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.

24 minutes ago, Montemy2419 said:

Where do you get your tags printed at ?  I think I may become a duck hider  but want to include a tag so parents don't think it's a lost toy and won't keep it.

We use Etsy.

6 hours ago, Va4fam said:

We've noticed ducks being placed or dropped into sculptures and artwork.  

We won't touch those, but others we find get adopted and released on our next ship.

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. 

12 hours ago, Ampurp85 said:

You need to earn points, 1500pt can get you a comped interior on select sailings. How much that cost you can vary wildly. For someone they could play $500 and do it and for others it may be in the $1000s. 

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!

24 minutes ago, Scarlett625 said:

Yes. I was worried when I brought my teens on a cruise that they wouldn't meet anyone and be "bored". I can say that I barely saw my teens that cruise, except dinner, an excursion, or a random pop-in to ask for something. They are still friends with many of the other teens they met and talk all the time on social media. We also sailed during a non-vacation time. 

Funny story...when we were waiting to board the ship in the terminal and there was one seat open next to my daughter. A girl around her age sat in the seat and her parents grabbed two open seats a few chairs down. I was sitting across from my daughter and motioned for her to say hello. My daughter was too shy to do so and sat there in silence. I thought it was going to be a long cruise. But that same girl and my daughter ended up being glued to the hip that entire cruise after meeting up again in the teen area. 

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.

54 minutes ago, CruiseGus said:

@Bowen didn't you have a manual passport check when disembarking because they couldn't get the Facial Recognition system forking on Sunday causing the delay disembarking.

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

5 hours ago, ZBrady said:

Always blows my mind when people try to bring up bringing various forms of drugs on board. Sure - I absolutely understand most people may or may not get away with it. But it just takes one time and this may have been it for some folks!

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

2 hours ago, jbrinkm said:

When we booked transportation through a private company from Galveston port to airport (April 2, 2023 Allure sailing), we asked what would happen if the ship was delayed in docking for any reason, and I specifically mentioned fog, as I had read reports like @Neesa's. The local guy said that the ships all come in at midnight now so there would be no more fog delays. I have no way to confirm if this is true. 

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.

34 minutes ago, SweetPea said:

Interesting! Thanks for reporting. Delays like this make me glad we're only driving to the port these days .

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

I was just coming up update, yep!

20 minutes ago, smokeybandit said:

We left the ship last summer on Navigator when the number hit 100 left. All the luggage tag time slots were delayed being called. And we STILL waited well over an hour to get through customs.

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.

15 minutes ago, smokeybandit said:

The only time I had an really long time in customs was when they took half the CBP staff to do a crew inspection.

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!

1 hour ago, Al Miller said:

On Anthem in February the cutbacks were painfully obvious from just the previous November. No snacks at Sorrentos anymore. Just Pizza. I used to love some salami and cheese. WJ had noticeably less selection and lots of empty spaces where there had been items just a few months before. In Solarium Bistro there was basically no attempt to rotate the food in the in the mini buffet to keep it fresh. There was a good chance that my little falafel bites that I got at 8pm had been there all night. They were little inedible rocks.  Izumi portions basically cut in half. I rarely saw anyone encouraging hand washing at the WJ entrance. I still had a good time, but the changes thus far have not been subtle.

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