Bowen

They are cutting costs, it’s evident and has been noted by many people. The glib comments brushing it off to make it sound like a You problem are weird to me. I’m glad people are posting about this, it lets everyone make a more informed decision.

My mom was able to board with a picture of her birth certificate on a closed loop cruise. Like a picture on her phone.

This is like going to eat at a restaurant and not leaving a tip. Just gross.

We use Etsy.

On our last cruise we saw that people had thrown ducks on to the top of an elevator. This is the part of hiding ducks that bothers me, I’m basically giving ill behaved kids more ammunition.

I normally get my kids the soda/voom package when we cruise, but I'm not seeing the bundle available on any of my upcoming cruises. Is this being done away with?

We hide ducks every cruise, and while it might seem like there must be thousands of ducks being hidden I can tell you from experience that while we hide approximately 50 ducks every cruise, in a half dozen cruises our group of five people has found a grand total of three ducks all together. I have never found one, but my youngest has, my mom has, and a friend we travel with has. Definitely never feel like you're just adding to an over abundance of ducks, they are still VERY hard to find. And we're not on FB either. We just kept the duck if it's a really special one (like we've found a crocheted duck), or we rehide them for others to find if we don't want them.

I only just started playing in the casino to see how much it would cost me to get to 1500 points. On our last sailing I spent $700 myself, and I got a white card so a friend traveling with me could also apply their points to mine. They "spent" about $60, but kept winning, I spent $700 and just kept losing. All in all I came away with about 800 points, and my friend had an additional 150 points or so that they accumulated on their own card before we thought to get the white card. So clearly YMMV on this.

Has anyone stayed here prior to an Alaska cruise? We've been out of Seattle once before, in 2019 and we stayed at the Mayflower (I think that was the name). I'm trying to find a room that will sleep five so we can save a bit of money. We won't be leaving the hotel, so we're just looking for something close to the port, clean, and with some food choices available because we'll be coming in later in the evening and taking an Uber, so we'll be ready to eat at least some type of food when we get there.

I didn't put my email in when I bought the picture with my coupon. But I do have my email attached to my seapass, so would that suffice? I can't open the rccl photo link at all, it won't even come up on my computer. The lady at the kiosk said I could only download it from that link while I was on the ship. I think I stuffed this all up.

I was on board Allure two weeks ago (the date we disembarked) and was told the night before that the free picture I'd purchased at a kiosk would be sent to my email. I tried to download it on board, but it didn't work and they told me that I couldn't use the same link and code to download once we were off the ship. It's been two weeks and I haven't gotten any link to download any of my pictures. Is there some way I can see the pictures and grab the one I purchased with my diamond coupon? Thanks!

I love it! My kids are fast friends with kids they have meet on cruises. We’ve even met up with another family to cruise together again, it’s been so much fun.

Early on, early off for me.

There will be teenagers. We homeschool and only cruise in the off season. It’s way more common to have kids aboard now, so many parents moved to homeschool permanently after COVID. Our local homeschool group went from about 75 members to more than five hundred, it’s extremely common now and vacations definitely reflect it. Have fun! I second making sure they do the meet and greet on the first night. There will be loads of planned activities.

I think it would be fine. I’ve never had anyone look at my boarding time. Last cruise we actually got a notification to wait an additional hour, but I was five minutes from the port and just went ahead and boarded, no problem.

No, we just had facial recognition, two minutes out once we were allowed off the ship.

I do also wonder if it’s people buying narcotics in Roatan. The pharmacy at the port now sells codeine, Valium, etc.

We docked around 5:45 on Sunday morning. You could feel the ship shaking. I got up at 6 to pack and we were in port.

No space. I had enough to stand by the outlet to dry my hair. Anyone needing to get by had to walk across the bed.

Same! And so glad our friends had an 8 pm flight out.

I was just coming up update, yep!

Oh yeah this wasn’t just us, it was the whole ship. No one was allowed off at all until the cops had come and gone.

Might be the same thing then. We weren’t allowed to even walk off the ship. Those poor crew members were getting harried I’m sure.

We stood in line for two hours this morning to get off Allure. They kept making announcement that the ship has not been cleared by local authorities. The rumors were that five people were arrested on drug charges and that they were locking bathrooms down floor to floor because someone was hiding in one of them. I also heard someone died on the ship, and since we heard an “Alpha Alpha Alpha” announcement last night there might be some merit to that. It was a wild morning for sure!

Yeah it feels like the food is much more sparse, not nearly as much selection. And no washy washy song anywhere.