FionaMG

Safe travels home @themillennialcruiser and thanks again for sharing your amazing cruise.

Love the pic of the two of you on the balcony.

Congratulations! A cruise in a royal suite is a worthy graduation present indeed.

My daughter did say it very much reminds her of Norway.

Mine actually updated a couple of days before the email went out. I didn’t realise what was happening at the time.

I believe you are in for a real treat. I have not been to Kotor myself yet (hoping to get there next year) but my daughter is currently working on a ship that is calling there weekly and she says it is stunning.

True, but I wish they would offer much more detailed info, like Princess do. Not that I've sailed on Princess either but I've dipped into their excursion descriptions on a number of occasions and they're great.

Tbh, I don't think shady is the right word, given that's there's no obvious intention to mislead. But I would say it's incompetence by the content writer and this is fairly common with Royal's copy in lots of areas. They could definitely do much better.

I haven't sailed with Celebrity but I have always found Royal's excursion descriptions to be very sadly lacking in detail.

I wonder if it's anything to do with the fact that you're booking on the Singapore website? Perhaps Royal are restricting suite offerings for that market for some reason.

Oh, I did not know that. Thanks for correcting.

Don't blame you. You got a cracking deal!

Just out of curiosity, for those not aware of the story behind the four MDRs on Quantum class ships, they are the result of the ill-fated "dynamic dining" concept that Royal invented when designing those ships. The idea was that each MDR would offer a different menu and guests would rotate between them accompanied by their dining room servers. The décor of each room was designed to correspond to the particular type of cuisine served there. The whole thing was very short-lived as Royal traditionalists shot it down in flames in short order and the different cuisines and menus were subsequently replaced with an identical menu for everyone irrespective of the room. I never got to try it but SIL and her daughter were on the first Ovation sailing from Southampton to Barcelona and they really liked the concept. For the newest ship in the class, Odyssey OTS, which is actually deemed as "Quantum+", the designers reverted to having one large open (and very attractive, imo) dining room instead of the four different ones.

If you forget, you can still screenshot the app for several hours after disembarking. I don't know exactly when the app rolls over from one sailing to the next but both sailings (the one that's just ended and the one that's just starting) exist simultaneously for a while.

193 for me since I moved back to the original Freedom sailing because I really wanted the itinerary. And very recently there was a huge price drop on it that let me choose and upgrade to a spacious balcony cabin and still save on the cost of my original OV.

Yes, big shout out to her. She's the one who's had the patience of a saint sorting out my uncooperative credit card issue over the holiday weekend.

Not in and of itself. I've used a virutal card consistently in the past to pay off my cruises and it's never been a problem before. But if they were "checking" the card using the full value, the actual payment would inevitably be declined because it would push the total over the amount on the card. Luckily I have another card with a much higher ceiling and that one worked. It's just annoying because the original card gets me airline miles so I lost out on those this time.

Wow, what a lot you packed into your day! Fabulous pics.

Thanks for sharing @themillennialcruiser. I'm following along with interest as I am looking to do a similar itinerary next year if I can make the dates work for us. I agree the whole Ravenna thing is a royal PITA.

Another FYI for the new cruiser. Your price might be different depending on where you are. I'm guessing from your date format you're probably not in the US, so your price might be in British pounds or some other currency. Either way, if you want it, it's going to be cheaper to buy it in the cruise planner before you board. But given that your sailing is less than a week away, you only have a few more days to be able to do that. The cruise planner usually locks down about 48 hours before sailing, after which you'll be stuck with the more expensive onboard price (and what that will be is anybody's guess).

At the risk of getting caught up in your shenanigans, there are some VERY good prices on Freedom in the first two weeks of December... DH and I are booked on the 8-night sailing on the 7th of December. This was a shenanigan in itself. Royal cancelled it and several others around the same date then subsequently re-instated them, at which point they contacted everyone who had been shifted and asked if they'd like to move back! We did because we wanted the itinerary but others preferred to stick with some very lucrative deals that they'd snagged by being moved to Oasis with price protection. This will be our first time on any Freedom class ship.

Yes, I always do this. As well as helping remember their names it also ensures you're able to spell them correctly.

That's interesting. I will have to try and check that out after my next one.

I haven't received a paper copy on the door or an email copy since the restart. Now I make a point of getting one at guest services before heading to bed on the last night.

This is exactly why it sounds yukky to me.