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MuttMutt

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Everything posted by MuttMutt

  1. I think it's a thing where Royal wants to keep people going on the ships and are willing to take a little bit of a hit in the profit area now vs having a ton of people pissed off and refusing to sail, at least for the time being. I have seen multiple occasions where captains have taken the ships up to full speed to get into port early and transfer someone off. I am guessing they already have some funding in place to deal with things like that on an average basis. Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if they figure their fuel costs way over the actual costs to begin with and then they don't have to worry about it when things get a little wonky and costs are increased. I mean I am not a genius financial person but that is what I would do in a situation where life happens and you never know what you will need on a trip if something goofs. In the long run however I expect all prices will increase and there will be less sales or reduced amounts for a while as well but overall this should be a non-event.
  2. Since it's booked for four I would make a call and see about getting the other persons stuff refunded or put as OBC. It should still be refunded even if they don't show from my understanding but having it for OBC would cover tips and a few drinks or something. For the check in I would just not fill anything out for that person. No reason to even touch theirs as they will not be going.
  3. Yes you can, everyone is supposed to watch the video's and listen to the warning tone and everyone WILL have to go down to the muster area to have their Seapass scanned. Them having the app is still worthwhile and free, no internet required just connect their device to the wifi and click the use for app only or something like that. Makes it a ton easier to figure out what everyone wants to do together and separately.
  4. Another option is to find someone else that would like to go and take them instead. Only one name has to stay on the booking so if there is a friend or family member who would like to go and can get the time it should be simple enough to make a swap. I have done this before when I booked a cruise and didn't have anyone to travel with then found someone to go with me and changed the name on the other space for the person going with me.
  5. I leave almost enough OBC in the account to cover tips and a few drinks when I have it. Everything else I cash out in the casino and the 4 or 6 bucks that are left due at the end of the cruise go onto a credit card. My B2B I think we took about 400 total out between each cruise and used the cash to cover purchases on shore as well as a couple taxi rides in Mexico. Still ended up going home with almost 300 in my pocket for other stuff, gotta save cash wherever you can while working on a house. Just dropped almost 500 on about 580 sq ft of R19 insulation and that won't cover much of the 2600 sq feet that needs insulation plus the nearly 3600 sq feet of foamboard I am going to install as well some of which will be doubled to 4 inches thick. Looking at insulation prices makes me want to drop dead some days.
  6. Most of the time it's pretty tough to get a refund especially after getting FCC's. And remember that if you do get a refund and had FCC's they will be dropped down to the original amount paid, so basically if you paid 500 and got a FCC for 625 you will only get 500 back. With that said going forward for the foreseeable future everyone 11 and older will have to be vaccinated on cruises unless you find a line that didn't sign up for the highly vaccinated plan. I also doubt they are going to extend anything other than the "if you catch COVID" section for refunds and FCC's. I haven't read it all but I get the idea and that is if you make a choice to not be vaccinated you are eventually risking deposits unless you chose a refundable version. Hopefully you have a travel agent to deal with things though, if you have to deal with it all yourself prepare to pull your hair out now. And I wish you the best of luck but have to warn you that you probably will not like the results if you put in a non refundable deposit.
  7. Can only get points for the room you are booked to stay in. If you REALLY want to net points for other bookings I think the RCCL credit card gets you some free onboard credit based on your purchases. It's not the same as climbing the ladder but you can use it to pay for things like room tips and such which will make it a little cheaper to climb the points ladder.
  8. Yeah. It's no big deal yet. Check it in a couple days and I'd should be there. Also if you didn't select a room and just let royal select one the room numbers won't show up till about a week before departure or so.
  9. Unless you are on the cruise the scheduling is subject to lots of changes and often times will not have a complete listing of what is going on. Until the day of sailing I don't even bother to look at the scheduled stuff because a lot of the entertainers will get swapped out at different times so they don't even know for sure exactly what will be happening and exactly when until shortly before sailing.
  10. Just plug it into the TV in the room. But yeah I have a 256GB flash card full of games and emulators. Going to get a thumb drive for movies at some point but I carry a bunch on my tablet. Speaking of, I use a USB OTG connector along with a PS3 controller to play games as well. It's a TabS4 so it does most stuff including N64 pretty well. Just such a small screen that it can be a pain sometimes. Will probably sit in the Windjammer sometime on my Vision of the Seas cruise that starts on Black Friday playing games just for fun.
