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We have an upcoming cruise on the Harmony in star class - our first non DCL Cruise - and have lots of obc. Can obc be used for tips for Our genie, servers in specialty restaurants, and/or the casino? Also as specialty dining and coastal kitchen is included should we budget tips for servers there and if so, how much do people normally leave at specialty restaurants or at CK? Thanks for any advice!

I know its 6 months away but I'm excited to sail with star class. We'll be on the Quantum of the Seas. One thing I'm hoping my assigned genie can do is arrange an in-suite dinner for my wife and I. Embarkation day is her birthday. Any suggestions on what to do? Also, how does the dinning work with star class? Can we basically eat wherever and whenever without incurring extra costs? Same thing for drinks or does the beverage package rules apply? Thanks in advance for sharing!

“Follow that STAR…Our Journey back to Oasis.” - March 15-22, 2020 Oasis… ” A fertile or green spot in the desert, a shelter from the storm, a moment of respite from the conditions of the desert…” We’re back with another blog and that line above pretty much sums up what this cruise means to us this time around. Our lives, since entering dry dock back in August 2019, has been work, work, and more work. To say that the last seven months have been busy is an understatement. However, all is going to be well soon as we are about to embark on not just another cruise, but another Star Class adventure! And full disclaimer! In fear of being blog shamed (I won't mention any names here lol), I debated waiting on this one until about a week out but then I would have to back track to outline the Star Class process. This is just easier. Oh, and I am excited too! Please note that this is only 5 weeks early. ? Let's begin...

With the obvious lack of Oasis Star Class blogs recently, I thought I'd step up and do one as well. The more the merrier, right? Stealing from @Lovetocruise2002 for formatting: Who’s Going? Me, wife Abby, and 5 y/o Daughter Virginia, along with Abby's mom and dad (the in-laws). It will be the in-laws first cruise in over 20 years, so going on an amplified Oasis will be quite the culture shock for them. Flight Flying from STL to FLL the day before via SWA, then taking an Uber/Lyft to Miami to spend the night. Pre-Cruise Stay Looking at hotel rooms, we were planning on staying at the Intercontinental, but rates were outlandish. $500+ per night per room. I couldn't believe that certain members of the Blog group would stay there at that price, so I was confused. I did some research, and that weekend is the South Beach Food and Wine Festival, so everywhere was booked or crazy expensive. So instead we are booked in a 2 bedroom suite at the Hyatt House near MIA for almost 50% of that rate, and for all 5 of us. Itinerary This 7-night, Western Caribbean sailing, brings us to Falmouth, Cozumel, and Labadee. No plans in Falmouth. Cozumel we have El Cozumeleno booked, and in Labadee with have cabana B2 booked. Cabin 2 Bedroom ATS on deck 9 for us, we will try to keep it nice for you @Lovetocruise2002. The in-laws are booked in a JS down the hall from us. RCCL sent an email about 3 weeks ago saying that they overbooked JS for this sailing and offered to go to a Balcony room for $300 OBC and a full refund of the second passenger in the cabin. We paid for this cruise as a Christmas present for them, so I pushed like hell for them to go to the standard balcony, but unfortunately they had already been on the blog and youtube looking at cabin information and were dead set on the JS... Pre-Cruise thoughts We are beyond excited to see the newly amped Oasis of the Seas. It's the only Oasis Class we've been on, and that was in November 2018. I'm very excited for all of the slides, the escape room, and the prospect of actual brewed iced tea at Portside BBQ. No pre-cruise purchases because it’s Star Class, but I did snag the DX for my in-laws at $18/day. Looking forward to checking out the new Adventure Ocean, even though Virginia will probably be bummed out that @Matt's daughters won't be there too! I think it's interesting that @Lovetocruise2002 and I have a different Genie even though we will be in the same cabin. We have Smitha, whom I've heard great things about, but apparently it would be hard-pressed to go wrong with any of the Genies on Oasis. Smitha has been great so far. We got our initial email from her 1 day after our survey, on 1/7/20, and had a provisional schedule worked out about 3 days later.

Not a live blog but posting details of our Anthem of the Seas Star class experience under live blog section of the website. Come check it out if you have any questions about the ship or Star class on Anthem. I will be posting all 7 days of our experience! I figure in these times of no cruises some fun pictures will be an enjoyable distraction!

