rajones007

As a guy I have to say I like the soaps and shampoos they leave in the suites. Yeah, it's girly stuff but my brain associates it with going on a cruise so it always brings a smile on my face.

I like the body wash. It's mint-y...or something. It feels cool on your skin. It isn't no manly scent and I'd never depend on it after a day of work digging ditches, shingling houses, or deep in a coal mine. But on a cruise it's great stuff.

'actually NCL has a really good latitude or frequent guest program compared to most ot fhe mass marketed lines.

 

I will also add, to what Rogue said: Zombie thread. I wonder why you decided to bring this thread back to life. It really has little to do with the ops gripe and it is old, old, old.

It's only 4 months prior to todays posts. So it's not THAT old.

All the Guinness I seen on the Dawn (2013) and the Star (2014) was the bottles with the yellow label. Extra Stout I believe it was called and it was 7.5% abv, if I remember correctly.

It was quite disappointing. It tasted nothing like that the draught I know and love.

With the exception of important instructions on debarkation day, it's very rare (in my experience) that an announcement is made directly over the PA system directly INSIDE the cabin.

re: the Captain's announcements. YES! I'm glad I'm not the only one who can't understand him most of the time. Good luck deciphering the important message between all the mumbling, microphone shuffling, long pauses, and "ummmmmm"s and "errrrrrrr"s.

...amusingly accurate portrayal of the daily announcements...

That made me smile and brings back happy memories.

I wonder if you can order food to go from the specialty restaurants.

They do, but they're strict about how many appetizers, main courses, etc they'll bring. Delivery of the entire meal might be restricted to those in suites, as pointed out by the person above me, but I can't personally attest to having knowledge of that.

When my wife and I were on the Dawn, we ordered Cagneys for in-room dining. We were in a suite, so we called the butler and he came to our cabin to take the order. When he arrived he was very clear that we (my wife and I) could only order a total of two items from each course (2 appetizers, 2 salads, 2 main courses, etc). He explained it was to prevent abuse of the UDP system.

It makes perfect sense. I can only imagine what kind of abuse of the system is attempted. It's an even bet that on the very first day they implemented the UDP some jerk tried to order an excessively large in-cabin meal from a specialty restaurant in an attempt to feed his cheapskate non-UDP in-laws or something.

On our last cruise we had caesar salad and pizza in La Cucina, then left for the theater for the 7pm show. When that was over we strolled up to Cagneys for steak and fries about ~9pm. (We did that in reverse a few days later, if i remember correctly.)

So yes, visiting a specialty restaurant more than once per day is allowed.

Also, I don't think any specialty restaurants are open for lunch, with the exception of Cagneys for the suite guests.

We did the post-cruise NCL tour of Tampa. It worked out perfectly for us. We left about 9am and did a tour of the city. It wasn't the most exciting tour in the world but it was interesting, relatively inexpensive, and we didn't have to cart our luggage around.

We even stopped for lunch in Ybor City. Some people went to a place that was featured on Diners, Drive-ins, And Dives (Tampa Brewing Company?...something like that), but a few others, us included, decided to walk to the other side of the plaza and go to a popular burger joint (which was awesome).

After lunch we went directly to the airport.

Funny side-story. Earlier in the day we stopped at some old historic building for an inside tour. Outside of this building was a park with a really old and very huge tree. Underneath this tree was a fairly large statue of JFK and a few bronze plaques and such. The tour guide mentioned something notable happening here in regard to JFK, but I cannot recall what it was.

Anyways, as we're leaving the historic building everybody clamored on the bus. We asked the tour guide if we could take a minute or two to see the JFK statue which was only about 50 feet away. (edit. okay, maybe 100 feet. Still, it was less than a minutes walk. /edit). The tour guide encouraged us to go see it. So we walked across the laneway, took a few photos, quickly read the plaques, and returned to the bus....which was now full of perturbed passengers giving us the evil eye and huffing and puffing and mumbling about how we held them up. (My internal response was ----

Even our guide noticed the aura of negativity, so he made sure to point out everything about the little JFK park as the bus started to pull away and directly asked us how we liked it, did we get many photos, hope you had enough time, and so on.

As far as I can figure the bus must have been full of angry Republicans ;).

Anyways, sorry about that off-topic bit. At the time it seemed very strange that no Americans were interested in this little monument to JFK, but here we are, a Canadian family, were the only people on the bus who cared to see it. I'm always of the opinion that once a president/leader dies, and especially if they were assassinated, all political affiliations are forgotten and they are treated with reverence and respect. The people on this bus, however, seemed to be purposely ignoring this small monument. Seriously, some even looked the other way when the guide was pointing it out. :confused:

Moving on...We were dropped off at TPA about 12:30pm. Our flight was for 3:10pm, I believe. There's a few nice restaurants in the main terminal, so as has already been said, if you want something decent to eat then stay there before going airside. We were in airside B. For food there was one or two bar w/lounges, a couple coffee stands, and a few vending machines. But nothing full-menu with full-service.

