dr martini

That's great, didn't realize that was offered to upper suite folks! One of these days I'll try that all out....important to have goals right? Thanks for the info

Seeing this offered as well for my Feb Navigator sailing, but to me for a short cruise not worth the extra dollars. Agree with others that it depends what you like. We're young to middle aged active cruisers, I don't like to over plan my day, I don't want a bunch of reservations out there and I certainly don't want to stand in line at guest services on this short sailing at all, for any reason, period. We always take late seating dining in the main dining room, in my experience the main dining room gets a lot of criticism it frankly doesn't deserve from all angles. Some people think it's way too formal and structured and other people don't think it's formal or good enough, it's been put in a really tough spot over the years. I think the food is perfectly fine. It's not wonderland every night, but it's fine. On our full week on Symphony earlier this year we planned ahead with reservations before sailing for hooked seafood, which was fine food but not amazing and slow service- not worth the upcharge and 150 central park which was amazing and worth every penny but very quiet and intimate, in my opinion if we did unlimited dining every night I would miss the company of our group and the fun stories of what did you do today, etc. For me, if we end up at playmakers or johnny rocket's then great, so be it and we'll just pay a couple bucks. But there are so many other great options for cruising, the added on boutique type restaurants are really for longer cruises with more time to plan things out. I want my 4 day to be a quick easy getaway, ultimate drink package, morning simple room service, then pool time, el loco fresh (which was awesome on symphony and is getting great reviews on navigator) relax, late seating Main dining room because I don't want to have to go down and get ready for dinner at 3:30 pm or just do buffet for dinner, cafe promenade is always there for late night snack or simple lunch and all of these are included, but that's just me. It's still free enterprise, you can spend as much money as you want and RC will certainly take it....

Correct. I think royalup has worked very well to fix sorting demand for stateroom by category. Royal often has more "guaranteed balcony" staterooms fares sold than actual balcony staterooms available (or pick another category, I'm just using this for an illustration). Thus, the royalup emails get sent out a few weeks before your sailing and then depending on bids and status they reward the folks who were in balconies the chance to bid up the most to get into the junior suites, which are kind of an in between category that on many ships doesn't offer the whole high end experience. (You can also see that they've added a lot of these in the corners for front of the ships in each Amplified dry dock) Also lets high status customers or people already in the junior suites slide up to any unsold high end suites, etc etc. Just a good all around tool for Royal to sort everyone into a cabin they are happy with. Maybe they don't get the initial big up charge they wanted for some suites or other categories in the first place, but they do get a lot of valuable data on pricing demand, category breakdown, and customer trends moving forward. Hence, you almost never see last minute deals on suites or ocean view, they simply royal up and get more money from existing customers booked on that cruise, then blow out the cheap inside rooms in the bottom of the ship. It's obviously working very well for them. Anymore it's all about that big data and we are just the guinea pigs haha

Agree with Ashely, just use a travel agent. Not only will they reprice (sometimes for a modest fee, but that can probably be more than paid for by your overall savings) they will almost surely be able to get you some onboard credit dollars as a perk just for using them, we've always done that to great success. Have cruised many times with groups from 6-30+ of us with my big family on Royal and princess, cannot stress the use of a good travel agent enough. They get paid commission by the cruise line, not us the cruisers and can answer all of the questions you have.

Paying $60 per day one device voom and deluxe drink pkg on navigator 4 night in February 2020 and that's about the same as symphony was this past March.