Our first star class cruise on Anthem of the Seas is approaching quickly. Today marks 50 days to go. We completed our genie survey this morning. This will be our first time as a family on Royal Caribbean (the husband previously sailed as a child on RCI). We have sailed on DCL concierge twice, both times on the Magic, once in the Walt Suite. The rising prices of DCL concierge had caused me to look into other options, and it seems that the amenities provided to star class cruisers on RCI are far beyond what is offered on DCL… and for a better price! Our suite will include myself, the husband, and our 8 yr old son (who will be celebrating his 9th birthday onboard). My parents will also be joining us on the cruise, but will be in a separate cabin. Cruise Itinerary: 11 night Southern Caribbean (Puerto Rico, St. Maarten, Antigua, St. Lucia, St. Kitts) from Cape Liberty, NJ on 1/27/2020. Stateroom: Owner’s Loft #8720 Shore Excursions: St. Maarten Beach Rendezvous. Catamaran Sail, Snorkel, and Beach Cruise in Antigua. 4x4 Island Safari & Beach in St. Kitts. All were booked online on the cruise planner with Royal Caribbean. Transportation: We are fortunate to live approximately 2 1/2 hours from the port, therefore will be arranging transportation for the entire family through Delaware Express. We have used them many times for airport transportation, and have found them to be very reliable. Bonus: We didn’t realize this when we booked the cruise, but the Super Bowl will be happening while we are onboard. Looking forward to finding out who our genie will be!

So here goes. I am a planner by nature and not being able to plan everything myself is driving me crazy! I am going to trust the process and "attempt" to go with the flow but am hoping to get some more information. We cruise in a little over a month and I have read tons of blogs and searched the internet but I still have a few questions/clarifications: 1. If I send a schedule of dinner each night, along with other things we want to do/already have reserved, will the genie follow that or will they move things around? My concern is that the times we want to dine there won't be tables available for our group (10 people in 3 Star Class Suites) since we didn't book in advance and therefore, we won't get to eat where I want on the day I want. 2. I have heard Anthem tends to not allow lunch to be served in the suite on embarkation day. We can live with that but will they do snacks/appetizers for sail away at 3 PM that day? I have heard people say that if the restaurant isn't open that you want the food from then you can't. We were thinking of getting some sushi, tempura and spring rolls from Izumi. Alternatively, Brass and Bock is open so we could get appetizers delivered from there. 3. I know the Genie doesn't stock the room with wine but could they deliver a few glasses of wine or leave some gin in a glass to make gin and tonics? 4. With our total of 10 of us in 3 star class suites, we have asked for one genie thinking it would be less work for that genie since we will be doing mostly everything together. Does that make sense to others or would having (potentially) different genies be better? 5. Besides the few snacks we asked to be stocked in our room, I do want some snacks delivered to the room (sometimes) but I don't want wasted food. I was thinking of putting on my schedule I will be sending to the genie what days we wanted snacks delivered. Is that what others do? 6. Tipping at specialty restaurants. I know we aren't paying for any of the specialty restaurants but I usually tip $15-$20 for the two of us when we have gone to them on past cruises. There will be 10 of us at most meals so what is reasonable? Follow the same guideline we typically do? What about at breakfast or lunch at CK? Does anyone have any guidelines that are reasonable? Not trying to be cheap but we splurged for our 20th anniversary on this cruise and I want an idea of how much extra cash I need. 7. When we do in-suite dining (we want to order chops one night), do we just get in contact with our genie and tell them what we want and what time? Is that the same for ordering breakfast in the room too? 8. I know everyone tips their Genie differently and I have googled, Facebook stalked and searched and I still have no idea! It seems some people do $100 pp/day (which would be $2100 which is 40% of what we paid for our room so that is not happening)! I only foresee our Genie scheduling dinners for us and handling in-suite dining if we want. We already booked all excursions and shows. I was hoping $700 for the week was reasonable (the other two rooms would likely tip them the same so $2100 from the 3 rooms in total - I know I would be happy if I made $2100 in cash for a week!!). 9. I know we have to go to the Star Class Zone 6 drop off area. I was a little confused as to what to do when we get there. I know I don't give the bags to the pier porters so is there someone at the star class banner that will tell me who to give them to or should I go inside with them? Thank you in advance for any other tips or tricks to make this the most amazing trip ever!!! I know there are some experienced Star Class cruisers here so I look forward to hearing from the experts!

