Vexorg

I've done Seattle to Fort Lauderdale a number of times for cruises, which is nearly the longest distance domestic flight you can take in the continental US (the only one that's slightly longer is Seattle to Miami.)  Throw in a layover and time zone changes and it makes for a rather long travel day. 

Here's the thread: 

It's a little tricky to sort through the spreadsheets, but some takeaways looking at this:

- Regal Princess is doing mostly Western Caribbean itineraries out of Galveston;

- Ruby Princess is doing mostly round trip 10-night Panama Canal itineraries;

-Emerald Princess is doing the one-way Panama Canal full transits, but also has some longer Caribbean itineraries without returning to Fort Lauderdale in the middle;

- Enchanted Princess is doing mostly 10-night Eastern Caribbean itineraries focused on the West Indies

- Caribbean Princess and Sky Princess seem to be doing alternating East/West itineraries out of Fort Lauderdale.

- The "standard" Eastern Caribbean itinerary has changed significantly, and now seems to be Princess Cays, San Juan, Grand Turk and Amber Cove.  Stops in St. Thomas and St. Maarten seem to be mostly on the 10-night itineraries, 

- The ABC Islands seem to be limited to longer (14-day) itineraries and repositioning cruises that need them for PVSA compliance, which is a bit of a bummer because those are my favorite islands in the Caribbean);

- Most Western Caribbean itineraries seem to have the usual 4 ports in some order (Cozumel, Costa Maya, Belize City and Roatan) although the Caribbean Princess "Western Caribbean With Bahamas (Princess Cays, Grand Cayman, Jamaica and Cozumel) seems to be the more interesting one.   

- There are almost no short cruises on the schedule; I see only 2 sailings shorter than 7 nights on the schedule.  Maybe this is more of a West Coast thing?

17 minutes ago, zhuangcorp said:

Do the hordes of boat-tour sellers also have a non-glass boat, just regular boat tour? How much is the going rate for these tours? Is there room for haggling for these tours?

 

Do most people choose to get dropped off at Medano beach? How then do they get back to the cruise port?

Does Cabo have a central historical area that is good for exploring history? I know Mazatlan has a central plaza and Puerto Vallarta has the Centro area. 

There are some larger boats as well, but I think those ones tend to get used for ships excursions.  There is also a small historical museum in Cabo near the marina (Museo de Historia Natural).  If you're looking for more of a town square type place you'd probably want to go to the Misión San José del Cabo, which has a plaza next to it.  I went there on a ships tour on my last cruise to Cabo.  It's still touristy, but less so than Cabo itself.  It is some distance away, but it shouldn't be too hard to find transportation to get there.

Based on the info I've been able to find, the "Beach Front Resort with Mexican Buffet" excursion in Cabo appears to be at the Casa Dorada resort, so it's possible that other excursions use that one as well.

9 hours ago, arizonaperson said:

Got it,for the 3 People that responded .I don’t believe the OP responded. My comment was -I just never thought to do this when I go on a cruise. I go on a cruise  to cruise.when I go on a land vacation I go on a land vacation. Yay to all of you that have done this ,had nothing really to do with expense when I made my comment, well sort of .I just can’t imagine spending money on a hotel which I am assuming is a five day cruise to Cabo overnight ,but I’m not even sure on the length. So I just thought perhaps the OP got a smoking deal on their cruise and they weren’t concerned with spending money to stay in a hotel for whatever the experience be. .I still just can’t imagine wanting to spend the Money for a hotel room and food ,but again just my opinion.  that’s why there’s choices out there in this world and it was just an interesting topic to me.

 Appreciate everyone’s response to me ,but this is definitely not about me .this was answering the Op/author to see if it could be done. Again I just find the topic very interesting .

 I don’t think any more comments need to be directed at me we need to go back to the original person. 

In this case it's a 10 night itinerary (the "Baja Peninsula and Sea of Cortez" one with overnight in Cabo plus La Paz, Loreto and Puerto Vallarta), and it was a pretty good deal.  The thinking is that for about the cost of a day pass for two at one of the resorts in Cabo we could book a hotel room for the night and get a lot more time to hang out by the pool and/or beach.

Another factor is that the available Princess shore excursions for Cabo seem lacking on this itinerary.  The ship arrives at 1pm, and the only excursion options seem to be the "short day" ones on the first day (the ones you'd see on a 7am-1pm or 1pm-7pm stop), with none offered on the second day even though the ship is in port until 6pm..  

