VillainsGin

Yep. Last week my wife got 1 on each at the same time. Booked the “Online” offer that night and called in the regular offer the next morning for a S2S out of Miami. You “should” also get a mailed flyer later in USPS and an email notifying you of the Online offer but sometimes not. 

A new wrinkle is that some “Online Only” offers only appear on the Advanced Search page of Royal Caribbean dot com under the “My Offers” tab. These don’t always appear on the Club Royale Offers page. 

i had no idea they had their own separate website, they never advertised or notified me of this. The entire time i thought everything had to be done by contacting them via phone! Thank you!

I guess that's the most anxiety inducing fear I have. Hoping I chose a date that will not get canceled, it's a shame RC won't honor and reschedule the booking. The money on the casino was already spent but if you're unlucky and chose the wrong sailing date that feeling could be devastating.
Thank you for your input as always!

I was on a friends casino comp for Oasis.  They oversold the cruise and reached out to offer to move us  we countered that we were traveling with a family member who paid for her own cruiser cabin, we had not linked the reservations.  They let us keep our booking.  So while casino comps may be cancelled, the circumstances can vary so the outcome can vary,
typically you cannot rebook your comp once your offer has expired.
On a side note:  you should check your online account to see if you have other offers.  Clubr oyaleoffers.com
 

Congratulations !  Nice comp !
If a casino comp booking is cancelled by the cruise line it is almost certainly 100% lost.  You would get any money paid, back but since the certificate with which you booked the comp would now be expired, it is almost a certainty that they would not offer you a replacement certificate/booking.  I say almost certainly, b/c there have been a few VERY rare situations where I have heard of Royal honoring a casino comp and allowing it to be transferred to a “replacement“ cruise.
There were quite a few casino customers who recently went through this drill when Royal cancelled the Panama Canal sailings.  As far as I know, none of them were permitted to move their certificate bookings to a new sailing.  I think the single exception to this were those for whom the Panama Canal cruise was their annual tier comp.  I think those folks were allowed to rebook….but those with instant certificates were SOL.

Unfortunately not retired, I have ways to go working for corporate 😭
I take any and all cruise when I can, If possible to forecast I definitely would. Nowadays the furthers I book out to is 6 months and I start lining them up from there.

Funny story relating to finding long lost connections!
Me and my S/O met another couple we got along with so well we started doing activities on the ship together on rhapsody OTS year 2000.
Myspace was popular back then so we kept in touch there until facebook came out and we lost connection, fast forward from 2000 to 2022 i was on oasis OTS with my S/O and finally bumped into him in the funniest way.
I'm a big time "enthusiast" and enjoy frequenting the casinos to wind down after a long day of excursions/activities. I play mostly tables and I ALWAYS carry two lucky charms placed on the tables i'm playing on. (picture below)
He was walking past my table and noticed the charm and approached me saying "he used to know a scumbag with that exact charm that ghosted him 20 years ago". At first it didn't click with me and thought he was drunk then after he dropped a few more hints my face lit up with nostaglia! He was able to recognize me only by my lucky charm because there was no way for me to recognize him. 20 years sure has changed us both, unfortunately he was no longer with his partner but we grabbed drinks at the bar and reminiscence/caught up in life.
NOW thanks to social media and technology we have kept in touched via multiple platforms (instagram/twitch/discord/twitter/etc) no way to lose him this time.
Attached below is one of my two lucky charms (my second one is a lickitung)i always gamble with.
 

It never gets old for me, I get extremely giddy and excited for every single sailing.
You just can't compare or compete with the vibes and moods of sailing. Everyone is in a great mood because they're on vacation, social interactions are so much more engaging and genuine, hot tubs, buffets, casino, shows, etc.
Also something about the smell of the ship cabin and ocean that triggers my nostalgia and serotonin.
😭🙏💕

sounds like printing $1 bills is a greenlight, they'll never suspect it. 🤣😈
all of a sudden we see a splurge of culprits with thousands of $1 single bills HAHA

Mercado Municipal Benito Juarez. Here's the link: https://goo.gl/maps/UGpUjvY86Ko8g9RZ9
You can definitely walk there, It's a long-ish walk from the main area - and way longer from the port. But the food is amazing, but don't expect any sort of luxury. You'll be eating on plastic plates.

Tips for Costa Maya - get away from the cruise terminal. It's just a huge shopping mall with a pool. Sadly there is not much nearby. Don't eat there either, it's very expensive, bad food.
If you want to eat some good mexican food, there is a market in Cozumel that sells cochinita pibil - the traditional dish of the region.

The Oasis crane incident resulted in a full refund and a full future cruise credit.  Got my money back and got a free cruise. 
That was before the pandemic shutdown so I'm not sure they would be as generous now but the compensation back then was pretty fair.  
 

sounds like printing $1 bills is a greenlight, they'll never suspect it. 🤣😈
all of a sudden we see a splurge of culprits with thousands of $1 single bills HAHA

You might want to rethink this piece.  Don't get travel insurance for fear of losing money on things that have to be cancelled.  get it because if you have a health emergency at sea an evacuation can be a life changing expense.  I never get it for land vacations, but always for cruises.
 