Well, it's been almost a week now that we've been back from our B2B Star Class cruises on Anthem so if I'm going to do this blog I'd better do it while I can still remember stuff (#oldbrain).... Some of you may have noticed that I tend to be a bit "wordy" <cough, cough> so I'm going to try and keep my posts short(er). Unfortunately, I am the anti-Twangster so I have NO photos at all. That's just the way I roll....so not only will this blog be on the wordy side, but it will be bereft of photos - hince, the shorter, more readable options, hopefully.

4:45 am alarm goes off. 5:00, maybe 5:20, stumble to coffee. 5:30 am blink and look at computer to figure out where I left off the prior day with work. Oh, that alarm – yeah, that’s my damn body alarm. When you wake up early (way early) and do a ton of reading about cruise stuff, you realize that writing up your own personal experience from start to finish is a cool way to document your vacation. Reading all the blogs tends to get you excited. You start thinking, yeah, cool, I can do this. No problem. Oh yeah, it was my sister that was the English major (#InsertExplicit). That just means I hope she never finds this thing. My grammar probably isn’t that good, but it’s communicable. Countdown started a long time ago, but now we are exactly 2-weeks from boarding. Let’s push the rewind button and see how we got here. April 2016, after taking a financial break from cruising (our last cruise was 2012 #ugh) to ‘fund’ our home renovations and finish our Master’s degree, we realized it was time to take a real vacation and celebrate a few things. One of our big celebrations was wanted to take the kids, my mother-in-law (MiL) and sister-in-law (SiL) on their first ever cruise. My SiL turned 50 and my MiL turned 70 – sshhh – ok, so those are big milestones, #meh, they won’t care. We needed a cruise that would accommodate all of us for a reasonable price. Many spreadsheets later and seeing as how we would ‘split’ the MiL’s cruise fare with my SiL, we landed on the Oasis of the Seas, A1-8330 Aquatheater Suite w/ Balcony. It was the 7-night Eastern Caribbean on May 28, 2017. Oh yeah, and it was our first time to experience Star Class (SC). #Ruined While on the 2017 cruise, there was a lot of discussion about when / where / how / etc would we do the next cruise. Well, we didn’t sign up on Oasis in 2017 for the next one because we just hadn’t figured out all the logistics. Maybe I’ll try and remember to write up something about that cruise later, but for now … need to fast forward a few months to the current cruise. There were months of research, discussion, pricing and justification before we finally landed on something. Let’s play from here. In January 2018 we confirmed the cruise ship, route and room. #MonthlyPaymentsStarted During all of our researching and planning, we laid out plans for the next 6 years of cruising vacations. This includes starting plans for the kid’s graduation cruises, one in 2023 to Italy and one in 2025 to Ireland. Plus, SC cruises in 2020 and 2021. We'll probably have to skip 2022 and 2024 to accommodate a 2-week vacation / cruise in 2023 and the other in 2025. More on those later. One of our cruise goals is to try all the new ships coming out for RCL. We prefer the larger ships with all the cool activities and shows. Finding the 9-night Bermuda cruise on Anthem was an awesome find. While we are still working for #TheMan, our vacation and cruise budget limits us to about one cruise a year. We booked the Owner’s Loft Suite 8720, which falls into the Star Class. I can blame the kids for wanting to only cruise in SC now. #Damnit #BadDad Oh, and since we found the Coastal Kitchen, we are now ‘required’ to book something that gives us access. #Spoiled Planning for this cruise is pretty much a weekly discussion over the weekend mornings while drinking coffee and scanning cruise ‘stuff’. Travel arrangements We booked our flight on 12/12/18 (about 25 weeks out) on Southwest. Flight on 5/5/19 and returning on 5/15/19. Since we are in Nashville, Southwest is our preferred carrier. Over the past few years, I’ve flown for work and we have taken a couple of Vegas trips, all on Southwest. So, those points FINALLY paid off. Rather than paying close to $1200+ to fly all four of us up to Newark, NJ, we paid about $50. I cashed in all my points for me and kids. There was almost enough left to pickup my DW’s ticket (I’m guessing this acronym means Dear Wife ? ) so, we paid the transfer fee to have her points transferred to my account to give me enough to get her ‘freeish’ ticket. Thus the $50ish buck was for the transfer and taxes. Not bad, fly all four of us roundtrip for $50ish ? #KeepCasinoBudget When cruising, we always fly in the night before just to make sure if there are any travel issues there is time to deal with it before getting on the cruise. I give credit to my dad for teaching me this. I’ve been cruising since early 2000’s and have always made sure to fly in the day before. Plus, we can start our vacation a day early. My better half did a lot of research on hotels around the port Bayonne in NY. She found a nice hotel, forget what it was, but really wanted to stay in something a little nicer. We talked about the Hyatt Regency Jersey City on the Hudson, but it was about $300 more for the night than what she originally booked. She really wanted to stay there because it looked really cool and is right across from the NY skyline. I felt bad because that really wasn’t in our budget. But wait, lookie what I found. We have some ‘cash-back’ rewards on one of our credit cards. Let’s us that to upgrade to the Hyatt and use our rewards to pay the difference. Done. Booked. Confirmed on March 5th. We’ll get to the hotel earlier enough that we are planning to go see the 911 Memorial and take the ferry over to the statue. Was hoping to be able to see the statue from the North Star as we left, but after a few postings and great information, that doesn’t seem to be an option. The only other pre-cruise travel stuff we did was book a spot to drop the car off. More than likely, we’ll grab us an Uber to get around everywhere else and to take us to the port on the morning of our cruise. Right now, we are planning to leave the hotel about 9:30 to give us an hour or so to make sure we are at the port and in the right spot by the Star Class to meet Yen. I’m the type of person that wants to be early to almost everything – I would rather wait than to have someone waiting for us to show up. #IsThatOCD We