AshleyDillo

You have to apply it to a single sailing. It will be available for you to use for pre-cruise purchases in the Cruise Planner and anything left over will be available to spend onboard. If you don't spend it all before you leave the ship you would lose it. You can always cash it out by charging to your room at the casino cashier as with no casino loyalty status it's only a 5% fee, so you'd still be getting 20% back.

A lot of people want the Diamond status because it gets them access to the Diamond Lounge and Diamond Happy Hour. After another next big perk comes at the 350 point mark (I think) is where the solo supplement is only 50%, so if you're sailing by yourself you don't have to pay double. That could be a pretty significant per sailing cost. Those two perks to me ones that are worth the intentional climb.

I wonder if this is the big announcement that was hinted at.

Once you connect to the ship's wifi you can actually make reservations in the app. I was able to make same day reservations when I had the UDP (albeit for the super early 5pm and super late 9pm time slots). It's handy if you want to plan to pop in somewhere for a snack pre-dinner or dessert post-dinner.

Usually they have some tiny print somewhere..but I can't find anything for this one. Makes me wonder if the banner shouldn't have been made active yet..typical Royal IT.

I would skim and look for Southern Caribbean itineraries as some of the commonly visited islands on those itineraries are close to South America. You can also use Google Maps (maps.google.com) and type in the name of the port and when you zoom out you can easily see where it is located relative to Florida which should give you a sense of how far south the island is. The Eastern Caribbean itineraries will include the Bahamas but will also get you further south. Western Caribbean will nearly always include Cozumel and Costa Maya which is further south as well. Basically, just avoid itineraries that only have "Bahamas" in the title.

They gave the option to elect for 125% OBC over a cash refund for Cruise Planner Purchases for some of the cancelled cruises.

This this this. Ignore the percentage off teaser and look at the price. Just keep track of items that you are interested in and monitoring the pricing on them. You can come to the boards and bounce ideas off of us here and folks who have the same ship/ports booked can all check their CP and give you an idea of what pricing looks like and how far away their cruise is. The good thing with CP purchases is that it's pretty simple to cancel and repurchase when the price is lower, especially if you are using a credit card and not a debit card (for not tying up money issues).

My interpretation of this is just simply that cruiselines have to comply with the Vessel Sanitation Program which is is run by the CDC. Basically that ends up making CDC be a health and safety regulatory agency for the cruise industry. Other travel and leisure industries don't fall under the jurisdiction and control of the CDC in this same manner.

That's just the way the site is programmed. The site by default will show prices based on the current sale, but as soon as you try to tell it you want to see the C&A price, it will give you that which may not be combined with the sale price. The C&A discount is a flat discount based on level, so it isn't always the biggest savings.

What sort of public administration retirement plan oversight committee would allow this kind of a corporate investment anyways? Where does the fiduciary responsibility of the plan administrator kick in?

After all the passengers had long departed and the crew members were the only ones left on the ships for months, they still made all the crew members wear masks outside of their cabins. This is as close to a bubble as you could imagine as they would be at sea for weeks. The only interaction with anyone out of the bubble would have been during provisioning. Doesn't make sense that is no one new was being introduced to a bubble that they would still need masks after the quarantine/incubation period, but they still required them.

Perhaps wishful thinking and keeping the cash register open. I think things are just so uncertain that they don't really know what it will look like at this point until they get an actual start date for sailings. With the requirements for prospective passengers to provide proof of a negative COVID test, that may thin the pool out as some people may not want to be responsible for seeking out testing. I can see once there is an actual start date that they would end out letters of what will be required of passengers to be able to sail and that could cause further cancellations. I am sure at that point they will have decided exactly where they would want to house people on the ship and have plans to move around those that are still wishing to sail. We don't really see the entire picture with respect to cabin availability from Royal's site. They may be holding back contingency space to move people around if that's part of their operations plan. We don't truly know yet. They may end up needing to do what they did with the Quantum sailings and flat out cancel everyone and reopen bookings for a completely new itinerary depending on port restrictions. I can see this being a more likely outcome once they know they will be able to start the slow rollout to sailing again. It has already been said that the entire fleet isn't going to come back at once. We don't even know for sure which ships are going to be part of the first sailings yet.

