jticarruthers

No connectivity is one of my cruise goals 🤔

My crew is already aware that they will likely see but not be able to touch the slides, etc. Already informed my wife that I will probably be in pissed off mode on Saturday until I get settled with what compensation RCI will be extending and then dropping it for the duration of the cruise, regardless of what said compensation ends up being. My expectations are that they will politely smile and nod as I explain that the FCC offered is worthless and offer nothing else but at least I can try one more time I guess.

It is easy to see/justify the value on a sea day, the tricky part is the port days and then weighing the mix of the two to determine the value over the whole cruise. For me on most itineraries it isn't worth the extra expense for the convenience factor of not worrying about what I am ordering.

bc, just make an appointment when you board on Saturday for a set time on Friday. They are usually pretty good about taking the people with appointments in a timely fashion. I was considering picking up an open booking but will wait to see how the FCC experience goes before I make that decision .... it appears likely that the rules of the FCC will not allow it to be applied to the cruise I already have booked next year and I don't see myself booking a third one next year just to use the credit which will probably mean I am irritated with RCI and not in the mood to make an open booking :)

On board contact options seem to vary by ship and AO age group. Some ships have phones or beepers that they give out, seems to be much less common than it used to be for some reason though and they also seem to give them out more for young kids and/or special needs kids as opposed to just everybody. My Nephew is autistic and they provided a phone to my brother on Freedom last year for example but prior to that I hadn't seen or heard of phones being available for a couple of years. I would think in port if you gave them a cell # they would try it but has never come up to be sure.

I know my son played some video games in kids club at that age but I think it was more "when he didn't want to do the group activity" as opposed to dedicated play time .... could be wrong as its been a couple of years.

Coupled with favorable experiences on Vista and Escape in the last 12 months this has pretty well torched any lingering "Loyal to Royal" instincts I had left. 2 years ago when it came vacation time there was only one website I went too ... now there are several. Royal is still one of them just not the go to anymore.

Three strikes so i guess i am done working this issue for now. Tried emailing customer service and got no where, tried calling customer service and get no where and tonight got the brush off from Michael Bayley's office directly ... at least i got the excitement of a phone call from Royal Caribbean corporate office to start the weekend off :) Sent an email into his email address about 2,30 this afternoon and got a call about 6.30 explaining that this was Mr Bayley's assistant calling me and that he (Mr Bayley not the assistant) had personally read my email and asked the assistant to call and blow me off. (not actually said that way but that was the effect). I thought about pointing out that Mr Bayley had spent the afternoon bobbing around the Atlantic taking pictures with his shiny toys but decided not to prolong the call any further. Result of the call - for those of us on the first few sailings post drydock (the ones where none of the upgrades are online) we should receive a printout in our cabins explaining the 25% FCC and how it will work.

bcarney, I called in and vented at customer care today in regards to current cruise costing more vs. future cruise credit being offered. The more I dwell on it the more it irritates me that I am probably going to be spending a whole lot more on shore excursions instead of staying on board and using the slides/flowrider, etc.and if I am willing to buy yet another cruise I will get some of the money back. Response from them was that there are no other options at the moment but that she would document my feedback and see if that changed anything at corporate. I also have no official communication from Royal on the topic.

It has to do with whether the cruise is a closed loop within the EU vs. exiting the EU (As I understand it) so to monorailmedics point if you could run through your port stops this year vs last time I think that will explain it.

Sorry wasn't clear in what I meant. When the 2017 schedule was rolled out , every Thanksgiving week cruise was priced higher than the same cruise on the same ship right before and right after Thanksgiving. From then on the prices have fluctuated with supply/demand/sale of the day but it was clear at schedule roll out that they had decided to start the Thanksgiving week at a premium.

Royal has now implemented premium pricing for Thanksgiving week as well as the Christmas and New Year weeks.

Same plan on our part. If we don't see enough Chops on the menu when we board we can cancel and refund instead.

bc, which night are you booked ? Since Chops is dead we went ahead and booked a Giovanni's reservation for the 4th night. Hoping to see some Chops favorites on the menu. Edit: Just read the menus you linked to and if there aren't any Chops dishes that reservation will be cancelled on board :)

Not in my happy place on this one ... two weeks to get some answers and then get back to my happy place though. Funniest part is Chops was not available to book online yesterday and now it is ... so on the day they announce Chops wont be available after all they add it to the website for bookings :)

As Floatme said I expect this has to do with the commissionable/non-commissionable split on your fare. I am sure we can get a real travel agent in here to explain it but my best shot at explaining it (as I understand it) follows: Royal publishes the fare as $800 + $200 in taxes and fees, total of $1000, You call your TA and say buy it, TA says yep I see the same total of $1000. Royal tells TA; as far as we are concerned $600 is commissionable cruise fare, $200 is non-commissionable and $200 is taxes and fees. TA says ok, if you aren't considering the extra $200 as commissionable cruise fare then I consider it a fee and presents it to you as $600 cruise fare and $400 taxes and fees. Same money but bucketed differently for different purposes.

It sounds good to me, but I think it is pretty clear that the philosophy is bigger is better and even bigger is even better.

Next year (2017) it seemed like the ships coming back from Europe were coming back later ... some of them weren't even back for Thanksgiving week.

The ride was a little rough both times but nobody in our party (including one who is very motion sickness sensitive) got sick ... she was unhappy for the ride but was ok.

Don't think we used the one on Labadee but I seem to recall using the one on CocoCay and imagine it would be similar. IIRC it was kind of a "beach" atmosphere with a bunch of sand and some play equipment for the kids to run around and play on while being supervised by the Adventure Ocean staff. Kept our son occupied for an hour or two back when he was about 6-7.

We have only done the mainland twice, both times the ship excursion had the ferry pull up to our dock and load there, similarly on the way back it was a dedicated ferry that came back to our dock rather than the regular ferry terminal. In both cases we got back to the ship late (due to the tour operator insisting on a shopping trip that nobody else wanted to stop for). I go back and forth between using ship excursions and self-booking, heading over to the mainland is one where I definitely believe in paying extra for the ship tour to get the "guarantee" of not being left behind ... (not technically a guarantee but at least they are less likely to pull away leaving a couple of hundred passengers on an RCI organized tour).

Makes some sense, of course on the flip side my expectations are that I am not attending anyway since I didn't know about it in order to bring the appropriate attire ... so it doesn't matter whether it is cancelled or not, I am disappointed when I read about it because I didn't know about it ahead of time ...

I have not been on board to know but am certain there is no way HOTS does not have the freestyle machines installed.

Havent seen that ... we did experience deck 6 1/2 onboard Carnival Vista this year though .. In order to get to the teen club you walk up the stairs from deck 6 halfway to deck 7 and then walk through the back of the stairwell to a different set of stairs to go down to the arcade/teen club on deck 6. (My description makes it sound like a secret wall, its not that bad). We spent the cruise comparing platform stairwell 6 1/2 to platform 9 3/4 ;)

It has always seemed strange to me to have "theme nights" but not tell people about it before hand so that they could pack appropriately ... maybe it drives on board sales of white t-shirts for the white night so much that they are afraid to lose the revenue ??