got our first RoyalUp email on April 26, about 6 weeks before our cruise date. This was the first time we ever received one of these. We talked about attempting to upgrade, but couldn’t justify an additional $2400 IF we sent in the lowest bid of $1200 pp. I mean, we ‘could’ have swung it but that would have taken away from our casino budget – yeah, we quickly shot it down. Now, if we could have bid maybe $500-$750/pp – that we would have considered a little more. Just to note, they would only charge us for the first two guests – so, technically, it was like upgrading with the kids sail free. Yeah, only way kids sail free is if we put them to work on the ship cleaning dishes or something. They are 12 and 14 now, so I’m SURE that would go over just peachy. Anyway, I guess we didn’t pay enough for this SC cruise so RCL was trying to get us to pay a little more. I’m not going to post what we paid but let’s just say I booked this thing about 16 months prior so I could make monthly budgeted payments. Yes – we actually have a cruise budget ?. We did reprice a few times over the course of time that saved us a little extra. A second email to upgrade came in about 2 weeks later on 5/7/19. I guess the second one was meant for @Lovetocruise2002, since she’s never gotten one. Lol Evidently, they wanted us to upgrade to the Royal Loft Suite which looks amazing, but, hey, we are happy to stay where we are at. There weren’t any other suites included with this email. Side note. We got the RCL credit card a long time ago on one of our past cruises. Yeah, the perks aren’t as good as other cards, but we designate this card for pretty much cruise only related stuff. Over the years, we obtained some of those MyCruise Points that we were able to use for some nice OBC. #BonusCasinoFunds We get double points by putting the cruise payments on this card, which can add up to some decent OBC. Plus, it keeps our cruise finances separate from our normal daily financials. Star Class Notes Our first welcome aboard email from the SC came in on 4/13/19. What’s this, about 8ish weeks or so before our cruise. It was just a generic welcome to the royal genie program where you can fill out a questionnaire. On 5/8/19 we got our first email from Yen Lee, our genie for this cruise. We are excited to have her and have heard great things, especially from @WAAAYTOOO. Here’s a snippet from her initial email: “Once I hear back from you, I’ll reach out again to confirm all the exciting details. From this point on, any questions or requests can be sent my way. I’m looking forward to seeing you onboard soon Please allow me to provide you with directions to the STAR Class arrival area and guarantee a VIP boarding. Kindly be advised that your drop-off point at Cape Liberty Cruise Terminal will be Zone 6. There is a large purple banner, which says Star Class, at the location. Please do not get off at any other zone. Once at Zone 6, kindly identify yourself as a Star Class guest and the assigned pier staff will ensure that your luggage is loaded onto a cart and will be sent directly to the suite while you go through the check-in and security screening process. Due to the nature of the Star Class program, you would understand the services and amenities listed in this email are exclusive and limited to guests residing in these suites. We appreciate your understanding when it comes to the exclusivity of these privileges. I would like to offer you Expedited Boarding services and I would also like to give you my undivided attention. May I suggest arriving at the terminal at 10:30 AM? I have 3 Star Class Families in total and I want to personally escort you inside the Ship. “ We are not the type of family to require a ton of assistance or demands on things, as we want to do all of our own planning and organization. But when cruising SC we allow some of our obsessive planning nature to be done by our genie. After coming up with a list of ‘must-do’ activities on the boat, we sent that over to Yen to allow her to plan the best times. Being in SC does have its perks – two of the main ones we enjoy is the ability to have someone help make sure we can enjoy ALL/ANY activity on board. This is really something that the kids enjoy. The second is the up-front reserved seating for all the shows. Of course, there a lot more benefits, but we can elaborate on those later. Over the past few weeks, we have been communicating with Yen to have her send us the dinner menus for the Coastal Kitchen #teamCK and the other specialty restaurants. I have 11 PDF files of these, so might load those in a follow-up to this opening blog. These will include Izumie, Jamie’s, Chops and Wonderland. We asked for the cruise planner, but haven’t gotten it at this time. Now being two weeks out, this weekend is dedicated to cruise shopping. We all need a few new things for the cruise like some new clothing, shoes and other misc. items. Our new suitcases came in last week, so those are setup in the living room to get ready to start packing. My DW wouldn’t really allow us to start packing any earlier. We don’t have a spare bedroom for a staging area, so have to use the living room. Oh well. Cruise Planner Being in SC, we pretty much get most everything available in the CP, with the exception of the excursions and a few other items (the photo package comes to mind). We did a lot of discussion around the excursions and talked with the kids to see what they wanted to do. For the most part, they just want to swim / snorkel the entire time. Paying some of the prices for the excursions was something we had a hard time justifying. On a prior cruise, my DW and I did a kayak, hike and snorkel excursion in St. Maarten but was pretty disappointed. Paying a few hundred for that excursion didn’t help us want to pay for another one, when we could potentially just walk somewhere and snorkel or walk and tour on our own. However, in 2017, we (all 6 of us, including my 70 yr old mother in law) did the Loterie Farm Zipline. Now, that was well worth the cost. So much so, that we booked it again for this cruise. This is our only purchased excursion in the CP. They did get hit really hard by the hurricane later in 2017, but from their recent pictures looks like they have rebuilt. We are happy to support them by taking this tour again. I’m going to pause for now but will pick up later as we get a little closer. I will also be attempting to do a few live periscopes as @CruisingHobby with #rcperiscopers and will also post more here during the cruise.

