Atlantix2000

Betting you're seeing the menus for the current cruise. Is Thanksgiving day 5 for the current cruise on your ship? It's been commonly reported that to figure out the menus for your own cruise, you either have to look at the menus while the ship is cruising an identical itinerary, or you have to select your actual sailing. (And I'm sorry but I don't remember the details of how to do that but there are posts about it.)

First, Royal's website is known to not show all available inventory. Second, you said this cruise is in Jan 2026 (over 2 years away). That's a LOT of time for bookings/cancellations/rebookings/cabin changes/RoyalUp/etc to drastically change the inventory.

I think you've misinterpreted the 6 month rule. Where it exists, the 6 month rule refers to how close your passport is to expiring, not to when it was issued. You can always travel with a brand new passport because it is valid for 10 years (or even longer? I don't remember). Countries with the six month rule are concerned that you would enter their country with the intention of staying for a week but due to medical/legal/etc issue, you end up staying in the country longer and your passport expires before you leave. (This would mean you are now stuck in their country). So they require that your passport will remain valid for 6 months after you arrive.

While true, your experience does not apply to the circumstances of the question. There is now an option to book the drink package while booking the cruise (in other words, not as a separate purchase in the app/cruise planner). The question is whether a drink package booked that way can still be rebooked for a lower price or is it locked to the purchase price. Unfortunately, the option is new enough that I'm not sure there is a known answer yet!

I thought TA supplied OBC shows up in your account on Day 2 of the cruise so it isn't available for use pre-cruise. Did that change?

It's a quirk of the card processing systems in combination with Royal (and most hotels/resorts/other cruise lines/vendors/etc) trying to save money. Whenever you run a charge on a card, the vendor gets charge a fee from the payment processor. There are actually 2 parts to this fee - one set fee per transaction and one variable fee based on the size of the charge. Therefore, it costs the vendor more to do five $20 transactions than one $100 transaction. In order to minimize costs, the vendor is allowed to place a hold and modify they size of that hold. Then, when they know the final bill, they cancel the hold and put through one final/real transaction. This works great for the vendor but not for the consumer because cancelled holds don't cancel immediately, but the new charge does go through immediately. This means for a short time, the card appears to have been charged twice. (The length of this time depends on the policies of the bank that issues the card and cannot be controlled by the vendor.) So how does this effect the consumer? It depends on whether the card is credit or debit and whether whether there is enough money to cover both the hold and the real charge. For a credit card, the issuing bank has plenty of money to cover all possible charges so the hold has no real effect. The only question is whether the hold plus the real charge plus any previous balance would hit your credit limit. If you're under the limit, great. If you're now over the limit, the real charge gets denied and you'll have to use another card or cash. The important point is that the hold effects someone else's money (the bank's). For a debit card, the money in your bank account has to cover all the charges and the holds. Your bank won't know the hold is cancelled so it ties up your money twice. That can lead to denied charges or overdraft fees depending on your account's rules. The important point is that the hold effects YOUR money.

Sounds like you've already gotten the right feedback, but I'll just add that the biggest problem is geography. While cruise lines like to say they are stopping in Orlando (or Rome, etc), that's really just the closest major city to the port. In reality, Orlando is closer to the center of Florida than it is to Port Canaveral on the coast. So traveling to Disney World means devoting at least 2 hours of travel time, plus time getting on and off the ship, plus some safety margin so you don't miss the ship. Stops at Port Canaveral also tend to not include as many hours on shore as stops in the islands which makes it harder to justify the trip to Disney. If you are annual passholders at Disney, then I could see justifying the trip since you'd only have to pay for transportation (but then you can't book Royal's excursion since that would include a Disney ticket you don't need). If it's your first time going to Disney, I would strongly recommend against doing it in the middle of a cruise. If you're somewhere in between, then I would just lean against the trip.

then most people are purchasing specialty coffee. For the original question, perhaps we can sum this up that for Royal (and most of the world) - Espresso is always Specialty Coffee, Non-Espresso may or may not be Specialty Coffee.

Apps showing schedules allow flexibility that paper schedules don't. They can be updated throughout the day if the weather/illness/etc causes a change to an activity/show/etc. It's also more environmentally friendly than printing something that is only valid for a single day. You can eat at the same time with the same waiter whether you do "My Time Dining" or traditional. There's no shuffleboard because most of Royal (and Carnival's) guests have never played it! Much of your complaints are a generational issue. I mean this in the kindest way possible, but it sounds like you are older than the target market for the mainstream cruise lines. There's nothing wrong with that, but you may need to seek out smaller, more luxurious cruise lines to find what you are looking for.