You might also want to rethink this piece.  Try to book further in advance and seek out refundable deposits.  Even though they will cost a bit more than the NRD rate that day, you will almost certainly harvest savings over the rate you end up paying.  Alternatively you could book them NRD and then if you change to another cruise, you lose only $100 of the deposit per person.  You are likely, overall, to still come out way ahead.  I'm booked through May 2025 currently.

My family just did our first cruise (Costa Maya and Cozumel) on Serenade of the Seas in July. We've already booked our next cruise, which is Alaska in May aboard Ovation. We all loved it. Make sure to roam all over the ship, there are great little hidden places to just watch the sea go by. It's amazing.

Princess does a great West Coast itinerary of LA - Santa Barbara - San Francisco - San Diego - Ensenada - LA, or something like that. I would love to do this one sometime, but would love it even more if Royal did it.

A coco cay type development in Baja would do for a destination.  I enjoy Catalina as a port just about as much as any, but it cannot handle more people and it requires tendering.  Ensenada would be good with the addition of a beach/pool destination near the port.  It would require a huge investment to build a dock and port like Coco Cay or Labadee in Baja, but one would think the market exists. 

It never gets old for me, I get extremely giddy and excited for every single sailing.
You just can't compare or compete with the vibes and moods of sailing. Everyone is in a great mood because they're on vacation, social interactions are so much more engaging and genuine, hot tubs, buffets, casino, shows, etc.
Also something about the smell of the ship cabin and ocean that triggers my nostalgia and serotonin.
😭🙏💕

It never gets old for me, I get extremely giddy and excited for every single sailing.
You just can't compare or compete with the vibes and moods of sailing. Everyone is in a great mood because they're on vacation, social interactions are so much more engaging and genuine, hot tubs, buffets, casino, shows, etc.
Also something about the smell of the ship cabin and ocean that triggers my nostalgia and serotonin.
😭🙏💕

PREACH IT! I'm fortunate enough to not prone to any motion sickness and was introduce to cruising at an early age from family vacations. Since then I have not stopped cruising and it has honestly been the ONLY way I vacation now.
Cruises gives so much value for your dollar compared to any other way of vacationing it is too hard for me to pass up!
Also helps to be an "enthusiast" of casinos with the comp'd cruises!

Seasoned cruisers may assign the "ship is the destination" a higher priority but on a typical cruise just over half of all guests on board are new to cruise or new to Royal.  For these newer cruisers they always look at ports with a higher priority over the ship. 
Nearly all cruisers when they are new want more ports stops, not fewer port stops.  Only once people have cruised a fair bit will they value more sea days over more port days.  Unfortunately these frequent cruisers are not the majority on the ship rather a small minority and that is not who the cruise lines target.   It's hard to fill ships consistently with frequent cruisers and there is less revenue from seasoned cruisers on a per guest basis.  
The bigger problem for larger ships is the need to tender on many west coast itineraries.  That will also limit ship size unless you remove tender ports but that means reducing the number of ports of call and that gets us back to the issue with new cruisers wanting more ports stops not fewer.  
Larger berths make sense if you are going to make any infrastructure investments for any port but that doesn't mean larger ships will be homeported there.   This is a case of "If you build it, they may not come".
However they can probably accommodate more not-large ships at the same time so if you are a loyal brand cruisers there is greater chance that your brand may operate from LA.  MSC loyalist?  Maybe a ship like Divina could homeport.  Celebrity and Royal and Princess on the same day.  Another Carnival ship in addition to Long Beach.  These are  likely the biggest benefits to west coast cruisers from the expansion announcement.  

I am now retired, but when I did work I was self employed.  So getting the time off was not an issue and I had the control.  But if you work for a company or have children in school, etc.  it isn't as easy to know if you can get the time off.  Especially a year or 2 in advance.  Just enjoy your cruises when you have them!

I'm a bit behind on the news for Los Angeles since I'm already accustomed to flying out towards MIA if i want to sail the larger ships on royal. (symphony/icon/odyssey/etc.)
It looks like they're resuming a decade old plan of expanded the ports to accommodate larger cruise ships, if I'm reading it correctly. There's a lot of fluff in between the articles but keywords I was mainly focused on was expanding ports for larger ships.
This would be absolutely HUGE news for all the residents of California (myself included) and states neighboring us! I always dread flying to MIA to sail the much larger ships so if these news articles are true does that mean we'll have oasis/quantum/icon class ships eventually calling Los Angeles port!?!?
I'm extremely giddy finding out about this, although the news was dated earlier of this year.
I've been complaining for about a decade now wishing there was a larger cruise port to accommodate larger royal ships. It helps tremendously with time & money.
•Pros to having larger cruise ports •
Saves time from coordinating flights to MIA and back. Saves money from all the related cost/fees/taxes that comes with flying/hotels. ( I always book a hotel the night before to give myself enough time before embarkation) Caters to the west coast guest and helps generate more traffic for the state.  
~~~Can anyone confirm if they're actually in the works of building larger ports for larger cruise ships?~~~
 
New sources below:
https://maritime-executive.com/article/los-angeles-seeks-input-to-double-cruise-terminals-with-outer-harbor
https://www.cruisehive.com/los-angeles-new-cruise-terminal-plan-underway-again/94634
https://spectrumnews1.com/ca/la-west/travel/2023/02/16/port-of-la-expands-cruise-services

I take several cruises a year, so always have one coming up fairly soon.  So booking 2 years in advance is not an issue and I have more to look forward to!