Atlantix2000

You already paid gratuities for your specialty dining when you purchased the UDP (18% was added to the daily per person price when you checked out). That covers your specialty dining whether you eat every possible meal as specialty or not. (Not counting any upcharges for fancy entrees at a few places.) The standard gratuities which you can also pre-pay cover your room steward, some behind the scenes staff, and your non-specialty dining wait staff. Even if you never have dinner in the MDR, some of these gratuities still go to them because they also work in the buffet and other dining locations that you may still use.

You (or your Travel Agent) selected Early Traditional, Late Traditional, or My Time Dining when you booked your cruise. You can call Royal to change it but since you are sailing soon, you would likely be put on a waiting list to change. There is no way to make this change online.

The answer will depend on what ship, what category of stateroom, and sometimes which exact stateroom you are sailing. If you tell us that info, someone may know. You can also google your room number and ship and often find photos and videos of your exact room.

One clarification based on how you phrased this question. Assigned times don't mean much. If you let Royal take your luggage, you can still depart whenever you like and pick up your luggage from the area marked for your assigned time. Of course, they don't actually promise to have your luggage delivered to that area until your assigned time so no reason to go earlier but you can go later. If you carry your own luggage, you can also depart at ANY time you like. They describe this option as getting off first but that's just because many/most people carrying their luggage are rushing to get to an early flight. They'll want you out of your room at some point but you can carry your luggage to breakfast or hang around the common areas of the ship if you like. Eventually, they'll start pushing you off the ship because it has to be emptied for the next cruise.

You can and it will usually work out the way you would expect. You would eventually get assigned a room of the category you booked but might win a Royal Up to a better category. However, there's a small chance something weird could happen because Royal handles the Guarantees and a different company runs the Royal up program. Your GTY room is for a certain category but the fine print says "or better" if they run out of rooms in your original category. So you could book an Interior Guarantee and bid on a Balcony through Royal Up. Then, something weird happens and you get assigned a Junior Suite! You're thrilled. Then you "win" your Royal Up and you pay to be "upgraded" to a Balcony. Not you're not so thrilled. This would be REALLY unusual and the odds are REALLY low, but I think I read about something similar happening to someone on this site.

Since you currently have late dining, on the small ships (non-Oasis/Quantum classes), you will not have an issue with show conflicts because there is a late show (for those with early dining) and an early show (for those with late dining). It's actually the people with My Time Dining that want to eat at a "middle" time that could run in to show conflicts. On the large ships (Oasis/Quantum classes), the shows don't occur at the same times each day. So anyone could have a conflict with a specific showtime but that same show would be at a different time on the next day. So you just have to find the right show time that works with your dinner time. (There is always a small chance there's no good possibilities and you'd have to eat at the buffet or a specialty restaurant, but in general, the schedule will work out.)

Out of curiousity, why would you think the balconies would be restricted at sea?

You would have a point if the sentence ended after the words "including Gold" because that would call out Gold as somehow an exception or special. But the sentence doesn't end there, it continues to lists EVERY level of the C&A program from Gold to Pinnacle. That makes it clear that you have to be in one of those categories to qualify. Someone who has never sailed before does not have a qualifying level. It IS possible to get a C&A number before your first cruise, but you are not Gold until AFTER your first cruise.

I think you can book them on the app, but not until you are on board. That's the trade-off with any dining package - book on board for a discount or book in advance at full price.

Why doesn't your friend on the cruise ask this question? That would give us an actual real world recent example!

The default for My Time Dining is getting a private table for your party. The default for Traditional (Early/Late) Dining is sitting with others unless your party is large enough to require its own table. However, you can get a private table with Traditional or share a table with My Time Dining. Try to get the style (MTD/Trad) of dining set before the cruise. You can always request a different table while on the ship but it is not always possible to switch the type of dining.

But that's why people are asking where and how you booked. The terms and conditions ARE different. If you book through the US site, you are bound by US terms. Through a European site, you get the European terms where the pricing/repricing rules are very different because Europe has stricter rules on getting your money back. But you can book any Royal cruise anywhere in the world using any of Royal's websites. (And if you use a travel agent, that opens another set of questions over how they booked it. Some TAs will only use their local rules, others will book through international terms when they find better deals.) It's really no different than the airline industry. The person sitting next to you could have paid a wildly different price and have wildly different cancellation terms but you're on the same plane taking the same trip.