Depending on what you mean by bringing your own freshly ground beans, that may not be allowed. Any food products you bring on board have to be factory sealed or will be confiscated. I seriously doubt every restaurant in your country is serving you coffee that they brewed just for you.

Nope, barista-made including everything you listed is specialty coffee. Normal coffee is just coffee from a pot where you add your own cream and sugar.

@Foodog You don't mention what category those 3 cabins are which makes it harder to evaluate the Royal Up offers. Typically, you can only increase your category a certain amount of levels through Royal Up. So I'm assuming your cabin 3 (that allows bidding all the way up to Owner's Suite) is already a higher category than the other 2 cabins (that only go up to Junior Suite).

What is a mummy's favorite style of music? Wrap Music!

I wouldn't put much faith in a phone call to a representative that doesn't specifically mention Martinique in their answer. The reply as written is the standard reply for most normal cruises. If the representative didn't understand that there are exceptions, they'll just repeat the standard scripted answer. As for the Roll Call admin, I also disagree with that statement. My understanding is that you enter a country by entering their waters. Staying on the ship changes nothing. If you don't have the proper documentation to enter a country, you will be denied boarding.

How can anyone predict the future? 2024 cruises to Israel and Egypt are months away. If you are booked and hoping to get your money back, I'd say it's way too early for the cruise lines to cancel. You'll have to weigh the pros and cons and possible financial penalties of canceling vs waiting to see what happens next year.

It used to exist and generate revenue but tux rentals died out as formal dress became less popular. Once the costs and hassle of storage and cleaning the tuxes exceeded the revenue, they got rid of the offer.

If you are making a reservation while on the ship, then you do not pre-pay for the meal. So yes, buying does imply eating since you'll get the bill at the end of the meal like a normal restaurant. The rule is written to encourage specialty dining on the first couple nights when the restaurants typically aren't as booked because many people (especially first time cruisers) don't do any planning and won't know to make reservations until they get on the ship. For a transatlantic, I imagine they have more flexibility than normal given the length of the cruise but then again the clientele is also more experienced and restaurants may be more booked.

I feel like this ended up in the wrong thread since it's missing context about a formula, but I'll answer this: Drink packages booked in dollars would most likely (always?) book under US rules. In that case, the price given does NOT include the 18% gratuity which gets added during the checkout process. Drink packages booked in euros are already going to have gratuity included. Therefore to compare prices correctly, you need account for both currency conversion AND gratuity. If you have converted 96 euros to 80 dollars, then the daily dollar rate is about $68 (since $68 *1.18 = $80).

I don't have nearly enough nights at sea to make such a definitive statement as "always", but in my experience, there's been a Drink of the Day every day I've been on board. To the best of my memory, there was always a sign on the bar (but not necessarily every bar since not every bar has every ingredient). No idea if it was in the Cruise Compass or not.

Depends on your definition of optimize. Removing things so that the main part of the site (the actual blog post) can fill the smaller screen is an optimization. It would be preferable if features like search were still accessible from a menu but I don't know if Matt can provide that. The website/forum software Matt uses can be customized but it may not provide that option. From a mobile, you can always hit "Show desktop version" in your web browser but you'll probably have to zoom and scroll more due to the formatting.

Did this post end up in the wrong thread? I don't see any references to CC or Lelepa.

To you it may have looked like a goodwill gesture, but legally it may now be considered an accepted settlement. That's why everyone is saying you'll need to talk to an attorney.

If someone takes your room key, they will only have access to a room you haven't been in yet. That's not really a concern because if you get there and someone else has put there stuff there, you just contact the cabin attendant and they'll take care of it. The other person won't be able to charge anything to your account because your picture would pop up on the screen and the cashier/bartender would know it isn't you. You will usually have access to your room long before your luggage is delivered. There will be giant piles of luggage near the crew elevators. The cabin attendants will eventually move/separate those piles and deliver to the correct rooms but you can always go find your own luggage if you want. No, nothing really prevents someone from taking the wrong bag, but there are cameras to identify who took the wrong bag. I'd be way more worried about the parts of the trip BEFORE the luggage end up in that pile.

Actually, that link https://www.royalcaribbeanblog.com/boards/index.php/topic/17-when-is-your-next-cruise/ is broken because it is missing the "?" after index.php (likely due to upgraded forum software since that post was created). Right now, clicking that link gives the result Fuzzywuzzy stated. The correct link should be https://www.royalcaribbeanblog.com/boards/index.php?/topic/17-when-is-your-next-cruise/

In the upper right corner of the homepage, there's a search box (see where I typed Anthem). Once I hit the arrow on the right, I get a list of blog entries on Anthem. Now, my screen is maximized, when I it's not maximized, the menu at the top and the right column with the search and quote sections disappear depending on the width of the window.