  11. Nope and who knows if they ever will to be honest. Plus I can see a bunch of 30 to 40 year old's with a drink package and a bad attitude when they lose end up throwing a controller through a screen or starting a brawl... Yep, I think I will stick with my Raspberry Pi 4 in my room for my gaming fix while on the ship. And I am sure some people pack their consoles to take on the ship as well.
  12. It's not about theft. People take towels off the ship and they get left wherever. Eventually Royal has supplied brand new towels to the residents of every port because people haven't brought that many back to the fleet of ships. They could easily just rent the towels out or not provide them at all. I am sure there are a ton of other ways it could be handled as well which would all be called stupid. But I can bet that if someone came into your bathroom and took 4 or 5 towels every couple days and forgot them somewhere you wouldn't be happy about it either. Royal is dealing with potentially thousands of towels being left places. With that said I have no clue what happened but I tend to get my towels on the ship and make sure to scan in and out every single time. If they are writing stuff down I don't want the towel in the first place nor will I drop off with them because who knows if it will be correctly handled or not. Hopefully things are straightened out over the charges.
  13. It can be done and it's time it should be. That also means that if it happens people need to be prepared to put their money where their mouth is. Maybe it's not much but I would be much more willing to gamble 50 bucks if smoking was abolished than if they leave it in place. On my last cruise I didn't even use the free play because it stunk so bad. But honestly if we don't want smoking in the casino's we have to step up and say something. Maybe it won't do any good but sitting there saying you want something done and not step up to make it well known things will never change. I can only do so much starting the petition, people have to push others to sign the thing so it can go to the cruise lines. If a few hundred thousand people who cruise sign and get their friends to sign as well it will be at a million within a month, it took a year to sail a million people on Royal Caribbean and I am sure some of those are duplicates. They will take notice if that many people sign.
  14. Not sure why it wouldn't work. I use a Chrome variant called Brave. Only other thing I can think of is I use dark mode on the site.
  15. Check the "Desktop Mode" on your browser. I use Android and usually it's my tablet on which I use the Desktop mode for sites almost exclusively and never have an issues with icon's not showing up.
  16. Doing stuff ahead of time saves a little bit of a headache but honestly isn't needed to get on the ship. If you have a computer you may try to access there as well. Sadly while a lot of places have apps and such they are still not as good as a full website. You could try the website on the phone browser but that can be hit and miss. Updating apps and such as well as a reboot can often solve issues, the OS being up to date should have little influence unless that phone is really old and honestly will not likely have updates available. It's just a catch all that companies try to pull. Very rarely will the OS version cause an issue, I should know because my tablet is an S4 and hasn't had anything other than a few security updates since October 2020 when Android 10 was pushed to it.
  17. Yep and if you are having an issue where you can't understand them you can always just end the call and try someone else.
  18. Haven't had much of an issue and have had to deal with the camera flipping. Sometimes they switch to the back camera and sometimes the front. Having another person hold the phone makes it a lot easier to deal with though as then you can look at the screen when it's facing you and reposition the other person as needed. With a laptop and the built in camera you will be stuck trying to hold stuff up and make adjustments to it. If I REALLY wanted to have something to use a single camera it would be a desktop with a USB camera so that I can hold it up and set it down however I like. Plus some laptops are designed with a built in "flip" so that you will see text backwards, that will likely wreak havoc with barcode scanning so keep that in mind.
  19. I wish they would as well, even a mask doesn't help me so I usually just walk outside on deck 4 rather than go through it. Even just walking past the stairs in the Promenade that go down to the casino while wearing a mask I could smell it come up. But who knows if enough people tell them what they want maybe something can be changed. I don't lose a dime by making a petition online and it's all the rage now so I figured why not. At the very least we could get them to pave over the stairs and install sliding glass doors on either end so the ones who want to be in there can marinate in it. https://chng.it/2pTZpRfN6Y
  20. Have done GTY twice now and it's been ok. Talked with someone on our B2B who were down low somewhere and laying in their bed they claimed they thought someone had installed a magic fingers massager and they were trying to figure out how to turn it off. Well something like that. I generally do interior rooms either way and have been on deck 7 or 8 each time. Thinking about a balcony I have to say that I don't think there would be a single one I wouldn't be happy about other than the room being bright with the sun in the morning when I want to sleep, LOL.