She had a valid passport with valid expiration date for check-in. When packing, her husband put the expired passport in her bag. My wife and I have our old passports also and they are in the same safe as our current passports. This story makes a good argument to stop doing that!

I assume you're referring to the new deck 11 cabins. Have you looked at the videos available on YouTube? The guy in this review doesn't like them due to seeing so much of the ship and the lack of privacy due to the rooms above. I think I would love it but it seems like opinions could really be all over the place on this. I'm pretty sure various posters here have done reviews when these cabins were first added. Try a quick search for "Deck 11" on the forum.

Given the reaction of the Israeli official, it kind of sounds like they may have been calling your wife's name for awhile and you only noticed at the 2 hour mark when they shouted it. Since you just returned to the ship at that point, you don't even know if there was a simple miscommunication or an actual problem with your wife's passport. You don't know (or at least don't state) that you were denied entry to the country, so I'm not sure what you want from Royal.

This is a good example of why Royal Up is not recommended when you have more than one stateroom. Officially, they don't have to do anything to help you. They will certainly give you extra keys but whether they would rearrange who gets the suite perks is going to depend on the whims of whoever you talk to. Please also consider that you should increase your gratuities to the suite's attendant. You would have 4 people in the room, but they'll only be getting paid to clean up after 2 people.

The very last line of your quoted text is "The Royal Caribbean Best Price Guarantee is applicable to North American reservations only."

I would guess it does have some relation to the size of the room. Let's say one steward is expected to clean 20 standard rooms. Would they also assign one steward to 20 larger suites? I doubt it because the suites will take longer to clean. Therefore, if the suite steward has fewer rooms but it takes the same total amount of time to clean, then they need a higher per room rate so that they make the same amount for working the same number of hours. Who would want to be the suite steward if it meant you made less money?

Sometimes your browser won't notice that there's new/different content on a website and just uses what is cached on your computer. I've noticed this alot on a Disney forum I visit. When I see the same headlines on the top page, I sometimes have to hold down the control button while hitting refresh to force Chrome to fully reload the page without using the cache. Maybe give that a try on Royal's website.

Do you mean the ship skipped Mazatlan and/or no one was allowed to get off there for some reason? In those cases, yes they would refund the port fees. If you mean you personally chose not to get off the ship, they would not refund the port fees. If you have the opportunity to go ashore, the ship (and thus you) owe port fees. I suppose it's possible there was a significant difference between the expected port fees that were charged when booking and the actual port fees when you arrived. If they refunded the difference to everyone, that was a nice but unexpected gesture.

The angled black lines are to show the door location for interior rooms. Therefore, if the yellow highlighted line is a wall, then the entrances to both 10231 and 10633 are blocked from your suites. However, you can definitely cross through the elevator lobby. It would only add a few seconds to the walk. Either way, those are still the closest interior rooms to your suites.

I think your statement is the "correct" and/or "official" answer. However, I think by default the chips in the cups are activated for 14 days (which is long enough to cover almost every single cruise with a few transatlantic/transpacific exceptions). Therefore, the cups would probably work fine for B2B cruises but I don't think that is Royal's intention.

A lot of the excursions are offered by small companies or family businesses and many of them had to change jobs during the pandemic. Add in the staffing problems every company is experiencing these days and neither Royal or the excursion companies are as willing to promise they'll be able to run a specific excursion many months or even more than a year away. I think they are just trying to avoid too many refunds and upset customers due to canceled excursions by waiting until closer to the cruise to actively promote them. That's just my wild guess based on seeing this topic come up a lot in the last year.

If you mean Nov 27th of this year (as in <2 weeks away), the ship is likely very close to sold out. That means you're also going to run into issues with lifeboat capacity for the muster stations assigned to the area of the ship you are looking at. If there are three empty 4 person rooms available in the muster station but there are only 4 lifeboat spots left, then they cannot sell them to a group of 10. So it can look like rooms are available, but once one is sold, the others would be forced to remain unsold.

The farther out you book, the better prices you can get but there's also more risk of changes due to charters, itinerary updates, and even ship redeployments. It's all part of the cruise industry.