micahd

Oh so much great advice. Thanks for the full letter @Lovetocruise2002. Hopefully come March 22 it's back to that or even better! The new cruiser should be crossing 7 months so we'll be just past the line. I tried to reserve online with "baby lastname" but it wouldn't take the due date as a birthday because it must be in the future. As everyone has suggested I'll just give Royal a call and see what they suggest we do. Like most of you we've being longing to get back to sea and are so excited to make baby's first cruise our first one back and in a suite! And thanks all for the well wishes.

Thanks to @twangsterand @Steve_for the helpful answers. We've never been able to get a suite before so I'm not as familiar with all the class breakdowns. We'll be adding a baby to the fam this summer so we'll have to try and add to the reservation after that. Hoping for a kids sail free promo we can jump on at some point.

I have one of these book on Navigator for March of 22. This will be our first time in a suite of any kind. I have two questions: 1. What tips do you frequent star-class cruises recommend for us being in a suite for the first time? 2. How difficult is it to add another passenger to the existing reservation? (booked directly with Royal)

@Mario you may be surprise at the quality of the WAN connection, newer ships have a very stable, low(er) latency connection see here. The way I understand it there is literally a satellite in geosync orbit over the Caribbean dedicated to Royal's ships. I personally know of a current charter cruise where Oasis and Symphony are using two-way videos links to connect conference sessions. Granted that's high-end gear with full cooperation of Royal's IT teams but, you get the point. This does depend on the specific ship, not all are yet equipped with this tech. Good point on the DHCP lease. Either way I definitely want to hear if you give it a try and what you discover.

I'm not all caught up in the morality of the application there but I'm excited about the technical discussion. First I'm sure the ship has many, many subnets and vlans and all that sort of fun stuff. Depending on how new/old/recently renovated the ship the more advanced the systems. IMO I doubt security would even care if you were just trying this on the network, maybe if you were trying to access internal systems, payment processing, employee networks etc. But lets be honest, IT security is nearly always an afterthought and never funded very well until a business gets caught in an actual breach of some kind. People pretty regularly post instructions on MAC cloning and using routers to share one wifi package with more devices. I would say it's unlikely that any off-the-shelf solution would work. I would expect device isolation to be enabled and that this wouldn't route internally. I would anticipate that if you bought the wifi access for two devices and used a cloud based service it would work though. If you were able to truly randomize the ports, maybe, or if you could force it over port 80 or 8080 or something common like that. The concerns would be if the DHCP lease expires on the remote phone you could drop the connection when it renews..? Personally I'd just like to see someone try, would be fun to see if it works. I think if I ever have the time for a TA or longer cruise with lots of sea days I would be trying random (read: not malicious) network stuff like this.

Closer to your sailing they will show up for free reservations in the cruise planner. Usually 60ish days out. For a good general idea of what to expect you can look up past cruise compasses of a similar sailing.

Just closing the loop on this: we are 3 days out from our cruise and they just posted all the other premium restaurants in the planner, and as @AshleyDillo mentioned they are charging a premium for some extras on valentines day. For $75/pp the Cruise Planner description is: Booked it, YOLO.

I had the UDP on Nav in January and got Izumi in port and Playmakers as we were leaving Coco Cay.

Yeah. We knew we wanted to do Hooked twice so it was a pretty good deal for us. But, it was SO. MUCH. FOOD. I couldn’t imagine eating like that for an entire week long cruise.

We got it on Black Friday for $74/person

"Inflated pricing" that sounds great... ?

Well.... we are 11 days out from this cruise and still no CP150, Jamies or Sabor. I'm guessing my best bet at this time is to get to CP150 as soon as I board to get a reservation?

Just to close this out; we had a great time on Navigator with the UDP. We hit chops on embarkation day and had no problems using the $35/pp credit at Izumi when it was open for lunch while docked in Nassau or at Playmakers when leaving Coco Cay. Also hit Johnny Rockets for a chicken finger snack and our favorite Hooked for dinner twice.

Lots of good practical tips here. My favorite packing tip is more theoretical: "Leave half the stuff, bring twice the money."

I got the same price for Navigator in January. Absolutely crazy considering it’s $94 for exactly the same thing in February on a 7-night On Harmony

Will do @twangster. Looks like chops is open on embarkation day and Izumi is open when in Nassau, at least it was back in September. So in your experience with the UDP, if the restaurant is open they accept the package and don't charge extra?

Well... did a little more googling and found this on the RC website:

We picked up the UDP for our short 3-night on Navigator in January. The wording on the website says it also includes lunch on sea-days but this cruise has no sea-days. Does anyone know if I will be able to use the package on embarkation day at Chops Grille and at Izumi for lunch while docked in Nassau? We are also planning to use it for an early snack at Johnny Rockets or playmakers and have later reservations at Chops, Jamies and Hooked but scanning through the forums I see people get various results, does anyone have experience with the current polices on Navigator?

We also rented from Advance in Curacao, it was a great experience and a great way to see the Island.

We did a similar itinerary on Navigator earlier this year. It was our ten-year anniversary and an incredible experience. In Aruba we rented a jeep and went all over the island, Conchi, the lighthouse, two or three different beaches, the house of cake and the flying fishbone restaurant. In Curaçao we rented a car and hit several beaches including Playa Grandi first thing in the morning where we swam with several wild sea turtles. That was the experience of a lifetime. We stoped at a local grocery store for lunch and hit a few beaches before we spent some time in the very colorful downtown area as well. In Bonaire we did discover scuba diving with VIP diving. I would highly recommend it, they are not available through RC but they were incredible and they got us back on the ship with plenty of time to spare.

Nobody ever says this one; bring a watch set to ships time. It gives us ultimate peace of mind when in port and out on excursions. Cell phones can change time when the connect to the cell network at port and for us, we prefer to leave the phones off and locked up in the safe anyway.

Cool thanks @KathyC. I just want to lock in that valentines day reservation early!

I'm booked on Harmony February 9th sailing. Cruise planner has wonderland, izumi and chefs table but none of the other restaurants. I'd like to book CP150 for valentines day. Am I just too early and the other restaurants will be available closer to sailing?

@FroggyFlo No formal library on Harmony there's a "Card Room" on deck 14

I have the key on an upcoming Harmony Eastern cruise so I'm also interested to see if anyone has the activity schedule as well. As for opinions on purchasing it I would not pay more than $20/day/person. $37.99 looks ridiculous.