IDB37

Many thanks for your kind help both !

Hi

We're considering taking a south Pacific cruise on Coral Princess & have in mind a BB cabin on Baja deck. We are light sleepers & want to minimise noise as much as possible.

Question - does anyone know which side the interior doors open for staterooms B317 - B433 ?, i.e. is the entrance to these interior staterooms from the Port side (i.e. directly opposite staterooms B314-B414) or Starboard (i.e. directly opposite staterooms B315-B427) ?

(I thought there were deck plans that showed this information, but I can't find them anywhere online).

Many thanks for any info. anyone can provide re this.

New to this thread, so many apologies if this has been answered before.

Does anyone know where Sapphire is going from May - November 2022 ? 

Princess are currently showing the ship completing the trans pacific cruises in April & then nothing until Nov 17th LA to Hawaii, Mexico & back to LA.

We are booked on the Auckland to San Francisco cruise from 8th - 29th April 2022, but aren't feeling too confident that it's actually going to happen, unless there's a marked improvement in the situation in NZ.

1) Fly in hundreds of crew from all over the world.

2) Assign them to crew quarters, minimum two people in very cramped cabin accommodation, including shared bathroom facilities.

3) Send them off to their designated roles including food preparation for thousands of guests, entertainment and other customer service face to face roles.

Surely the weakest link above is (2), which subject doesn't seem to get much discussion. Possibly because it would be hugely time consuming and expensive and to fix !

Does anyone have any news re Serenade of the Seas for fall 2021 and whether she is heading down under via a re-positioning transpacific  cruise ?

(Apologies if this has been covered elsewhere).

Many thx..

a) Significantly enhanced on board medical facilities, free of cost to all passengers.

b) Lower prices. Peoples fear tends to dilute when they see what they believe is a genuine good deal. (Remember British Airways seven day sale after 9/11 ? One long haul destination on sale a day, at ridiculously low prices).

(I have no idea about the commercial viability of (a) !).

Interesting debate.

We've often wondered about taking an 'around Britain' cruise, but have been put off by the fact that the itineraries seem largely to visit only Scottish & Irish ports, plus maybe Liverpool & Southampton.

There are some wonderfully scenic areas up the north coast of Cornwall (e.g. St. Ives, Padstow, Boscastle, Bude), Devon (e.g. Clovelly, Woollacombe, Lynton & Lynmouth) & across to West Somerset (e.g. Minehead, Porlock & Exmoor) & I wonder why these places don't feature ?

I'm not sure which if any Ports would be large enough, but one would think tendering could be an option. The only other thing I can think of is whether the tidal flows are unduly difficult ?

My apologies @mayleeman, I hadn't seen your prior post.

Yes, the crew accommodation & working conditions are subjects that haven't really seen the light of day yet. But they are surely fundamental issues that will need to be addressed, if we are all to feel safe again.

Haven't seen much discussion about crew conditions onboard.

Even if every new (passenger focussed) 'hygeine' measure is implemented, the vast majority of the crew will still be living/sleeping in extremely cramped conditions, sharing bathrooms and eating facilities etc..

I hadn't really thought much about this until Covid arrived on the scene, but it does make me feel very uneasy about getting on board until those issues are addressed.

Given the cost and time implications of doing so, I'm really not sure how, when or if that can realistically happen.

I've read a fair bit about the measures that are likely to be taken by Princess (& other Cruise lines) to improve ship cleanliness, food service, hand washing, etc. etc., but this quote from the news article referred to above, attributed to the CDC, is one which makes me feel more uneasy still:

"There are also crew members who, in addition to being low-paid, sleep in communal quarters. They have bunk beds. They share bathrooms. They often eat together at mess halls".

Whilst it only states what I imagine we all already know, it begs the question how on earth can these issues be resolved, without massively redesigning the crew quarters, with all the inherent cost and time implications.

1 hour ago, Selbourne said:

I agree that Boris always wanted the job, well at least since he discovered that there was no such job as ‘World King’, but the suggestion that he missed ‘critical’ COBRA meetings has been widely disputed and seems a bit tenuous. Funny old world Politics. From my experience in business, the best CEO’s delegate and empower their senior teams. They have a handle on the business but resist the temptation to meddle in the detail as it’s often counter productive as well as infuriating to those whose job is to manage said details. The best ones that I have worked for have been strategic, charismatic, bright and good with people of all types. As I say, politics is an odd world that I wouldn’t last 5 minutes in, as many of the traits that make a good CEO of a business are somehow seen by some as weaknesses. 
 

