WAAAYTOOO

...and Seattle

I’ve never tried to do this myself but I have read that some people have difficulty getting to the USB port as some TV’s are mounted to the wall and cannot be moved.

OMG look at those cute lemon-fish !   Cutest thing I’ve ever seen !

Have a great time.  I’m so excited for you.  I image you are already at the port.  Such excitement. Unfortunately, the boarding will probably go very quickly and will just be a blurr.  They always are.  Have FUN !

1 minute ago, Joe Stahl said:

Yes, I was asking about paying for 1 meal. We both had bariatric surgery about 6 years ago, and only have 25% of a stomach. It won't make sense for us to have a ton of leftovers if we have no way of heating them up, and if there is constantly new food being offered. 

I see.  It is worth asking the question. It seems reasonable, given the circumstances.

BTW, I have an excellent recipe for queso fundido, if you are interested, when you return.

Yes !  This is mine and Dan’s favorite thing to do !  We always share our food.  I am not much of a beef eater but I love a bite or 2 of steak. We will always get 1 steak and share it and generally share all of our entrees.

Now....if you are asking if you can purchase 1 meal and just pay for 1 person but have 2 people at the table, eating ....hmmmm...don’t know about that.  We have always paid for 2 but shared all of our food.  I suspect they would not permit that but I really don’t know. Never heard of anyone asking.  

Yippee !

Did I spy with my little eye queso fundido at La Bamba ? I’m so envious !  I still have not forgiven NAV Sabor for removing it from their menu !  I guess the whole restaurant is gone now !

3 hours ago, Pima1988 said:

I am not a fan of the Bionic baR.

I am with you on this one.  Complete waste of Prime real estate.  We got 1 beverage from the one on Harmony and dumped it in the nearest trash can.  Horrible.  No more since.

You are so welcome !

1 minute ago, Joe Stahl said:

Navigator

Ahhhh....  NAV does not have any entertainment reservations.  You will have to wait until you board to find out dates and times and their shows are first come, first served.

Only the Oasis and Quantum Class ships offer entertainment venue reservations.

Not sure when they stopped printing photos on the ship. I just redeemed 2 [complimentary] photos with Santa on our Christmas +NY cruise on Grandeur last Dec.

Just now, Joe Stahl said:

My cruise is in 43 days and I'm still unable to see entertainment options. Sounds like I should be able to see them. 

Yes, I agree that at 43 days you should have the entertainment option IF you are on a ship that offers entertainment reservations.  What ship ?

Congratulations on reaching Diamond !  That’s a great milestone !

14 minutes ago, Notlad said:

We took a 4 year break from cruising then tried HAL's Nieuw Amsterdam the end of November last year. I usually only gamble a hundred bucks on cruises, including my past RCCL ones, but this time I gambled a bit more although at the end of the week I only lost $137. I was shocked two weeks after returning home to get an email with "exclusive casino offers' that included free inside cabins on a lot of sailing and inexpensive upgrades to other catagory staterooms and suites. April 7th we are going on our "free" cruise (we still had to pay port fees , taxes and airfare to Florida but still a $1200+ value free). We could have upgraded to a balcony for $598 total and a suite that would have cost me $4300+ to book otherwise for just $1598. Would have definitely done the suite if we didn't have a 2 1/2 week trip to Italy and Greece in Septyember that includes a 9 night Greek Island cruise on Jewel of the Seas.

While we are on Jewel in September I will gamble more than the hundred bucks or so I have in the past on RCCL and will be curious to see if I start getting casino offers like HAL sent me.

I had a similar experience with Norwegian.  After 1 cruise with them, we received a free cruise.  We went on that cruise and then never heard another thing from them.

I can promise you that $100 will not do anything to get you a free cruise on RCCL.

As long as they're not ALL the way in the back, I think the aft rooms are more easily accessible to most activity areas than those on the front of the ship.  There seems to be less movement (although I am not sensitive to movement) in the aft versus the front.

I love the aft rooms....but I don't have any issues with ship movement, either.

No one really knows exactly how these venues are going to work - yet....but it is my understanding (based on prices alone) that you are paying the "entrance" fee to the water park when you rent the cabana.  I could be COMPLETELY wrong but that is my understanding at this point.  So I think the water park is included with the rental cost of the cabana.  Otherwise, how could they monitor it ?  If you are already in the cabana, how would they possibly keep you out of the water features ?