I promised Sabrina that I would do this, so here goes. First: I am the worst live blogger EVER since I hate to take pix. I DO realize that long, text review/live blogs are less effective b/c nobody wants to sit and read line after line of text. I hate it myself ! So I am going to TRY and be brief-er than usual and TRY and incorporate photos, which are 2 things I am not very good at (brevity and photography). Who: Dan and I (Raye) What: S2S cruises on Brilliance and Oasis. Where: Tampa then Miami When: 24 - 30 Nov (Brilliance out of Tampa) then 1 - 8 December (Oasis out of Miami) Why: Because we can...and this will be our first S2S At home, writing this but leaving for the airport (DCA) at 2PM. Uber, cost $81.56. We have to have an XL due to luggage. Honestly, it's not that far to the airport. We live about 20 miles south of DC so it's not more than 15-17 miles to the airport. Kinda high, IMO but still cheaper than parking the car in Long Term Parking for 15 days. We will pass some time at the American Airlines Admiral's Club prior to boarding and then fly First Class to Tampa. Flight is at 5:00, arriving TPA at ~7:30PM. Will Uber from airport to the hotel (Tampa Marriott Water Street); used rewards points for the hotel. We could have used airline miles for the air but we're saving those reward points for a yet-to-be scheduled Alaska trip !! One piece of luggage still missing as it is awaiting inevitable forgotten, last-minute items. So looking forward to Brilliance. #1, we have never sailed on Brilliance before and #2, it has been many years since we sailed on a Radiance class ship. PS. I am already having fits with just 1 pic. I don't know how the rest of you do it !! More, later from the Admiral's Club !!