I don't know of any recent experiences, but several years ago I remember hearing of people who were able to make arrangements to disembark the ship in Victoria on Alaska cruises instead of Seattle or Vancouver.  As far as I know this wouldn't be a PVSA violation for the Seattle round trip or the Whittier to Vancouver itineraries (although those don't generally stop in Victoria anyway) because the disembarkation isn't in a US port.  The main issue with this is that CBSA would need to be available for passengers to clear customs, which isn't always guaranteed.  Given the fact that the Victoria stops tend to be the bare minimum needed for PVSA compliance (some itineraries have stops as short as 3 hours, 9:00-11:59pm) and the ship arrives in Seattle at 7am the next morning I can see why Canadians might just get off in Victoria to save themselves from having to get back from Seattle and cross the border again. 

My wife and I are booked on a cruise in October that includes an overnight stop in Cabo San Lucas, and we were looking at options to spend a night in a hotel on shore while the ship is in port.  While inquiring about this on the Mexico Ports board, one person reported that on a recent Carnival cruise that had the overnight Cabo stop they were informed that they were not allowed to spend the night off the ship, and would not be allowed to reboard if they did.  In the past I've read about people being able to either spend the night off the ship or to meet the ship at the next port as long as they notified the passenger services desk first, but I would be interested to know if anyone has done this recently and what your experience with it was.

On a related note, does anyone know how late the tenders typically run on one of these overnight port calls?

My wife and I are going on the October 23rd Sapphire Princess Baja Peninsula/Sea of Cortez sailing and have been looking for info on Loreto as well.  It seems to be a relatively uncommon port call for cruise ships (it only gets 2-4 port calls a month, and most of those are the Diamond and Sapphire Princess with one call each by Discovery Princess and Koningsdam for the rest of 2022) and it's a tender port, so those are things to take into consideration.  Loreto also doesn't have the kind of Malecon \ touristy area that Cabo or La Paz has so it will probably be a bit more laid back compared to those.  

On 7/20/2022 at 10:27 AM, tonit964 said:

There is one potential problem to consider, if the weather is bad/too windy the following day and they can't use the tenders, you will be stuck.

Definitely something to consider, but if that happened it wouldn't be too much of a problem because we could meet the ship in La Paz the following day.  Would need to spend another night on land though.

As for not allowing people back on the ship if they stay on land overnight, I could see something like that being part of COVID restrictions, but even then I have generally seen other threads saying that in ports with overnight stays people have been allowed to stay off the ship overnight, but were instructed to inform the passenger services desk before doing so.  I'm also guessing that tenders would stop running after a certain time until the next morning, but I'd have to ask when that would be.

My first thought was a new stage show, but I guess we'll see.

My wife and I will be on the Sapphire Princess 10/23 sailing which includes an overnight stay in Cabo, and are looking at spending that night at a beach hotel.  After doing some research It seems like most of the all inclusive resorts require a 3-night minimum (and are rather expensive anyway) but it does appear we can book a one-night stay at Casa Dorada for around the same price as a day pass for 2 people (but without the all-inclusive).  If anyone else has done a one night hotel stay in Cabo I'd be interested to hear where they have done this.

Based on running the numbers if you don't drink alcohol the numbers just don't add up for Princess Plus compared to the base fare.  Even adding the soda & more package (11.80 per day per person), Wifi ($5 per day with Platinum/Elite discount, or $10 a day for the 4 device plan for 2 people) and crew gratuities ($14.50 per day per person) that comes out to $31.30 per day, $18.70 less than the $50 a day to add Princess Plus.  Depending how much stuff you drink, I also suspect most people who don't drink alcohol probably aren't drinking $12 worth of soda and mocktails a day anyway, so ala carte would very likely be cheaper anyway.  Adding unlimited coffee drinks to that is another $11.80 per day and puts you much closer to the $50 per day, but a coffee card costs $36.58 ($5.23 per day for a 7 day cruise) and would get 2 people a premium coffee drink per day for the entire cruise, or an elite member could swap the minibar for 2 coffee cards and have enough coffee to never fall asleep ever again.  

Now if you're ruby, need to keep 4 devices connected to the Internet at all times and 11 lattes a day to keep functioning then Princess Plus might make sense, but if that's the case you're probably too busy to take a cruse anyway...

My wife and I have the October 23rd (10 night Baja Peninsula/Sea of Cortez) sailing booked, so we're hoping to hear more soon. I will say that Sapphire is my favorite Princess ship that I've been on.  I've always liked the older Grand class ships over the newer ones for having one less deck of cabins and the covered pool, and Sapphire comes with some quirks like the 4 smaller midship dining rooms instead of the 2 larger ones most Princess ships have, forward facing cabins on Baja and Caribe decks and a wider promenade deck.  I'm looking forward to a chance to take another trip since it's been quite a while since she's been on the West Coast.

