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Sip, Tour & Save 30% Sale


rjac

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Heh, took advantage when it first came out on Friday. Saved just shy of $240 on everything I'd previously purchased with them -- refreshment package for my wife, our zip line and alpine coaster tickets on Labadee, and our dolphin push/pull/swim excursion on St. Kitts. (I actually realized as I was typing this that I hadn't rebooked the coaster tickets, so just took care of that! Thank goodness they extended it another 24 hours!)

Savings were enough to let me get Refreshment Packages for my daughters and only be $100 net additional out of pocket. All that's left to buy now is our internet package, which I'll get on my next billing cycle to lock in the price, and then hope for another sale to get some back.

Only thing that I had previously bought that wasn't any better off was the Nellie's Beach over-the-water cabana (which was a crazy 40% off when I booked it). So I'm a seriously happy camper!

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7 hours ago, JLMoran said:

Heh, took advantage when it first came out on Friday. Saved just shy of $240 on everything I'd previously purchased with them -- refreshment package for my wife, our zip line and alpine coaster tickets on Labadee, and our dolphin push/pull/swim excursion on St. Kitts. (I actually realized as I was typing this that I hadn't rebooked the coaster tickets, so just took care of that! Thank goodness they extended it another 24 hours!)

Savings were enough to let me get Refreshment Packages for my daughters and only be $100 net additional out of pocket. All that's left to buy now is our internet package, which I'll get on my next billing cycle to lock in the price, and then hope for another sale to get some back.

Only thing that I had previously bought that wasn't any better off was the Nellie's Beach over-the-water cabana (which was a crazy 40% off when I booked it). So I'm a seriously happy camper!

Saving of $240 sounds like a great deal but may I ask how much you spent on refreshment package, zip line, alpine coaster ticket and dolphin swim excursion?

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7 hours ago, Tampaite said:

Saving of $240 sounds like a great deal but may I ask how much you spent on refreshment package, zip line, alpine coaster ticket and dolphin swim excursion?

Sure. Here's the original prices and then what I rebooked to:

  • Refreshment Package -- Originally purchased just for my wife a week and a half ago at $26/night + 18% gratuity ($245.44 total for 8-night sailing); sale price $18 + 18% gratuity ($169.92 total, saved $75.52)
  • Zip line -- 3 tickets originally purchased back in June at $104.75 each ($314.25 total), sale price $83 each ($249 total, saved $65.25)
  • Alpine Coaster -- 4 tickets originally purchased in February at $35.75 each ($143 total); sale price $28 each ($112 total, saved $31)
  • Dolphin excursion -- 4 tickets originally purchased in May at $149 each ($596 total); sale price $134 each ($536 total, saved $60)

Total savings: $75.52 + $65.25 + $31 + $60 = $231.77

So I was actually off with the total savings by about $10 with my mental math, but still a significant savings across four purchases. And then I bought the two additional refreshment packages for my daughters at the sale rate of $18 / day per person, for a total of $339.84, or net additional outlay of $108.07.

Hard to believe this is the first actual sale I've had on my sailing, apart from a massive sale on cabanas that I took advantage of in February (when I also originally purchased the Alpine coaster tickets); that let me get the aforementioned over-the-water cabana on Nellie's Beach for only $255.75 instead of the usual $450-$495 I've been seeing every other month.

Do note that I didn't make all the original purchases at once. I've been budgeting about $400 a month for excursion and package purchases, so I'm spreading out the costs. When I did the cancel and repurchase, all the original purchases were returned as credits on my credit card and then the new purchases were charged. If I hadn't bought the two additional drink packages while I had this sale going, I'd have had a net credit applied to my card.

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Hi experienced cruisers

Is it quite normal for excursion costs to change even when there is no 'sale on?

I booked a number for my Ovation cruise in March/April and purely by chance I saw that one of them had reduced in cost so when I checked I saw all had gone down - so cancelled and re-booked. Saved a fair few £s/$s!

I will keep checking back!

 

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34 minutes ago, Bazza said:

Hi experienced cruisers

Is it quite normal for excursion costs to change even when there is no 'sale on?

I booked a number for my Ovation cruise in March/April and purely by chance I saw that one of them had reduced in cost so when I checked I saw all had gone down - so cancelled and re-booked. Saved a fair few £s/$s!

I will keep checking back!

 

I think at this point I'd say that it's "normal", if not necessarily common. The costs will sometimes go up (see the above-mentioned cabanas, which are currently $495 but much earlier in the year were $395 or $450 for my particular sailing), and sometimes they'll mysteriously go down without any announcement (see the multiple threads here over the last couple of weeks as the Deluxe Beverage Package mysteriously dropped from $55 per person per day to $45 or $43 or even $41 for a couple of people).

I think one thing that everyone has agreed on at one point or another is that the presence of a "sale" banner means very little, either for excursions or base cruise fares. Those are just a way of drawing attention, and the actual prices are whatever the sales and marketing folks at Royal think they need to be at that time based on availability and demand vs. what they need to sell to meet their sales and profit forecasts for the shareholders. If there's a really big price drop, odds are it's because they're selling way below the required quotas (say, because they changed the rules around drink packages and suddenly no one is buying them) and they need to make up some of the slack to get back to where their forecasts say they need to be. Better to have a discount promotion and get a flood of sales that provides modest profit, than to lose money because they overpriced or pissed a bunch of people off and didn't take corrective measures.

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2 hours ago, JLMoran said:

Do note that I didn't make all the original purchases at once. I've been budgeting about $400 a month for excursion and package purchases, so I'm spreading out the costs. When I did the cancel and repurchase, all the original purchases were returned as credits on my credit card and then the new purchases were charged. If I hadn't bought the two additional drink packages while I had this sale going, I'd have had a net credit applied to my card.

Thank you for letting me know that your original purchase was refunded. I was a bit skeptical to lock-in the prices but now feel more comfortable.

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