10720

This is also a Grand Loft Suite and was our home for the second leg of our B2B.  So here comes the bad news - the only real disappointment of our entire journey.  It was absolutely 1/3 the size of 8724 despite being the same suite category.  It was small, cramped, had almost no storage and closet space (Dan and I weren't even able to put all of our clothes into the 1 tiny closet in the bedroom, upstairs), had a tiny little dressing table behind the bed.  The downstairs bathroom was "split" with the toilet and a sink on one side and a walk-in shower and a sink on the other side.  The upstairs bathroom was, at best, 1/2 the size of the one in 8724.  The balcony was tiny although there were 3 of them.  There was a small balcony with a hanging "teardrop" chair upstairs, the main balcony and a small side balcony downstairs. Trust me, these useless 2 additional balconies did not make up for the other shortfalls of this suite.

IMO, this suite should  NOT even be in the Star Class category.  It is, at BEST, a Crown Loft Suite size...probably even smaller than most CLS.  I let it be known - loud and clear - about our disappointment with this suite in the post cruise comments and have so far gotten 2 phone calls from RCI in response.  This would be a fine Sky Class room but it is NOT up to Star Class standards and if this room was my only Star Class experience, I would be sorely disappointed with Star Class.

The reason that this room is so small is a simple matter of geometry and had I been thinking objectively about this, I should have realized that this room would be significantly smaller. It is the same reason that the ATS on the O class are biggest on deck 8 and get progressively smaller as they go up.  The matter is made worse by the fact that this suite is on the corner and is "cut off" by the curvature of the ship.  I understand WHY it is smaller, I just don't accept that it is good enough.

All of that aside, we continued to have a lovely cruise.  When Yen visited us in 10720 I could see that she could see our disappointment and did her best to cheer us up.  She certainly realizes that this suite is subpar for Star Class.  She calls it "cozy".  We laughed.  We continued with our established schedules from the previous week.  We had breakfast in the room many mornings and we had 1 meal in our suite (on the last night of the cruise - Dan's favorite, lamb shank !!!).

The good news...there was no noise bleed whatsoever in this suite so we were far enough away from 270 to avoid that noise.  It's still a long walk back there, though.  No relief there.

Our room attendant was Jesus and was great.  He is no Brian, but we truly appreciated his service and consideration.  Jesus was, by FAR the most talented towel animal artist that we have ever had.  His creatures were AMAZING.  He mentioned that he started the whole towel animal program with Royal Caribbean back in the 1990's, so he has been doing this for a while !  He was a lovely, lovely attendant and I am so happy that he was ours.

If you are going to be cruising in Star Class on any of the Q ships, I cannot recommend this suite.  Avoid it.  It should be downgraded from a Star Class suite. Period.

The only danger I can predict for being below the Solarium would be the noise of moving deck chairs.

Wow....that's quite a crowd for a behind the scenes tour.  I don't think I've ever seen one quite that large.  Nice pix of the theater area.  What a beautiful new venue.  EVERYTHING on this ship is new !

+1 for NOT being under the WJ.  We had a lovely Grand Suite (8010) on Grandeur this past Christmas/NY.  Lovely in EVERY way EXCEPT that it was directly beneath the ice cream machine and beverage area immediately outside the WJ.  The noise from above was really awful.  I don't know what they were doing up there at 5AM but it was always noisy and woke us every morning.  I will never ever recommend that Suite to anyone.

8724

This is a Grand Loft Suite and it was our home for the first leg of our B2B.  It is generally equivalent to the Star Loft Suite on the Oasis class ships but I will say (having stayed in both now) that the SLS on the O class ships is just a tad all-around larger than the GLS on the Q class.  I loved this room though...it was spacious, had the loft bedroom with lots of storage, double closets, big dressing table, queen sized bed with Duxiana mattress (heavenly !!!!).  The suite has 2 nice, big bathrooms with walk-in showers (1 upstairs and 1 downstairs).  There is a nice dining table inside with 4 chairs (PLENTY of room for a nice sit-down meal) and a reasonably large table out on the balcony for outside dining (only 2 dining style chairs outside though).  I think the balcony on the O class SLS is also a bit larger (particularly the version that looks "aft" on the O class ships).  The balcony on 8724 has 2 loungers, 2 regular chairs with footstools and of course the table and 2 chairs for dining.   It is very nice but not particularly expansive.  Certainly big enough for the 2 of us !  There are floor-to-ceiling windows which gives a very impressive view of the fantail and the wake from anywhere in the suite and provided LOTS of natural light.  We were very, very, very comfortable in this suite.

