Marc Van Niekerk

Cruise planner started populating on the weekend for my cruise and I have already had a price decrease on a cabana.

22 hours ago, Mrs. Thomas said:

@Marc Van Niekerk right now I highly doubt they are going to open many options up for Labadee until they know if itineraries will change that far out.

True enough and yet it has an excursion listed as does the stop in Jamaica.

We are primarily looking for Coco Cay as we have people in our party who would benefit from the accommodations of a cabana and want to get the best price / location we can.

We just booked an Air BnB / Hotel in Rome for pre-cruise in November and they offer a private car service for 150 euro.  Sounds a bit spendy at first but some quick research showed it wasn't out of line for the market.  

My advice? Check to see if your accommodation has any sort of arrangements.

To be fair, we have based our research on a similar time frame this year instead of next.

Air 2 Sea is always a good consideration, and we will investigate.

Travelling to a US airport tends to not be very economical for us in our searches for US ports because of the time, distance and weather factors. It may be a different story for Europe in summer.

We also just learned that Iceland Air while a great cost is a bit of a unicorn in how they ticket their flights.  Usually, when we book (even with Air2Sea) the Locator ID provided is active within a few days on the airline site for seat selection and other items. Iceland Air does not activate until 'ticketed' which happens for them when they are paid in full which is not the case for Air2Sea.

Booked this when it was first announced but we are 50/50 on whether we will be going.

First glance at potential flights makes this a tough sell.

We have a cruise Feb 2025 and I am trying to keep an eye on when excursions and such are posted to CP so I can get items at Perfect Day and Labadee.

How far out do they usually load this?

Anyone have a cool automated way to watch for it?

Thanks

Did this on Harmony in Feb.  It was about 20 people, 2 long tables with 2 chefs leading.  I found it pretty much in keeping with what I would have expected.

I also thought that the quality of the ingredients was very good, and the quantity of sushi I made and ate was certainly worth the cost of the class.

We recently had this same situation.  We had My Time for our cruise departing this weekend and had booked all of our meal times when they became available on cruise planner.

A week ago we got cancellation emails for all our reservations and when we looked it was because we had been changed to Early seating.

We did have our TA confirm too that the change had happened.

I can't tell you if we were passed over at any time but I can say we did get the change we had been waitlisted for.

Booked this and the 2day pre for a B2B

We too are booked on this. WIll be our 30th anniversary.

We are booked for this too.  So excited for our first TA!

BTW, there is an FB group for this search "Odyssey of the Seas Transatlantic November 3rd 2024"

On 6/29/2023 at 8:59 PM, baltodave said:

I was thinking of the Crowne Plaza that's very close to the airport since we have a 9am flight the next morning.   For those staying over an extra night, where are you staying?

We booked Crowne Plaza post cruise for same reasons.

Our TA booked us on direct flights from Toronto with Copa Airlines using Air2Sea.  Arrive in Panama on the 15th and depart on the 24th meaning a couple extra days for which we have booked rooms at Holiday Inn (pre-cruise) and Crowne Plaza (post-cruise).

Selected Crowne Plaza for the included airport shuttle.

We are open to change on hotels if we find these inconvenient as group plans develop but we felt it prudent to have something on the books rather than ride it out and have troubles later.

19 hours ago, Ampurp85 said:

I took that since terms would be based on country orgins it would be harder to book in USD since things would differ. The whole point of booking in USD is to take advantage of the policies.

Fair observation.  I will note that currently when I use the website to look at cruises I can as a resident of Canada on the Canadian site still select to see prices in USD. Maybe someone from MEI can enlighten us on the TA side of things as I do use an MEI agent for bookings ( @Beci )

4 hours ago, Ampurp85 said:

It looks like some people will no longer be able to book in USD when they aren't located in USA. 

Is there a particular part of the new terms and conditions that leads you to this conclusion?

I can't find anything when I search for currency in the PDF.

I figured out how to force this in CHROME on my PC.

I needed to empty the cache and hard reload the page, but the steps are pretty techie.....

I do not see this refreshed search interface on iPad or computer. Perhaps it is because I am in Canada?

Is there a summary anywhere of ships in the fleet that have has Starlink rolled out?

I may be wrong here but formal nights seem to coincide with sea days.

That said, there are still come itinerary changes that need to flow through in the Cruise Planner since the addition of Perfect Day to replace Roatan.

Presently they are still offering Mason Jar Brunch on day 2 when we are at Coco Cay.  Generally this is only on sea days as well.

Itinerary change is reflected in the calendar on Cruise Planner but they do not seem to have reloaded the excursions, etc. to match.

I have found that it depends upon the currency in which your cruise was booked.  Since we now book through a travel agent (shout out to MEI Travel) in US dollars, all our cruise planner purchases are in USD.  

In the past when we booked ourselves in Canadian dollars the cruise planner purchases were in CAD.

Canon has a tutorial app called Canon Coach that had a few guides on using a camera with more settings than the typical Point and Shoot.

https://canon.ca/en/product?name=Canon_Coach&category=/en/products/Software-Solutions/Camera---Camcorder-Apps

32 minutes ago, twangster said:

Are you wearing a mask in public and maintaining a list of close contacts? 

https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/these-covid-19-travel-rules-are-still-in-place-and-you-might-not-know-about-them-1.5859570

Maybe doesn't apply to you if you aren't in Ontario.

 

 

 

I absolutely am.

Quick update about return to Canada after April 1 and no test required.

I registered with ArriveCAN for DW and I however I did not pay super close attention to the spelling of my last name.  On MOST of my identification my last name has a space in it, and this is true of my passport.  My NEXUS card however has my last name without a space.

My ArriveCAN did not have the space and so while I was allowed to enter without any issue at the airport, I have now been getting daily check ins reminding me to be quarantining for 14 days.  I am not truly required to do so as I am fully vaccinated but there is apparently no way for them to stop the system from contacting me.  I will continue to answer their questions and take it as a lesson learned.

All my life I have had to ask people looking me up in their computer systems to check with and without the space in my last name so I should have known better.

Booked on this!