  21. Galveston was doing their best to enforce in the best way they can. One of the issues is that sometimes the intake workers are ready pretty early and want to get started ASAP. My check in time on my recent sailing which was scheduled for 11:30, we were at the terminal around 10:15 and were in the terminal by 10:30. Our group was lined up on one side and the next group was lined up on the other. No clue if people who were in suites or had the key had a line or not but there were a few people already upstairs by the time we got there. The ship was accepting passengers by around 11:15 or so which is another thing that can be an issue. If someone takes forever getting off the ship times may not run as early or could even run late. I mean I for one am happy they run early because it gives me more time on the ship but the people in the terminal have to get a jump on things as best as they can even though it ends up being a huge wait afterwards. Then you have people with a scheduled time who show up a few minutes before time and they get to find out their slot has already been processed. The stipulations as I understand it says they only get a 30 minute window and if it's missed you may have to wait till later. Does that get bumped up as well by the people at the door, I mean someone on a power trip could try to pull that. Honestly I have dealt with dumber people on a power trip, LOL. And I would hate to think about what would happen if a ton of issues happened and you are lining up a ton of people outside with a bunch of them complaining that their time slot is over but they haven't checked in... On paper it's great but we all know it doesn't always work that way. It's still better to have people sign up for the timeslots so it spreads everyone out. They could easily enforce the stipulation 100% so I try to show up around 30 to 45 minutes early but with the understanding I may just be standing around for a few, but at least I don't have to worry about being late because a shuttle has broke down or who knows what else could mess up. And I figure most everyone else is similar so things should work out ok if people stick to something like that instead of everyone just showing up in huge masses with huge lines in the terminal among other things. That is what I showed up to on my first cruise out of Galveston and I figured most everyone would already be on the ship with 3 hours to go. Being able to breeze right through is awesome and I hope that from time to time if people start showing up to form huge lines they will fully enforce it for a while to get people to show up closer to their assigned times.
  22. Sometimes they will open checkin early on accident. At one point I had access on my B2B cruise about 4 months out on one cruise but it took forever on the other till it did. In the mean time the first one that had opened had lost access and gained it back a couple times even after the other one opened up but usually was only a day or two. Who knows what happened but I like to think the squirrel in the cage for the one that was staying up had a better handler who remembered to change them out from time to time and the other cruise that didn't show up was a little more lax in that department till his supervisor chewed him out. Anyway it's usually about 45 days before the cruise leaves that access is stable for that stuff. So give it a day or two just in case the squirrel had a heart attack. If it's messing up after a couple days call RCCL and see what they can do on their end as something may be stuck.
  23. On my first cruises it wasn't an issue having a single bed so I have to figure they usually leave it as a single bed, not sure if it's a queen or a king, lol. Anyway on my most recent one there was NO WAY I was sleeping with my girlfriends son.... Sorry I would have made him sleep on the couch or split the bed myself and left him with no sheet or blanket, LOL. Anyway as soon as we hit the ship I stopped by guest services to let them have housekeeping know that the bed needed to be split so hopefully they could catch it before it was turned over. Around 1:30 after getting some things scheduled, having lunch, and getting Max acquainted to the ship a bit so he could get around on his own, or find people to help him get around if he gets lost, or find a map, or give up and go sleep on a deck chair, LOL. We stopped in at the room to get our keys and see if the bed was split. Our attendant was nearby and asked how we were and everything. After getting the door open and seeing the bed was not split I stuck my head out and our attendant asked how everything was and I let her know the bed needed to be split. She said she would absolutely get that done and I cracked a joke about sleeping with his mom and not wanting to sleep in the same bed as him and I was gonna make him sleep on the couch. We had a nice laugh and a chat about my wife as she was also from Jamaica. As we were getting ready to go she said not to worry about the bed to Max which got her a smile from him. I told her she had as long as she needed till around 10 pm as that is when my internal clock likes to shut it down. By the time we were back in the room the bed was split and we were all setup. I left her a little more than I normally do because I know that it's tough and I left a couple bucks for the attendant that was for the room right next to ours as she had helped split the beds for us. Didn't know that I could set a room preference for the bed in the C&S profile. I wonder if they can set a preference based on if it's my girlfriend going with me or her son. That would be nice to have.
  24. I am sure there are a few smokers on here but in the US only around 14% of people smoke. I have seen many posts with people who have suggested RCCL ban smoking in the casino's as they did for a few weeks when the Omicron variant was very high and has since been rolled back. The CDC (yeah, I know they have been derps on the COVID stuff) has the information that I am using and they show that the majority of people who smoke are probably also the people who can't afford to go on a cruise as well. So lets figure less than 10% of people on a ship smoke right? Yet they are willing to allow that 10% to effectively stop people who do not smoke from wanting to even be near the casino. So I have started a petition directed to a bunch of the cruise lines to ban smoking on US sailings. Please sign it and share it to as many people as possible. Change.org petition to all the cruise lines to ban smoking in the casino's
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