As for Dominic Cummings, he strikes me as a completely odious man and an odd ball, but he is who Boris chooses as his senior advisor so he obviously has talents that aren’t apparent to us armchair critics and in that role he absolutely should attend key meetings, even when Boris is in attendance. It would seem odd to me if he didn’t. 
 

As for preparedness, we couldn’t have possibly pre-empted a ‘once in 100 years’ pandemic of this scale and it would have been ludicrous to operate a health system that would be under utilised for 99 years out of 100. Same goes for PPE. We’ve never needed this amount before, hence very little is produced here, but now the whole world is chasing it. Again, hindsight is a wonderful thing. 
 

The vast majority of the population including, it has to be said, those on the left, feel that the government has handled the situation well, as confirmed by several polls. I am staggered at how the Nightingale Hospitals have been kitted out so quickly and it is surely a sign of excellent crisis management that we may end up not needing them. 
 

The whole crisis is indeed frightening though, but one thing still terrifies me more. The thought that we could have been going through all of this with Comrade Corbyn, Dianne Abbott etc in charge. God help us. It gives me the shivers just thinking about it 😉

An excellent summary of the whole situation. Well said and well written.

As for those who constantly carp, nothing the Government does will ever be recognised as positive. If they announced tomorrow that a cure had miraculously been found, the response of the perennial whiners would be to ask them to apologise for not finding it sooner.

2 minutes ago, zap99 said:

Don't like Banff. We were staying in the Fairmont. I said to DW let's get the bus back to the hotel. I said to the driver, 1 and a senior to Banff springs please. Only one senior sir. My dear wife was super peeved.

lol. Bet you were popular. 🙂

3 minutes ago, wowzz said:

The problem is that most of those in power have never worked in a proper job. Would you employ Matt Hancock in any commercial enterprise?

Debateable, but likely not.

Unless it was a choice between him & Albert Steptoe, in which case he'd be a shoe-in.

Respectfully, whilst you make some valid points, the word 'underfunded' is entirely subjective.

As for the problem of other treatements/surgeries being cancelled, having 'cleared the decks' for everything Covid related, that is a problem in most Countries right now. It certainly is here in Canada & I believe also in the US. 

5 minutes ago, Harry Peterson said:

To be accurate,  it wasn't built in 9 days. The building was already there, and it was a straightforward internal conversion job, akin to shopfitting. 

 

It was sensible to do it, to counter the dire shortage of NHS beds built up, but the problem has been staffing it, because of the dire shortage of staff built up.  Patients have been sent away for lack of staff, and had it not been for this and similar shortages elsewhere our appalling death rate, already heading for 30,000 in just the first wave, would be lower.

Yes, of course there have been problems, and hard lessons are and will continue to be learned.

I just take the view that the constant Government bashing achieves very little. Those who have political agenda's based on proir lost battles will of course continue to do so, but I incline to the view, that most of those in power are doing their utmost to manage their way through this crises in the best way possible.

1 minute ago, Harry Peterson said:

I see no evidence that the Sunday Times report is being widely derided  - except by those whose political agenda it doesn't suit.

 

And as more and more comes out about what's been going on (or rather not going on because the PM wasn't bothering to turn up to critical meetings) support for the government is falling.

 

And just what IS Dominic Cummings doing at SAGE meetings?

Well, as he's the PM's senior Adviser, I assume he's there to learn & to report on what goes on back to Boris when he returns to the Office tomorrow Harry.

Even Nick Clegg's former adviser James Sorene say's it's a non-issue & that he used to attend SAGE meetings during the swine flu epidemic.

Lol, that's a pretty fair assessment !

We overlook the Rocky mountains, which is one of the joyful consolations of being largely 'confined to barracks'.

Unfortunately, Calgary and Alberta are suffering in the extreme right now from the consequences of the oil crash, coupled with the impact of Covid. The 2020 Stampede has just been cancelled for the first time for 100 years or so and Banff is pretty well a ghost town (albeit hopefully has the cushion of some hugely successful years over recent times to fall back on).

Vancouver has fared better, but will greatly be impacted by the loss of the cruise market unfortunately.

Hopefully circumstances will allow you to visit this wonderful area again before too long. 