You can control the lighting for the entire suite from wall control panels both upstairs and downstairs, which was nice. Unfortunately, you could only open the big drapes (downstairs) from a control panel downstairs.  So when we were upstairs (most notably in the morning) you could not open the big drapes from upstairs which was kind of a nuisance.  There are also a set of heavy drapes that will close off the bedroom from the downstairs view.  I suspect this is particularly nice when you have folks living/sleeping downstairs.  We never used them as it made the bedroom loft seem much smaller and closed-in.

There were only 2 "negatives" to this suite, both of which were quickly forgiven, as it is such a lovely room.  #1, it is directly above 270...so there is most definitely bleed-through noise/music from the venue below.  We were almost never in our room in the evenings so it wasn't a particular problem for us but my guess is that on evenings when they had performances in 270 (most notably, Spectra), I imagine it was quite loud. #2 is the same issue that I have with the Aqua Theater Suites on the O class ships.  It's a long walk all the way aft to get to your room.  This is an unfortunate and unavoidable issue for ships with big suites on the fantail.  They are on the fantail.  It's a long F'N way back there !

As I mentioned before, we had lots of beverages waiting for us, which remained stocked throughout the cruise.  The "beverage guy" - named Chris, came by twice a day to make sure we had all of the water, sodas, beer or whatever else we wanted/needed.  We are not big wine drinkers so we did not have any wine in our suite but if we HAD wanted wine, it would have been at an additional charge.  They will not deliver liquor to your suite with the single exception of the packages that they offer on all of the cruises.  We never had any liquor brought to our suite.  Why would we ?  We could go into any bar or restaurant and get any kind of drink that we wanted at any time.  As I have made mention of previously, there were always some kind of treat being delivered...some of them were a function of being in a suite, some were a function of being Star Class, some of them were a function of being D+ and some of them came from the Casino so I never really knew the original of much of what was being delivered...but truly, most of it went to waste.  We never eat most of what is delivered to our room on ANY cruise.

We had several meals in our suite, mostly in the form of breakfast.  This is my FAVORITE meal to eat in...b/c I don't have to get dressed and run to the restaurant before it closes.  On my first few SC cruises I was always very hesitant to ask my Genie to order my food for me.  It seemed like such a ridiculous waste of the Genie's time to place my room service order.  HOWEVER, after trying to do it myself and getting NO ANSWER on the room service number enough times, I decided that I had better get over that little phobia and let the Genie do their job.  So, we had a pretty much standing order for breakfast most mornings and they were always prompt (sometimes early, AAMoF) and it worked very well.  Only once, in this suite, did we have dinner delivered.  Never lunch. We had no "standing" orders for any kind of recurring food delivery (outside of breakfast) and I went to Starbucks and got my own damn cappuccinos in the morning.

I've mentioned Brian (Jamaica), our primary room attendant.  We had 2 attendants, but TBH, I never even learned the name for #2.  Brian was a big personality !  He was funny, engaging, very very helpful and just a really fun guy. I know EXACTLY how he got to be a room attendant for the biggest suites - he is just a natural at it.  We seemed to see him everywhere.  I think he is very popular among the crew, for obvious reasons and he was everpresent.  He was always making jokes about having a party in our suite when we weren't there (and it would have been a-ok with us if he had !).  We enjoyed him so much.

One of the really lesser-known but SOOO important amenities for being Star Class is that you can have your laundry done as often as you want.  They will do it twice a day if you want.  Since this was a 16 day cruise for us and we knew we could have our laundry done, we packed light....and it was really nice.  We used the laundry option more on these cruises than we ever did on any of our other SC cruises. Mostly b/c we truly NEEDED to and also just b/c we could !  One day, I had intended to get our laundry together to send out so I had placed the laundry bag on top of our collapsible hamper that was sitting out in the bedroom upstairs (there was nowhere for us to put the laundry basket inside a closet which is another indication that this room is just a LITTLE bit smaller than the other big suites on the O class).  Ship happened and I never got around to putting the dirty clothes into the laundry bag.  We left the suite for whatever thing we were doing and when we got back, we noticed that Brian had taken everything out of the laundry basket, put it in to the laundry bag and sent it off to the laundry.  WOW.  Now THAT is special service !

Next to the Star Loft Suite on Allure and Harmony, this Grand Loft Suite (8724) on Anthem is our favorite Star Class Suite.  I highly recommend this particular room to anyone.

15 minutes ago, Hoski said:

Sorry I meant the Ultimate Dining Package.  We bought online, what will they base the 18% gratuity on?

The gratuity is included when you prepurchase the dining package (or even individual meals) but if you purchase a specialty dining meal after you board, you will pay an additional 18% grat on top of the price of the meal.  Prepurchasing is definitely the way to go if you know you are going to want to eat specialty meals.