I just received a Royal Up bid possibility for our sailing in a few weeks. As of now we are in an Owners Suite with a minimal bid in for a 2 Bedroom Aqua (really would prefer 2 bathrooms) but nothing was available at time of booking. My question is two fold, does anyone know the stateroom numbers of the Star Loft Suites so I can see their location and your thoughts if you have stayed there? ie part balcony in proximity to the basketball court etc. The minimum bid requested is $1300.00 so even if we bid that my CC gets hit for $2600.00 if we "win" Planning on staying low key so we will be in stateroom a great deal. Your thoughts would be so appreciated, what would you do? Thanks a bunch Sailing Harmony

I have been planning a cruise with my friend and her sister since January. We are sailing on symphony of the seas October 12 2019. We were originally booked in the star loft suite 1722. An Aqua Theatre 2 bedroom opened up and we discussed how it might be beneficial for us to have the separate bedrooms for privacy and the sister would be more comfortable in a bed. I personally also love the wake view and we were interested in seeing the shows from our balcony. Now I’m reading some reviews about noise, the 17th floor having more of a “wow” feeling and that the aqua theatres are sub par to the Star loft with the view of the shows being “outside of all the action and too high up”. Can anyone give some insight on if we made the right decision?

We have an upcoming cruise on Harmony in late August and are staying star class. First time on RCCL (we have sailed DCL) and first time on Western Caribbean itinerary. It’s just me and my 9 year old son. He doesn’t like the beach but loves swimming in pools. I love lying around getting served frozen drinks. We will be getting off at coco cay and at Costa maya (to zip line.). I’ve considered getting a resort day pass in Cozumel but am also considering just staying on the ship in both Cozumel and Roatan. It seems kind of silly to disembark to go somewhere to pay for food, drink and pools when we have all of that already on board. But does the ship really empty out on port days and/or if we stayed onboard for 2/4 port days will we regret it? I’m also super concerned about safety - as we will be traveling without my husband. So any advice? Is using the ship’s pools on a port day with less people and enjoying our star class perks just as good as snagging a day pass for a resort? Thanks for any advice!

Our first SC experience was in 2017 on the Oasis. I'm working up a small blog about our experience, so more to come on that. Our genie 'Allen' was amazing! Now, in 2019 we are going for our second SC experience on Anthem. This question comes more as to what we can bring as a thank-you gift. We did leave a really nice tip, but want to take it a bit further and bring something unique or cool. I feel bad that we didn't really have anything to give Allen in 2017, especially since on the last day he had gotten all of us a little nice gift. For me, a really nice new wallet - which I'm still using today. What, if anything, have other cruisers in the SC brought as a thank-you gift for their genies? What about thoughts on a price range of the gift?

Hello I currently have booked a 1 bed room aqua theatre suite on Symphony of the seas but I just found out for the same price I can get a grand panoramic suite on Allure of the seas. I would like to experience star class but there are currently available on the date of my sailing. 1. Is there a drastic difference between the symphony of the seas and allure of the seas and which room should I choose.

I am making no promises. I have only my iPad so not really equipped to create a full cruise blog but I will do what I can without interrupting the groove of the cruise. I’m not much of a picture-taker and I don’t even know how to post a pic so probably won’t have photos unless I can figure that out. Today was travel day. Left DC at 5:30 AM. Wow. That is early ! ...but had an uneventful flight down. The air was very unsettled so it was a bumpy and turbulent ride but we made it. Since we are both status members with American Airlines, we always fly American. From DC, American does not fly nonstop to Fort Lauderdale so your choices are, nonstop to Miami or go through Charlotte. We chose to go through Charlotte this trip so we had 2 segments, but the flights were so close together that we basically got off the first leg and hustled to the gate for #2 with no time to spare. We are staying at the Residence Inn Airport and Cruiseport. While the hotel is very nice, there is absolutely nothing nearby unless you want Wendy’s or Dunkin Donuts and even with those, you would have to cross a busy highway to get over there. They do have a shuttle bus that picked us up from the airport and will take you to a couple of nearby restaurants or Publix market at no cost but that got old quickly. I don’t think I will stay here again. Dan used points for this room so at least the price was right. They only have a complimentary happy hour Mon-Wed so nothing for us there. There is a complimentary breakfast which we will check out tomorrow morning. There is shuttle service ($8 pp) from the hotel to the port so we are scheduled to leave here at 10 AM. The Genie is expecting us at 10:30 so we may be a bit early. We’re in for the night at this point. Very excited about boarding Allure in the morning ! We were on Allure over Thanksgiving last year but not in Star Class. This will be our first time in Star Class on any ship other than Harmony. It will be interesting to compare the service on the different ships. They’re calling for rain tomorrow so it might be a wet start. Our friend Jim flew in much later this afternoon and is staying elsewhere so we will not see him until after we board tomorrow. It’s always an adventure when you vacation with one or more of the Jim twins.