I've stayed at the Doubletree Biscayne Bay and it was a decent hotel. Walking distance to restaurants and a grocery store to pick up wine/water/soda to bring onboard or any last minute things you forgot or didn't want to pack. I made some comments about the hotel (with bad photos) at the beginning of my Thanksgiving 2019 live blog here:

Unfortunately it doesn't seem that things will change. Since Royal has pushed out their Cruise With Confidence program, most of the terms have remained pretty consistent and the only way to get a full refund without a refundable deposit is to make the final payment for the cruise and then have it canceled by the cruiseline. The good news here is that if you cancel with Cruise With Confidence, you will get the full $500 credit towards rebooking another cruise whereas prior to the pandemic a cancellation would have resulted in you losing $100 per person. You may want to look into a Lift and Shift and push the cruise out to January/February 2022. (Might I suggest Harmony January 16, 2022 - sail with me! ?) This way you will maintain your current rate that you booked and it pushes out your final payment a bit. Either way you are either going to lose the $500 or have it tied up, but at least a L&S lets your decision come further down the line.

Location no longer matters when dealing with a TA since most no longer operate out of a physical location. They will respond to phone calls, emails, texts, etc, whatever is the most comfortable way for you to communicate. I'm sure others will chime in with their specific MEI TA recommendations, but you will find that any of the ones that you would be assigned to from the Get A Free Quote sidebar on the main page of the blog should be very well versed in Royal Caribbean cruising. You aren't married to a specific TA. If you don't happen to jive with one for any reason, you can always choose to go with a different one.

I think the Royal UP was actually handled by a third party company. Are we sure that company is still even in business at this point? I think they handled the NCL bidding program too.

This post mentions an email. but states it is for the 125% FCCs only. http://creative.rccl.com/Sales/Royal/General_Info/Cancelled_Sailings_FAQs_0324.pdf Celebrity has this, but I can't found anything royal like this: http://creative.rccl.com/Sales/Celebrity/General_Info/ITK/GSS_CWC_OverviewGrid_Sept29.pdf

True. That behavior was happening anyways, though. Locally it has always been on the business to turn a customer away despite the county mask mandate. But now the business at least isn't at risk of losing their business license if their customers don't comply with the mask mandate. It's back being as enforceable as "no shirts, no shoes, no service" for the business -- the business can make the decision to enforce it or look the other way, but they won't get in legal trouble for it.

Maybe they added the pullman indicator to include rooms where the rollaway is also an option which would explain the loft suites getting it. I can't see how 5 adults in a GS is going to be comfortable at all, though.

Heck, even my Florida hometown ACC team's coach tested positive. The team still played without him as coach that weekend. I always assumed the point of the initial lockdown was to stop rapid spreading that would overwhelm our medical care infrastructure. A byproduct of that is that it bought us time to learn more about the virus and now we are getting to the point where the impact is understood more and we know how to mitigate the risk a bit better. Now it's time to keep implementing the practices to keep moving forward and slowly reopening everything. It's still personal choice whether someone wants to patronize a private business but at least the businesses are allowed to be open so you can make that choice.

Unfortunately we can't count on everyone to do the right thing, so even if they tried to restrict cruising to those who have done an isolation quarantine, people are still going to lie about their compliance. They would be hard-pressed to find folks to be the guinea pigs for first cruises that will do the isolation thing. Folks that can honestly say they have had zero contact with anyone else in the past 14 days are likely not folks that would be willing to go on a cruise. It just isn't reality, so instead they have to come up with the best ways they can to reduce the risk which seems to be more frequent testing and immediate isolation of those that test positive.

This is a good point. Then even if they do one ship per day, what happens when a ship does end up with someone testing positive? Do they contract trace and find out that person visited CocoCay and thus any subsequent ship that visited CocoCay was potentially exposed via interaction with the CocoCay staff? If they truly expect to operate a ship in a bubble as much as possible, even only visiting private islands can pop the bubble if it isn't done correctly. IMO it's impossible to create a perfect bubble, so the only thing to do is to try to eliminate as much of the risk as possible.

We stayed at the Doubletree Suites in Jersey City which was a reasonable Uber/Lyft in both cost and distance from both the port and the airport. It was walking distance to the PATH so you could easily venture into NYC and it was also walking distance to a lot of shops, restaurants, and even a grocery store.

If this is something that you are seriously sweating for any/all of the reasons you mentioned, that's where Cruise with Confidence comes into play. Take the FCC and use it on a future sailing when things are more certain and there is less of a chance that you will be inconvenienced by last minute changes, restrictions, or cancellations.