to breakfast items is a toasted plain bagel with ham, cheese, and some sort of greens. It tasted "wrong", for lack of a better word. Something about the ham didn't look right, but I couldn't place it. Wow... the McNugget of deli ham.

I didn't care for the packaged cookies back in the day, but my husband liked them so it was a nice treat. I was on a B2B recently, and we happened to be in our cabin on day 1 of the second week when room service was delivering cookies to all the staterooms. I was able to decline them up front, and that was nice since they're not interesting to us. Perhaps the "and no cookies" might move up the tiers. I wouldn't say I'm representative, but I'm approaching 340. 😉

The house wine will vary from ship to ship and even bar to bar. On Anthem of the Seas last week, the house pinot grigio was Danese. I didn't care for it, but I'm too much of a fan of Danzante which I was also able to get onboard, just with less success. In the past, the chardonnay was Zonin, which I detested, so I've not even kept up with their house option here.

I did have one interesting bit of second-place luck from a slot tournament. It was a shorter cruise, and they were doing their win-a-cruise slot tournaments as usual. Being a shorter cruise, though, it was much more likely that they wouldn't get enough entrants during the sailing to qualify to give away a cruise. In that case, there would be cash prizes for first, second, and third place. I ended up getting second place after the two rounds of the tournament and won a few hundred dollars. If there had been enough entrants, I wouldn't have won anything at all since there are no prizes after the cruise prize.

They usually aren’t, but I think they have done something where Club Royale members have been able to join in on an already booked sailing of theirs. That was 2015 or 2016, so I don’t know whether it’s still true today.

From what I can tell, the "instant rewards" are the certificates you get from the play during your last cruise. The ClubRoyaleOffers.com site was originally intended for offers issued by landside operations, so I'm not terribly surprised there's a mismatch in the way they're presented. My past experience is that the certificates earned onboard had to be booked within 30 days, but it's been quite a while since I last used one.

I thought I'd lost the PDF after booking my similar offer. This is 22FEB101, but I suspect yours may be a pruned down version of this one. On the other hand, it may be completely different, but it's all I can offer. In my case, I happen to be planning on being in Orlando in mid-February, and I had an offer for a comped junior suite plus $300 freeplay for a variety of sailings, including Independence of the Seas on the 20th. When I checked availability, the only junior suite was a guarantee, so I knew that wouldn't work. When I checked later, I told the Royal Caribbean search that I was traveling solo, and a JS came up. It turns out that there was one JS left on this sailing, but the muster station was nearly full (my guess), so they could only accommodate one person in the cabin. The solo price for this 4-night sailing according to the website? Over $5,000! My cost, thanks to Casino Royale, including prepaid gratuities? $169.01, less whatever winnings I may get from the $300 in freeplay. 😁 99D6D6B3-7D97-4CE2-935C-189CB4BDDD64.pdf

We were in a junior suite, so getting just the toiletry bags may make sense.

We got C&A-logoed toiletry bags with their Sea+Salt products. This was from our Christmas cruise, but we don't know specifically why we got these. Someone else (another passenger) we asked didn't know anything about it. 🤷‍♂️

Here are the Casino Royale rewards table which does show that Coastal Kitchen is still available for Masters tier members.

I saw this offer show up on ClubRoyalOffers.com, but didn't realize it was one offer that includes three sailings. That's interesting. I do note that I've been downgraded to an inside cabin, which I'm sure is long overdue! 23STE104.pdf