I am going on Oasis of the Seas on May 13th and booked Star Class room 1720. Has anyone sailed in this room or cruised Star Class on Oasis and if so do you have any tips or any important information that could be useful. Thanks have a great day!

Greetings all. I'm writing to you from my pre-cruise hotel listening to the dulcet tones of airbuses and boeings flying overhead as I await the arrival of the Anthem tomorrow morning. Travelling with me is my wife, 3 year old daughter and a friend of ours who has NEVER CRUISED BEFORE. We are staying in a grand loft suite (I feel she may be screwed for any subsequent cruise if she likes...) I'll do my best to post here daily but copious amounts of watered down American beer (if you can call it that) may get in the way. Feel free to ask any questions. I'll do my best to answer them. Oh. Before I forget.. The Lids store located within the Jersey Garden mall had paw patrol hats on for 50% off. I know you'll sleep better knowing that. Cheers.

For those of you who have had the pleasure of experiencing the Royal Genie service, what kind of requests did you make from your Genie. What kind of requests (if any) did you have to pay extra for on top of your cruise fare? Just trying to get an idea of what to expect from a Genie and what experiences (if any) I would have to expect to receive from them for an extra cost. I don't mind paying for things, I'm just curious what I would be paying a "price" versus a "gratuity" for.

This morning, when I checked the prices on my cruises, I noticed a new discount that I have never seen before. The Sky Loft (soon to be renamed Star Loft) on Harmony is showing a $1000 discount that they have called a "Star Savings". The sailing where I saw this is 17 Feb 2019 on Harmony. This is currently the only Star Class suite available for this sailing. As a rule, the Sky/Star Loft suites are priced slightly higher than the 2 BR Aqua Theater Suites but the price on the Sky Loft Suite is significantly lower than what we paid for the 2 BR ATS A1. Granted, the ATS that we have booked is a fully refundable deposit while the Sky Loft is non-refundable, but it still seems to be a good price ($13K for everything) on this suite, especially with the additional $1000 off.

Guess what folks! I'm back again ready to provide another quality LIVEish. This time around I'll be on the Anthem of the Seas. This will be my first time on a Quantum class ship. For those that want to get an idea of what I'll be posting look back at my last journey on board Harmony of the Seas back in May of 2017. Also, keep an eye on Twitter/Periscope for any material not posted here. Twitter/Periscope: @CGTLH For those that made it this far, I'll be reaching for the "Star"s on this voyage.

Title says it all. I'm on the Harmony in pretty much 2 sleeps. My first time in a Star Class suite. I'll do my best to take pictures of the daily literature they drop off. If you have any questions, let me know..I'll do my best to check in daily.After that, I'll compile a lengthy review.

A group of friends and I just booked the Royal Loft Suite on Anthem for a 9-night Bermuda and Caribbean sailing next summer! I just had to share my excitement with someone(s)!!! Has anyone stayed in this suite before? Any tips? Tricks? Creative requests for the Genie??

Is $8,000 for a Star Class Aqua Theater for 2 people on Allure of the Seas in Jan 2019 a good price for that room category?

Starting May 1st, 2016 as most of us know RCCL is starting a new program for guest staying in Suites on Oasis and Quantum Class ships. There are several posts on this forum and Cruise Critic describing what it will include when launched. Matt has discussed what we know at length on his Blog and Podcast as well. This is what I would like this topic to be a place holder for: If you are sailing in a suite on an Oasis or Quantum Class ship in May or June 2016, could you please say when and what class, STAR, SKY, SEA During or after the cruise could you give a brief discription of what the experience was like. If you are sailing SEA or SKY the differences may not be "in your face", but we won't know until launch in May. Now, STAR class is something completely new to RCCL and this is where I am really curious. I am sailing on the Allure June 12th, I will be in STAR class (A1 Aquatheater 2B), I am an uber planner and the grey area that I find myself in makes me nervous. All the newest information from RCCL both online and from the people at C&A tell me "don't pre-reserve, let the Royal Genie do it all." I was told the whole point is to create a stress free and all inclusive vacation experience for the STAR class. I believe them but....being that I am sailing a month after the program starts there is NO actuall feedback yet. Bottom line: If you are sailing in MAY, JUNE or JULY in a suite....use this a placesetter for feedback so everyone can benefit. If you see info on Cruise Critic Forum cut and paste to this one since it is smaller and easier to find information. Thanks