TravelingEA

Your inside passage voyages (usually from Vancouver) are much calmer. Unfortunately, they only do one way passages (Vancouver to Whittier/Whittier to Vancouver). The good is that the smaller ships like the Coral Princess make this run. Given a choice...I would do the inside passage with Glacier Bay.

We were on the Emerald in May - Round trip inside passage from Vancouver. It may have been the only one of the season, but that is the reason we took it.

What month did you visit Tracy Arm?

We went in May all 3 times. The Tracey Arm and 1st Glacier Bay was about the week before Memorial Day. Glacier Bay this year was a week earlier.

I believe it has been mentioned before that OBC cannot be used in the casino.

We have in the past. Put some money (from OBC) on the card and cashed it out at the money cage.

We have been to Glacier Bay 2 times and Tracy Arm once. We did do the small boat excursion in Tracy Arm. We were in Glacier Bay last week. Both my wife & I thought Tracy Arm was preferable. It may not have been without taking the small boat excursion though. We did see bear on the small boat excursion on the shore.

We normally have $600-800 in on board credits and we do not drink much. The way we burn the money is to schedule excursions through princess (even though higher priced) I guess will will have to do the slot machine game to get use of our on board credits in the future.

We just got off the Emerald on May 20th. I could not believe how much they were pushing Share. The was a presentation in the Piazza for the up-charge restaurants on the ship. They were handing out menus for Share, but not for any other venues. When I told the guy, no, I was not interested, he did not want to take no for an answer and tried make me take a menu. There was also a Share sign up whenever we went to Horizon Court. It must not be very successful, if they need to push it so hard. Normally, I do not see Princess as a hard sell ship.

Thank you. We board tomorrow in Vancouver.

Yes, the 1 nights do count. Book single inside (can usually get around $30 if you time it right), then have SO book your preferred cabin (be it inside, OV, Balcony). You can both stay in preferred cabin and collect 2 cruise credits each. Normally you can book 3 - 4 one nights a year...so 6 - 8 cruise credits per year. When our kids were still home, we could only get away for a night so we did achieve Elite with very few days. Now our kids our out of the house and we still do the one nights, squished in-between at least a couple 7 or 10 nights.

That is very easy for someone who lives in the Pacific Northwest, however, it is very difficult if a person is not anywhere close to a cruise port.

There are no RMD's for a ROTH IRA :)

There is for those who inherit a ROTH IRA.

I have mine in a Roth IRA account. It is the only stock in the account. Rather than cash dividends, I do dividend reinvestment, so the dividends buy me added shares of Carnival stock. When I am no longer around, my kids can take the RMDs from the Roth account.

My daughter went on her first Princess Cruise a couple of years ago. Prior to that, she had been on Carnival and Royal Caribbean. We asked the steward about towel animals. He made her 2-3 each night. My daughter was about 30 at the time. Ask and you will receive.

I have an application called Tripit. Whenever I get a travel related email, it puts it into the app with the itinerary. It does keep the history, so I can look back. It keeps things like confirmation numbers etc.

Have you considered renting a car? You can pick up the car at Canada Place and drop it at Seatac. The last time we did this it was about $50.

Why don't any cruise lines sail out of Milwaukee or Duluth? I would love to not have to pay as much for airfare as I pay for a cruise. I don't feel to bad for those who live with in driving distance of a cruise port.

Thanks for all of the information. I told my wife this is what she should do with me, when the time comes.

I apologize for clogging up the boards with a question that I even asked early on and cannot find it now. So here goes again: We will be on the Crown Princess 3-25-17 and will not be doing the formal nights in the MDR. We want others to enjoy dressing up so my question is Can you just do casual elegance in the Crown Grill or Sabatinis on formal nights? We can eat anywhere and want everyone to enjoy their dining experience formal or not.

Yes, you can do "non-formal" at the Crown Grill on formal night. We do it all the time, rather than packing formal clothing for formal night. There are usually a few people in the Crown Grill dressed up in gowns and tuxes.

We were picked up in Tracy Arm - we got off on the tender exit. We have met in the theater before. I think there were 2 small boats that picked up passengers. It was in May and we overheard the driver of the boat say they really should not have been there. There were quite a few icebergs on the way that he was running over. It was the first trip of the season. I had heard that some of the small boat excursions after us, were cancelled. It was a great excursion. We saw a couple of bear on the shore line as well as seals? on the chunks of ice floating. We were dropped of at the ship, the same way - into the tender entrance on the ship in Juneau. We saw quite a few whales on the way back to Juneau after we got out in the open.

Hi! We are arriving on Princess at 0730 and depart at 1600.

 

Is this enough time to take a tour of Tracy Arm Fjord? If so can anyone recommend a charter tour group?

 

Thanks.

When we went in May, we took a small ship excursion that picked us up from the ship. The ship went on its way to Juneau and we went to Sawyer Glacier. We were dropped of at the ship in Juneau.

Not quite. Regal calls in on both E & W voyages. CB is also working the Caribbean and has many calls there. For the near term, those are the three ships regularly working the zone. Princess used to have a 4th ship with regular runs. So they are using it, but less opportunities to call in.

We were on the Eastern Caribbean in December on the Regal. We stopped at Amber Cove instead. Didn't Carnival Corp. develop Amber Cove for their ships?

We received the blue bags on the Regal in December

The pub lunch was on the Regal on the last sea day in December.

The department of transportation in the state I live in sell your information as well. I don't think there is an opt out for that.

This is a long story so bear with me. I happened to be looking over my booking last night and noticed an error with my address and went in to change it but every time I hit save, the website would revert it back to the incorrect address.

 

So I call into Princess to see if they can fix it and the service rep was having the same problem so she called someone in Captain's Circle to see if they knew what the deal was. Then that person said that they have a database supplied by the postal system so I need to call them and get them to fix it. So I then call the Post Office and give them my address and they say it shows up fine in their system so it must be Princess.

 

I then call back into Princess to tell them what I found out so they fool around some more and still can't get it to work. They then tell me that they're going to show it to someone else today and to call back tonight for an update.

 

It just boggles my mind that it's that difficult for them to manually override something in their system. So, I spent about 3 hours on the phone last night between Princess and the Post Office trying to get this issue sorted out and was wondering if you guys thought it would be unreasonable for me to ask for additional credit or something for wasting my time.

We had the same thing with the SS admin. They could not find our address, but got no compensation for it.

You must cruise on the RUBY because of GLACIER BAY!! The RUBY, CROWN AND EMERALD are the same style of ships.

 

Chose Ruby because it presently has an OBC credit of $210, or higher.

 

Satxdiver is so right about the crew workers always changing. You can always change tables if you are not happy with your waiters or your table mates.

 

I would choose the Ruby because it does have a lot of activities and I cruise a lot on it. I just got off in Nov. and will cruise again on Feb. for my birthday. I am getting $175. for OBC.

 

I did a search for Alaska cruises. I noticed that HAL stops in Sitka the Russian style port. Have you been to Sitka since you say you are from Alaska.

It has been years since I have been there. I miss cruising to Sitka.

 

My cousin says that cruising in Sept. is super cold but the stores will be having some great sales on their things before they close down for the winter. I would like to buy me another winter jacket there. LucyR.

We are going on the Emerald in May - we will be going to both Sitka and Glacier Bay.

We rented from Alamo at Canada Place. It was a great experience. We had a one way from Canada Place to Seatac. We could drive on our own time, stop when we wanted, etc. The cost for 2 of us was much less than what a shuttle would have been and much more convenient. The Alamo agent actually took us to our car, instead of saying it was in a particular stall, and have us find it on our own.