9 hours ago, Tommart said:

I'm not sure how much you know about the situation in the UK, but it's become very clear over the last few days, following a detailed report in the Times (Coronavirus: 38 days when Britain sleepwalked into disaster), that the government acted far too late - it's one of the reasons our NHS workers are facing shortages of protective equipment, and it's one of the reasons our death rate is now heading for Italy's.  There were no queues outside hospitals, but people still died, and the 20,000 deaths now reported don't include thousands of deaths in care homes and elsewhere.  These are just the hospital deaths.

 

More than 100 NHS workers have died as a consequence of the delays in providing equipment (still going on).  Nothing was done in February when we should have been taking action based on Wuhan and Italy, and Boris Johnson skipped five Cobra meetings on the virus because he didn't see it as important. At that time he was concentrating on his interesting private life.

 

This from a senor advisor to Downing Street: 

 

“There’s no way you’re at war if your PM isn’t there. And what you learn about Boris was he didn’t chair any meetings. He liked his country breaks. He didn’t work weekends. It was like working for an old-fashioned chief executive in a local authority 20 years ago. There was a real sense that he didn’t do urgent crisis planning. It was exactly like people feared he would be.”

 

The government did too little, far too late, and the economic and health consequences are disastrous.

 

As another posted has pointed out, the Sunday Times hatchet job was widely derided for inaccuracy. Unsurprising coming from the same publication that paid a fortune for and published the 'Hitler Diaries' , which turned out to be fake.

Based on the article and poll below, It would seem most people do not share your assessment of the UK Government. As you'll see from the very last sentence however, whatever reservations they may have re politicians are dwarfed by their extreme contempt for TV journalists and newspapers:

https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-britons-still-support-lockdown-despite-being-sadder-and-more-anxious-poll-11977655

7 hours ago, wowzz said:

Perhaps you would care to tell us from the depths of Calgary, exactly how many people have been treated in the Nightingale hospital in London ? Can you also tell us how many people have been screened at the drive in testing centres? 

Strangely enough, it is possible to listen to UK news, LBC & even the jaundiced BBC, from Calgary. Not sure if you're aware of that from the cosy fields of Lincolnshire. And as a UK Citizen and expat., I do so daily. 

There have been no more than a handful of people treated at the Nightingale in London, but being built in nine days to ensure sufficient capacity, was a fantastic achievement, which no doubt you choose to overlook as it doesn't fit your agenda. 

5 hours ago, wowzz said:

I'm not sure who you are listening to, but if it's Matt Hancock,  I would ignore everything he says.  

At the moment,  I would prefer Mrs Merkel to take over - look at how the Germans are controlling the situation. We are being lead by donkeys. Empty hospital beds,  empty testing centres, people being denied cancer treatment,  transplants, etc. It's a total shambles.

The only people that are happy are the police, who suddenly are out in force to stop you sitting on a bench,  or seeing if your shopping is essential.  

If the UK Government hadn't ensured sufficiency of ICU capacity by taking over the private Health sector beds and building Nightingdale Hospitals in record times, and there had then been a bed shortage (like Italy), no doubt you would also be complaining vociferously about that.

For my part, I agree completely with ADawn47's post above.

8 hours ago, Harry Peterson said:

I'd back their journalism (and they have a good track record of getting the right information because they have good sources) against the likes of the tabloids, who just print whatever lies will sell their papers!

Hmmmm..........I seem to recall the small matter of the Adolf Hitler Diaries !

You're very welcome. It was a wonderful day.

I'm guessing the climax of that game was enjoyed on quite a few ships across the oceans !

Lol - I can tell you guys are big cricket fans, so here's a quick 1 1/2 minute video clip of the last over of the World Cup Final at Lord's last summer, just to remind everyone what they're missing !!:

Yes, the lack of Hockey is also a pain, but as a UK expat., the absence of sound of willow on leather is what is really causing me pain !

1 hour ago, JAMESCC said:

Don't we all. We want people to stop dying from this virus, we want people to go back to work and the economy to open up again and then on a small selfish note we want to start cruising again. Oh and i want baseball back! Lets go Mets. 😂

Never mind baseball.

What about the Cricket season ? 

🙂

Covid aside, isn't how long we live the ultimate age discriminator ?

The average life expectancy for a female in the western world is around four years longer than for a male. That's why life insurance costs less for ladies. 

Complaining about age discrimination just ignores the reality that Cruiselines have to deal with.