I will also say that we sailed on a cruise on Caribbean Princess just a few weeks after her return to service from the shutdown, and although food and service was excellent during that cruise there were definitely some issues with our room, mostly with the plumbing.  Mechanical systems don't like to sit around doing nothing for long periods of time, and on a ship of that size it's probably impossible to test every single thing, so it's possible you could run into some issues.  

My wife and I are looking at possibly doing a coastal repo at the end of April that, at least currently, goes from LA to Vancouver with stops in San Francisco and Victoria.  My guess is that if they needed to they could shift the itinerary to stop in Astoria (in fact, the route map on the site shows Astoria instead of SF right now) and end in Seattle, which would actually be really convenient for us since it would save us from needing to take the train from Vancouver back to the Seattle area.

My sister in law has Celiac, and has had no trouble with cruising.  Just make sure the dining room staff is aware of it, and what they typically do is bring the next day's menu to your table at the MDR and review it with you to advise on which items can be made gluten free.  If there's something that requires special preparation, you can pre-order it there so it's ready for you tomorrow.

On our most recent cruise on the Caribbean Princess in December, the tea served at Afternoon Tea was Bigelow.

When one of the tribal casinos here in Washington (Angel of the Winds) reopened after the COVID shutdowns they just made the entire casino non-smoking.  As far as I can tell it doesn't seem to have hurt them any even though other nearby tribal casinos are still allowing smoking indoors (although some have moved it to designated areas.) 

Back home from last week's Caribbean Princess cruise, and I thought I'd share a few thoughts.  In total there were five of us in our party:  Myself, my wife, my sister-in-law (who was going to bring a friend with her, but the friend backed out about a month before sailing) and my parents.  My Mom has mobility issues and was using a scooter to get around the ship, but that didn't seem to pose too many issues overall.

The Good:

• As has been noted elsewhere, there were around 1,200 passengers on board for this journey, well below the ship's usual capacity of around 3,100.  Areas that are typically crowded (especially the top deck) were not crowded at all, and we had few problems finding seats in the theater for the two production shows or tables in the dining room.  Also plenty of loungers available as long as you weren't looking for one right next to the pool.
• Service and food in the MDR was excellent.  I do miss some of the items that used to be on the menus, but generally was happy with the items I did order most nights.  I only ate their a couple of times, but generally found the buffet food to be pretty good too.  
• The cruise director and staff were quite entertaining.  Given the current situation the number of activities seemed to be less than usual, but the ones that were offered were generally well attended and entertaining.

The Bad:

• We had some significant problems with our room, mostly with the plumbing in the bathroom.  Our room was D516, a midship interior cabin on Dolphin deck that connected to D512, where my sister-in-law was staying.  The faucet was leaking and on more than one occasion the stuff we were storing on the shelf under the vanity got wet.  There were also several instances where the toilet would not flush (pressing the button would do nothing, from what I heard this affected a larger portion of the deck we were on) and my wife had problems with the way the bed was being made, where the bottom sheet would come loose several times during the night and need to be readjusted.  Between this and some requests to the cabin steward that didn't get fulfilled in a timely manner, it was enough that my wife requested to have the automatic gratuities removed.  This is not something I would normally do (in fact, I would consider it a "nuclear option" for dealing with customer service issues) but there were just so many issues that she felt it was necessary.  That said, I felt that the passenger service desk's efforts to remedy the situation were more than adequate (they gave us each $100 in OBC, a free dinner in the Crown Grill and offered to move us to another room but we declined because we wanted to remain in connecting cabins) but my wife still insisted on removing the gratuities.  I'm not the kind of person to pull rank, but I wonder if we would have been treated the same if I wasn't Captain's Circle Elite and my wife wasn't Platinum.
• Although a lot of the ship was generally kept in good condition, the Caribbean Princess is definitely showing her age in some areas.  In particular the Explorers Lounge and Club Fusion were looking a bit tired, since it seems like they have missed out on the refreshes that a lot of the other public areas on the ship have received.  Some new furniture and lighting in those areas would go a long way to making the ship more inviting, but ultimately this is still a pretty minor thing overall.
• As has been noted by a number of other people, the ship skipped St. Kitts on this trip.  Not a huge deal overall, and I'll trust the captain's judgment on this one (even though several other ships did dock that day) but was looking forward to visiting an island I hadn't been to before.