My PCC is awesome too. He even replies to my messages (phone and email) within hours, even if it's a weekend or holiday or his day off. He also calls me whenever a good promo is about to begin. He isn't a high pressure salesman either, or too chatty that it becomes annoying. He's damn near perfect.

The one I had before was just as good. He was promoted and, the last I heard, is my current PCC's supervisor.

For the life of me I cannot figure out why we are forbidden to name our PCC's. We can name any other NCL employee (stewards, butlers, waiters, captain, CEO, concierge, et al) and leave as much positive/negative info about them as we please...but the name of a NCL Personal Cruise Consultant is off limits.

It makes no sense.

I have finally processed all of the pictures I took and reduced them almost to manageable numbers. I have put them together here into a video if anyone wants to spend the 25 minutes or so seeing our trip as it happened through our eyes. Enjoy. (Note: There is no soundtrack to avoid copyright issues on any music choices I might have had)

Thank you. That was great. Difficult to watch without the sound, but still awesome.

For future reference - don't worry so much about copyright issues. Even though you might be in the wrong by using copy protected music for your video here, unless your youtube channel has 2 million subscribers and you're pulling in $10k per month from Youtube/Google in advertising revenue, no copyright holder really cares about your cutesy little home video watched by a couple dozen people.

Excuse me while I pick my eyeballs up off the floor.

A grand total of 6 photos in a thread with "pic-intensive" in the title. *sigh*

Seriously OP, just upload the pics, post the links, and be done with it. Put your thread out of its misery.

Google Chrome is a second tier web browser at best...

2nd tier? :rolleyes:

VV ...read what he said... VV

I am going to have to disagree from my experience on designing websites in the past. W3C is nice and all but realistically, you will be hard pressed to find websites on the internet that are W3C compliant.

 

The W3C standardization process is too long and is not keeping up with the web. HTML5 was just standardized this October! And this is due to W3C finally trying to speed up the process and dividing up HTML 5 into sub versions to be released separately.

 

The most common issue of compatibility on the net for chrome and other browsers are websites designed for IE6 and below. Most modern sites work on all modern browsers due to implementation of libraries that do the dirty work such as jQuery. CSS2 is widely supported, CSS3 remains a mess.

 

Personally, I code for FireFox (has the best debug tools), run into no issues with Chrome or Opera but often times have to make changes for IE. Though IE has improved so it is not as many changes as back in the IE6 days.

I received an email earlier today from NCL and they said they made some changes to the website so that it would work with the Ghostery extension.

It does work...better. It's not perfect. It seems to hesitate in some places, almost to the point where I think it's frozen.

BUT...when all is said and done, it does work for me. That's all I asked for.

And I must admit I'm impressed at the NCL response to my complaint. They jumped right on it and fixed it. Thanks NCL. I appreciate your prompt attention to the matter.

(I hope it's fixed for the others as well.)

Before starting the packing, I took the camera round the ship for a few pictures

I'd love to see more of your photos from around the ship. I was also on this cruise and (as stupid as this sounds, not gonna lie) I would be absolutely giddy if I were to see myself in one of your photos.

If I ever get back to Roatan I won't go anywhere else but Maya Key. It's just such a lovely relaxing place. The pool area is very nice and the beach and snorkeling is top notch. Maya Key is where my wife first discovered snorkeling and she has yet to find any place better.

It's cruise line passengers only, so it's not crowded at all. I think the price causes a lot of people to shy away from it, which is fine by me! It's totally worth it to be free of the AI drunks hootin' and hollerin' from 10AM on.

Same here....no problems!

I am using Chrome and have had no issues with their site...

I can browse the site without any issue. It's the actual booking part that is funky.

Have you guys actually done a dummy booking? How far can you make it? I'm willing to wager you don't get by the number of passengers question. My laptop, my desktop, my wifes laptop, and about a dozen PCs at work all halt at the same spot. So I know it's not just me.

Even MyNCL doesn't work properly once you're logged in. I can't do it now because I don't have a cruise booked, but it was severely limited in its usefulness too. I even recall resorting to using the "IE Tab" extension just to see the mail coming into MyNCL. EDIT. Seems to me IE Tab didn't work...but I can't recall for certain. I know I had to fire up IE itself just to finish the online check-in./EDIT

EDIT2. Just got a response from NCL. It's the Ghostery extension, which is one of the few extensions that are common to all the PCs I have access to. They, NCL, plan on fixing the issue on their end.

Dear rajones007,

We'd like to discuss your issues with Chrome. Can you please email us at publicrelations@ncl.com so we can be in touch?

Thank you!

