karl_nj

And Cunard.

Very glad to hear that my local cruise port is making progress on resuming operations too. I was assuming the focus would be on Florida for a while.

Yes, I think this is Royals concern. In numbers, the 0.5-11 year old passenger bracket may be low, but grandma may cancel her 75th birthday cruise, and the 6 cabins of passengers booked for this trip could decide to fly to a resort in Mexico if her 11 year old granddaughter is banned from the ship.

It would be smart, but it seems like Carnival corp doesn't believe in status matches. They can't even figure out how to do a match between Princess and Cunard or HAL.

Sometimes cruise lines change. My in-laws used to love to sail on NCL in the 90's. They ended up at the highest "Latitudes" level that existed at the time (more have been added since). But then NCL implemented their "Freestyle Dining" program, and they weren't pleased. They gave it a try for a few more sailings, but they rarely sail NCL anymore. This is one reason why chasing loyalty program level's is risky. Better to pick the "best" cruise, and not limit yourself to a specific line. Perhaps that means going with Princess or HAL for that one off Alaska cruise, and then going back to your preferred cruise line for your yearly Caribbean cruise, or whatever.

Well, that would be one way to cull the number of passengers to meet the other CDC requirements... ?

And they may have a point. According to The Economist a 15 year old male who tests positive for COVID-19 has under a .01% chance of death and a .6% chance of hospitalization. See how age and illnesses change the risk of dying from covid-19 | The Economist But I don't want to drag this into covid politics, so I won't comment further.

I was never really a big fan of USA Today. The only redeeming quality they had was that they employed Gene Sloan, who did a good job covering the cruise industry. After they laid him off for cost cutting, their cruise reporting has been terrible (matching the rest of their reporting).

Dealing with the J&J stuff has probably also been taking up everyone's time. Plus, until now, there has been enough demand for the vaccine from those 16+. Only recently has demand slowed down.

I believe Pfizer completed trials for 12-15 and has submitted them to the CDC for approval.

No, I haven't been able to find the actual letter. Seems like this might be better news for NCL then Royal. It matches up with their restart plans closer (e.g. no unvaccinated children onboard).

I thought that was the NY Post, not USA Today.

The WSJ is also reporting it, and doesn't mention USAToday. Cruise operators could restart sailings out of the U.S. by mid-July, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said, paving the way to resume operations that have been suspended for longer than a year due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The CDC, in a letter to cruise-industry leaders Wednesday evening, also said cruise ships can proceed to passenger sailings without test cruises if they attest that 98% of crew members and 95% of passengers are fully vaccinated. The move was a result of twice-weekly meetings with cruise representatives over the past month, the agency said.

Yes, basically you can call in and they can cancel and rebook with the new price. I've also had luck picking seats for Air2Sea flights booked on Delta and on SAS. Not sure if it is as easy on other airlines. If you re-price and they rebook you, you need to go pick you seats again. I actually had to go into the "old" reservation, move my seats, and then go into the new reservation and pick those seats I wanted again. Cancelling it on the Air2Sea system didn't seem to cancel it on Delta's system immediately. It is a terrible website. Sometimes I'll just play around with the search criteria and the flights I want eventually show up.

Strange. Did they say why they moved you off of your return flight? Does it have to do with the change you requested from JFK to EWR?

Are the original flights you still booked still available? Or is this actually the airline consolidating flights?

I don't believe the letter actually had an end date -- "These stringent requirements will remain in place until public health conditions allow for the implementation of more lenient protocols." If you read "until October" somewhere, it's possible the assumption was that this would be until the "CDC Framework for Conditional Sailing Order for Cruise" ends on Nov 1st.

Cruise critic seems to think harmony will move to the U.K. and do U.K. only cruises this summer, based on some Facebook post by a cruise director.

Delta airlines pays little to no US taxes either. The most profitable part of the company, their loyalty program, is "SkyMiles IP .. a newly formed Cayman Islands exempted company incorporated with limited liability and an indirect wholly owned subsidiary of Delta." So i'm not sure it's really accurate to say that Delta Airlines is an "American Company" either, but nobody ever talks about this. They just like to point out that the cruise lines are all "foreign" companies. And the US airlines have received lots of pandemic aid from taxpayers.

Matt was quoted in this article about how Royal had signups for "test cruises" back in November: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-03/cruise-ship-fanatics-eagerly-volunteer-to-test-covid-virus-protocols Not sure why this is "news" now, but thought it was an interesting article none the less.

Something to keep in mind is that rooms that hold 3/4 are usually in a different (more expensive) category . So even if Passenger #3 is "free", Passenger #1 and #2 are paying a slightly higher base fare. Sometimes the difference can be very large, but I've usually noticed this when my travel agent booked me into agency group space for the double occupancy room, but was not able to do so for the triple occupancy room.

They cancelled cruises with paying customers, that doesn't necessarily mean they can't do a test cruise before May. It's all up to the CDC.

Even Celebrity doesn't appear to be totally cancelling Europe/Med (yet), but consolidating/cutting down on the number of ships sailing. Otherwise why would they be encouraging passengers on cancelled cruises to move do a different ship sailing in Europe this summer?

Is it actually possible to L&S to anything after April (or early May) 2022?

I thought FCC was associated with a specific person, and was non-transferrable?