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WinksCruises

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  • Posts

    610
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About Me

  • Location
    New York State, USA
  • Interests
    Postcarding
  • Favorite Cruise Line(s)
    Princess, Celebrity, Royal... but not so much RCI lately.
  • Favorite Cruise Destination Or Port of Call
    Caribbean
  • If you have a personal or hobby CRUISE or TRAVEL BLOG, include the url here:
    Instagram: @WinksCruises Twitter: @WInksCruises

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  1. That doesn't bode well for Premiere and Plus people hoping to take advantage of the specialty dining options built into the package they paid for. What kind of scam is Princess running here!?
  2. Someone in their group reported it's a medical emergency
  3. In terms of the upcoming 2024 season, it's a case of whether your cruise line (not you) booked the itinerary before the referendum vote (ie Nov 8, 2022). So if Royal Caribbean, for instance, had the paperwork for your cruise with a Bar Harbor stop "on the books" before that November 2022 vote, that ship's Bar Harbor stop would be grandfathered in. If your cruise line (not you) booked the itinerary after Nov. 8, 2022, theoretically, you would be unable to stop there. And yes, any appeal by the plaintiffs would probably keep the cruise season open while it's worked out in the courts. Some interesting insights on Sea Trade Cruise News including a quote from a Holland America rep saying all their 2024 cruises will go on as they were locked down before the town vote.
  4. Has anyone attended a formal Princess book club lately? (One where Princess selects the book title for that quarter and provides multiple copies of it in the ship libraries?) I'm guessing from this notice on the main website it might be another program that's bit the dust.
  5. I can meet you at the port and play your grandchild for the week if you'd like! 😝
  6. Thanks, good point. Plans are to take my tea ball infuser to the Windjammer at breakfast and steep using their hot water. Discard the used leaves from the infuser into a napkin or a to-go cup and toss as normal buffet trash. No worse than disposing a tea bag. But you're right, I might want to enjoy a cup on the balcony for which I'll need to employ a mindful disposal plan. (That is, if I didn't get denied boarding for contraband! 🙂 ) Thanks everyone for your thoughts on this.
  7. Has anyone here ever tried to bring loose tea leaves onboard a Royal ship? I would like to start the day with the tea I enjoy, rather than steeping the mass produced teabags available onboard, but fear being called down to the bad boy room suspected of being a pot smuggler! Any experience with this. Serious replies only please! 😁
  8. Prologue Remember back in the day, when taking a math test in high school, one of the questions would invariably read “be sure to show all your work”? Well, think of this trip report like it’s one of those math problems. One in which we’re going to be showing you, our honorable teachers, all our work - without having to resort to the dreaded quadratic equation. Hopefully. Our adventure takes place on a relatively rare cruise itinerary, a 2-night-only Freedom of the Seas sailing from Miami to CocoCay and back. No other ports, no days at sea, no formal nights, not even a chance to say hello to your cabin steward before he’s slapping the disembarkation baggage tags in your hands and telling you to get off “his ship”. The sailing was from Monday - Feb 7th to Wednesday - Feb 9th, 2022... Which, as you can imagine, really made our bosses happy with us. Ultimately, this was a relatively inexpensive cruise, booked last-minute and rather impetuously, with only one goal in mind: secure 4 Crown and Anchor cruise credit points so we could become Diamond Plus for the other cruises we had booked this year. It would end up being the costliest points we have ever earned! So Who Books a 2-Day Cruise? The short answer? Desperate people lost in a hopeless loyalty points Ponzi scheme. When we initially considered booking this unusual, 2-night, Freedom of the Seas cruise, I had to keep reminding Mrs. Winks, “This is a work trip, not a vacation. It’s really all about the points.” She packed her flip-flops, bathing suits, and snorkel gear, anyway. I had to draw the line at bringing door art! This trip was solely about the points. There really could be no other justification. Especially because we live in New York where a sailing like this entails taking one of those live-proctored Covid tests, where you can’t hear what the off-shore instructor is telling you to do, only to wake up the next morning at some ungodly hour, to schlepp to the airport, braving sub-freezing temperatures, deal with TSA security lines, harried travelers and the whole mask thing, to take a flight (that gets delayed for 5 hours, btw), pay for a night in a Miami hotel – because perish the thought anyone fly in the day of the cruise – just so we could repeat the process, in reverse, less than 48-hours later. Utter madness! So why did we do it? Because having pulled several all-nighters running the numbers - using a slide rule, protractor, a compass, and eventually a rusting old T-square I luckily found hanging on the wall in the garage – Mrs. Winks and I calculated, with full-certainty, that we were just 3-points shy of becoming Diamond Plus members in Royal’s Crown & Anchor pyramid scheme. Our D+ status was so close, we could almost taste that extra free drink ticket! So, by booking this piddly, 2-night cruise, in a Junior Suite, on Freedom, we could secure the 4 required loyalty-program points to toss us over the transom and into that rarified air savored by only Royal’s most deserving elites… the Diamond Plus aristocracy, the highest echelon of C&A status! (well, if you don’t count those pompous Pinnacles! Jeez, talk about needing to get a life!) So, of course we went and booked it! As a side note, this whole “business trip” (as I kept having to remind Mrs. Winks - who was treating this jaunt like it was about anything other than points acquisition on the cheap) was actually inspired by an anomalous Princess Cruise sailing that used to run out of Seattle. Have you heard about this one? More than a few Captain’s Club members on that line had figured out a way to game the Princess loyalty program system using a one-night cruise leg from Seattle to Vancouver, part of a larger itinerary to Alaska. How did that work? (Sorry, it involves more math stuff). Unlike Royal Caribbean, Princess gives you one loyalty program point for every completed cruise, regardless of its duration. In the Princess program, you can get to their top tier (Elite) after amassing 15 points. So what Princess cruisers learned is that they could earn an entire cruise credit just for taking this one-night cruise out of Seattle. Point-wise, it was equivalent to taking a typical 5 or 7 or 10-day cruise, but without having to lay out all that scratch. While not strictly an apples-to-apples comparison, this 2-night Freedom cruise was allotting Mrs. Winks and me the same opportunity. We would secure the requisite points to obtain Diamond Plus level, without having to pay for a longer cruise. How gangsta be that? Irrational and silly, I know. But, if it all worked out, we would enjoy our next two cruises this year (all pandemic Lift and Shifts) as D+’ers. Taunting Diamonds with our extra daily drink ticket and our free bag of laundry. And we relished in that thought. Capeesh? Obviously, we were both completely mad. Okay, so enough with all the loyalty program gaming and painfully boring math. The rest of this review will describe our adventures on the shortest cruise we’ve ever taken - essentially a trip to CocoCay and back. With Mrs. Winks thinking she’s on a full-blown cruise vacation - trying to squeeze 7-days’ worth of activities into 2, and me just hoping we complete the journey in one piece… simply for the points. Be sure to Follow this review if you’d like to hear more about the longest travel-day ever, our brief hotel stay at the Marriott Key Biscayne in Miami, sneaking onto the ship as early as possible, a tour of our Junior Suite accommodations, our thoughts on CocoCay – remarkably, our first time ever being there - and sailing on this ship at half passenger capacity. And did we mention The Monsters of Rock? More to come.... Freedom docked at CocoCay on February 8, 2022.
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