12thman

Quote from RC " Guests may also bring non-alcoholic beverages as carry-on items on boarding day. Non-alcoholic beverages may not exceed 12 standard (17 oz.) cans, bottles or cartons per stateroom. Milk and distilled water brought on for infant, medical, or dietary use are permitted. " Nothing about having to be packaged as a group singles should be fine as long as the bottles haven't been opened.

After all this time find out there's a thread for this? Thanks for all the help to everyone and @Matt for creating a great blog, YouTube channel and community.

Seriously!? There's no taste. Guess that's why there's so many pizza joints. YUP! Used to eat it everyday when I was a delivery driver. Who remembers "30 minutes or it's free"?

Here's some new footage of the first tour group. It's a first hand video just before the eruption. WARNING the description and some scenes may not be suitable for young viewers.

@WAAAYTOOO don't get excited it was just 4 cans of coke and 4 bottles of water. We don't drink alcohol. Hahaha!! Although he did keep it stocked like that the entire cruise. Maybe it had something to do with the refreshment package?

Thanks @WAAAYTOOO and @Matt. Don't remember seeing a drink list for our mini bar? Our room steward just filled it no charge? Even gave my wife lactose milk (the whole carton).

Do they charge for this? Does it help if you have a drink package?

Maybe something stronger like a bottle of Vodka!

It's a hit and run!! Would you want to explain to the authorities that you just got your pilot's license out of a Cracker Jack box yesterday?

Never knew how competitive it is to get a spot in a show. The things the performers go through gives me a much deeper appreciation for the entertainment they provide.

@Matt did I steal your thunder? Sorry!

Think this is really shown in the cruise planner. You see a drink package for X dollars and when it drops you think it's a good deal, in reality the sale price is the price Royal wants you to pay. Other than the error of the $18 drink package the package remains pretty much the same on a cost per day average. At least that's what I've noticed.

Interesting article about how Royal gets us to spend more on our cruise. businessinsider.com How Royal Caribbean gets customers to spend more money Mark Matousek 5-6 minutes Royal Caribbean International emphasizes add-ons during the booking process to increase revenue. They make onboard expenses seem smaller at the time of purchase and change the way customers think about their spending habits once they're on the cruise. The phenomenon is explained by a behavioral-economics theory that businesses use all the time. Sign up for Business Insider's transportation newsletter, Shifting Gears, to get more stories like this in your inbox. Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories. How much should a TV cost? It seems like a simple question, but it can be difficult to answer. Of course, it depends on factors like size and quality — but once you've determined those, it's still hard to figure out what the price should be without referring to other TVs you seen, owned, or read about in the past. Even then, a $700, 55-inch Samsung TV might seem more or less expensive based on context. If you're spending $3,000 on speakers, furniture, and video game consoles to accompany the TV, paying $700 for the screen itself might seem like a bargain. But if you're browsing at Best Buy and see the $700 TV next to a $500 TV, the $700 one may seem more expensive. This tendency contradicts a classical economic theory that says the values we assign to goods and services don't change in different situations. So if you value a TV with the capabilities of a 55-inch Samsung model at $700, you'd be willing to pay up to $700 for it in any context. We think about prices in reference to other prices But behavioral economics, a hybrid discipline that fuses economics and psychology, suggests otherwise. In 1979, the psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky released an influential paper called "Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision Under Risk" that introduced the idea of a reference point as a benchmark to evaluate investments. Reference points can arise from several factors — for example, you might compare a TV against other TVs in a store, the last TV you bought, and the total price of the goods and services you plan to purchase in addition to the TV. Read more: A former Royal Caribbean employee reveals the one question you should always ask cruise ship workers Michael Bayley, the CEO of Royal Caribbean International, uses reference points to increase how much money customers spend on the company's cruises by emphasizing pre-trip purchases. The idea is that spending $100 on a drink package, for example, will seem less expensive if you by it alongside a $1,500 cruise ticket. If your reference point for what that cruise should cost is $1,800, then buying the drink package to make your total pre-cruise expense $1,600 still feels like a deal. And once you're on the cruise, you're less likely to consider the cost of the drink package when buying other items, meaning you're likely to spend more overall. "What we found is if you spend $100 before you sail, that's spent and gone — you don't even put it in your budget for when you're on vacation," Bayley told Business Insider during a 2018 interview. "So every pre-cruise revenue dollar that we generate will often generate 50% more onboard revenue for that customer." The strategy worked, and it was one of the reasons Royal Caribbean doubled earnings in the three years after Bayley became CEO at the end of 2014. Businesses influence how we think about prices Royal Caribbean is far from the only business that uses reference points to influence your spending behavior. Walk into any store, and they're everywhere. "These are used on price tags, these are used in advertising, this is used inside retail stores on signage — all of which are ways to try and get you to anchor on a particular price, so it is against that price that you would then evaluate the current offering," Priya Raghubir, a marketing professor at New York University's Stern School of Business, told Business Insider. When a bookstore runs a "buy two, get one free" promotion, it's encouraging you to use the price of three books as your reference point for buying two. So even if the total cost of the books is more than you would have been willing to pay if each had been discounted separately, you still feel as if you're coming out on top. And when a clothing store advertises a $20 discounted shirt by urging you to compare it to another one that costs $40, it wants you to use $40 as the reference point for that particular shirt, even if no other store would sell it at that price. Raghubir says that being aware of your tendency to use reference points still won't make you immune to pricing strategies designed to increase your spending, not even for the economists and psychologists who study them. "These biases are really strong," Raghubir said. "Even if you are aware, you are unable to control their influence."

Thank you!! Didn't know something like this existed.