Norwegian PR & E-Commerce Team

ALL RIGHT! Emailing now.

It just started last summer, right after they did some site changes. Chrome is always up-to-date, as well as Windows 7 in a squeaky clean relatively new Dell laptop. My desktop has the same issue, and about a dozen PCs at work do too.

Not only do they need to keep the site updated, they need to get it working properly in Google Chrome. It's been more than 6 months since I've been able to get past the number of passengers on their booking page.

The worlds most popular browser by a wide margin (and yes, it's #1 in the USA too) and NCL still designs their site for IE. :rolleyes:

Also just got off the Spirit on Tuesday, & got the 8 piece box. I do not think they are all that tasty, DW eats some of them. We were in a suite. Got nightly mints.

I'm with you - they're not all that good. Even my son, who would eat his own head if it was made of chocolate (and some days I think it is), isn't all that impressed with them.

Same with the chocolate covered strawberries. They just aren't that good. The strawberries themselves are fine, it's just the low grade chocolate they use...or something. We found a plate of them in our cabin on at least 4 occasions during our 13 day cruise last month, and they were never touched except for the first day when we all tried one for the first and last time.

We've never been a fan of fake fish eggs, cat food pate, and weird cheeses that always smell like feet, so they always go uneaten too.

Our butler Made eventually learned though. Every afternoon he brought us BLT's and warm chocolate-chip and peanut butter cookies. Now that's a snack!

 

It was bizarre that we were being escorted past obviously angry passengers seeing us pass them by. When we got off the elevator, crew members had one hallway blocked off. They let us through, and I was thinking "Great! A private way to immigration!" Nope. That hallway was full of people, that's why they blocked it off, so no one else could stand in line there.

 

The thing was, people had their bags all over, and about halfway down, we had no choice but to just start pushing our way through -- even with Hanno leading and our butler bringing up the rear. People wouldn't move their bags or move aside.

 

And with the last guy at the front of the line complaining to the crew, he wheeled his bag in front of my wife and she knocked it aside with her suit case, then he put it in front mine and I knocked it to the other side. I apologized and kept moving. But he was just being a jerk.

 

But I would assume that ANY suite passenger -- not just GV -- would get the same kind of escort if they needed to get off the ship early. Like you said, wish they could find a way to do it more discreetly. It was crazy cool, but embarrassing too.

It is for ALL suite passengers. And I agree - it was bizarre. We were in a 2br family suite and got off the Star after her 13 day PC from Miami at the end of November. We were also escorted from the theater to the back entrance of Ginza. We arrived to a room full of glaring non-suite passengers. If looks could kill, well, we'd be dead.

The NCL crew did rotate the two lines so it wasn't like we jumped the line all at once. They did a "one from line A and one from line B" type of thing. Which, all things considered, was about the only fair way to handle it.

I found the situation quite awkward and very uncomfortable. You just have to go with the flow and not look at the non-suite people in the eye. I paid for the privilege, after all. I felt bad about it, but what can you do when placed in that situation? *shrug* Not much, I guess.

Is that for each person? We got 2 x 4-piece boxes on the Star in November. I was thinking one was for me and one was for my wife.

As long as it will fit through the x-ray machine when you go through security.

That's what I thought.

Can you imagine what boarding would be like if people were allowed to carry on all their luggage with no restrictions on size? Half the passengers can barely manage their own luggage as it is. Ugh. I don't even want to think of the clusterf--- of passengers getting it up the gangway and navigating it to their cabin.

They would have to move back the Muster Drill to midnight.

...You are no longer in Quebec or Ontario. The rules do not follow you from home. Again, really?

D'ya think?

Thanks for letting me know Captain Obvious. You do good work here.

Room Service, arranging surprises or gathering for Birthday / wedding/ anniversaries either at restaurant or in the suite, tendering, getting spa reservations, etc sorta the same thing hotel concergies do too for their guests (middle or high class ones, anyway) .

 

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-Room service is via the butler. That would be funny if somebody phoned the concierge for room service.

-In suite gatherings are via the butler, as well. RE: a gathering in a restaurant...what really needs to be "arranged" other than getting the reservation for X amount of guests and letting the waiter/waitress do their job?

-Tendering. You get a priority tender ticket in your room on embarkation day. What else needs to be done?

-The Spa. Every ship I've been on it's been "buy your access and go whenever you want". What is this "spa reservation" you speak of? EDIT. oh, okay, you mean massages and facials and stuff like that. Gotcha. /EDIT

Not at all, we never used the concierge to book restaurants and they take care of a lot more

The concierge hardly ever books restaurant reservations for me. They do lots and lots of other things that make them worth their weight in gold..

Serious question....Can you elaborate? Other than booking restaurants (and the occasional excursion) I cannot think of "a lot more" and "lots and lots of other things" that a concierge can be used for.