Other notes:

• It has been a while since I have been to Princess Cays, and it seems that there have been a fair number of upgrades since the last time we were there.  Ultimately it's still largely the same experience as always, but it seems that they have better tenders now and some nicer facilities at the dock.  It would be nice if the water was a bit less rocky, but there's not much that can be done about that.
• On St. Thomas we took a taxi out to Coral World at Coki Beach.  Originally we had planned on going to the beach as well, but ended up getting a fair bit of rain while we were at Coral World so we ended up skipping it.  We also had to take a trip out to the Walgreens on St. Thomas to retrieve a prescription medication that had been left at home by my sister-in-law.  For the most part the weather was pretty good, but we did have a couple of rainy days (we also got a fair bit of rain in Fort Lauderdale on disembarkation day.) 
• For all the cruises we have been on, this was the first time that I have ever eaten at Sabatini's or Crown Grill.  One specialty dining cover charge was included with our booking, and the other was provided for the room issues noted above.  Sabatini's was pretty good but I'm not sure if I'd pay the extra for it on my own.  Crown Grill, on the other hand, was definitely worth it, although my wife (not a big fan of steak or seafood) had trouble finding things on the menu to eat.  She ended up eating mostly sides, but quite enjoyed those.  
• OceanMedallion definitely has its issues (the biggest one I ran into is that I couldn't ever get JourneyView to work on my device, and it would freeze any time I tried to pull up the schedule) but it seems to work a lot better on the ship than it does on land.  OceanNOW seems to work well for ordering food and drinks (I made a bit of a splash by getting an entire pizza delivered to the Explorer's Lounge right before the magician's show on the second formal night when I thought I was ordering a slice.)  My parents did have some issues with the OceanCasino app when they tried to play some bingo cards on the last day and the app didn't work properly for them.  From what I understand they ended up getting their bingo cards refunded and $20 in casino free play for the issue.
• In one of the mini suites near our cabin there were a couple of passengers with the last name of Swartz with no Captain's Circle status displayed.  I don't know for sure if it meant anything, but something tells me the crew wouldn't want to get on their bad side..

Aside from the cabin issues it was a nice cruise overall.  Not sure what we will do next, but I think we are looking at one of the 10 night Caribbean itineraries for next Winter.  At some point we also want to try one of the Oasis class RCCL ships as well.

On 12/19/2021 at 3:45 PM, tlcm said:

Also, does anyone know if one can order a la carte from the Crown Grill or Sabbatini's for room (non-suite) delivery?   

 

It's been done lately on the Ruby from my understanding.  

 

Thanks!

I saw that Crown Grill and Sabatini's items were available in OceanNOW to be delivered to ones room or to any public area on the ship, although only during the times when those restaurants are normally open.

Oddly enough, out of all the cruises I've been on, I think this is the first time I've had a port stop cancelled.  I'll trust the Captain's judgment on this one, it looked pretty windy with rain squalls earlier, and the ship was listing about 3 degrees to port earlier.  I think they have stabilized her for now.

If I recall correctly Canada's current restrictions on cruise ships are in place through February 28th 2022.  Assuming that they don't extend them it shouldn't affect the Alaska season next year.

I know that ships in port at Vancouver also charge VAT on drink purchases, and I believe they also have restrictions on how many bars can be open while the ship is in port (if I recall correctly the last time I sailed out of Vancouver the ship only had 1-2 bars on the Lido Deck and 1 bar in the Piazza open before departure.)  

Oops, 12/12.  Getting my dates mixed up since we fly out on the 10th.

Will be watching since we are going to be on the 12/10 Caribbean Princess cruise.

I was able to find the official immunization record being used by the state of Washington (and a number of other states) using the myirmobile.com website.  There is an option to download a certificate of vaccination issued by the state Department of Health.  I downloaded mine and it shows my name, DOB, and the date, manufacturer and lot numbers for both of my shots, but it doesn't show where the shots were administered (a mass vaccination site in my case) so I'm not certain if that would be considered valid proof for Princess' purposes.  I'm sure they'll have to sort these things out as they go along.

Right now, the guideline calls for 95% of passengers to be fully vaccinated, which I assume would allow for children too young to be eligible for the vaccine as long as it's less than 5% of the total passenger capacity.  It's also too soon to tell what the guidelines will look like by the time the cruises actually happen.  

That said, it looks like the December 2021 Caribbean cruise I've got booked is on the schedule.