dockman

one other consideration re singles could be that a single room the steward tip pool gets half the $$ then if there are two people ...probably relatively small but of course a room steward likely prefers two or more people in the rooms he cleans as more to tip pool and also more extra tips to him/her. As to who spends a lot and who does not I would suspect that some singles spend more than twice what some couples spend and vice versa as lot of different kinds of people on cruises with different budgets and wallets...

find me most ANY cruise with no single suppement on Holland, princess or better) and i am ready to go...few and far between though i have gotten close a few times on older princess ships when they were obviously far from full and semi last minute...

I understand but you are hoping to get a room that they want to sell to two people and only pay for one.....rare for them to eliminate completely the single supplement but sure would be nice if u /me did not have to pay the full extra price for a second person (except for port taxes/tips)... One reason that many lines do not like to offer no single supplement is because a lot of savy people will then book two connecting cabins as singles and get twice the space for same rate as two people in one cabin...some lines pretty much eliminate that idea by charging maybe at least a 50% single supplement... I agree it certainly does not seem quite right that we often have to pay for two peoples eating etc when there is only one of us but i doubt it will change much as they can and do get away with the full charge...and of course they very much want two (or more) in every room to then make additional $$ from drinks shore excursions etc...

Try and imagine the size of the data base of email addresses that all the major cruise lines together now have.... That would be worth some very serious $$ to companies wanting to promote to the cruise demographic people. Of course the airlines and many other huge companies also have massive data bases of email addresses also worth zillions. Once upon a time you pretty much had to print and then mail stuff to peoples home addresses which was very time consuming and costly not to mention all the paper wasted....now an email promo can be produced and sent to millions with the click of a button...it's a different world. Not sure if big corps can legally sell your email addresses or not but the answer is probablay buried deep in all the fine print lawyer speak. Thankfully so far i do not thing HAL/CCL has sold the data to other companies.

lets hope so as maui needs biz... https://www.travelweekly.com/Travel-News/Airline-News/United-cuts-Maui-flying

The kihei and wailea and kapalua and a few other areas of maui are open and want biz...kaanapali could be a challenge as those hotels like royal lahaina are full of workers and displaced people possibly for a couple of yearss so maybe not many toursits there....several airlines like united have cut way back on maui flights for few months as demand is down...Lahaina will be off limits for a long time i suspect as they say the cleanup of all the toxic chemicals the fire created will take a lot of specialized work...lot of old lead pipes melted into the ground and lot of asbestos in those old buildings among a few... There will be cars available as they certainly will not get rid of all of them...but they simply have too many cars for the current and foreseeable demand they say. There will also likely be an army of construction workers eventually who will need all kinds of trucks/cars/equiptment as well as housing etc. My understanding is they want to house these people probably in kaanapali near as possible to the work site of lahaina...my opinion is overall tourist probably better off in kihei wailea areas. It is a long and tough road ahead...Maui does need and want tourists to come back, they are just asking that the toursists pretty much stay out of the way in lahaina as there is much work to be done there and a lot of it will be off limits for a long time.

Have done a lot of solo cruises as well as having single room but travel with friends many also single. Overall I love solo cruises, even the ones where no other friends onboard. It is truly up to you as to how social or unsocial you choose to be. If you want to dine with others either same table everynight with same people or different table with different people it is easy to do. Or as i usually do you can eat most of your meals in the buffet where u can usually sit alone. On longer cruises the staff will likely get to know you and stop by to talk with you everyday and make you feel special. I like to read a lot of books and i like to sit outside as much as possible as well as do a lot of wallking on the prom decks which the older princess ships still allow you to walk all the way around while the newer ones are all chopped up and the only real walking deck is a much shorter one about 15 decks above the water line with little to no protection from the elements and looking through often dirty plexiglass...unfortunately that seems to be the wave of the future. I have always been able to find a quiet or semi quite place to sit and read or simply look at the passing scenery...it never ceases to amaze me how many people seem to rarely ever sit outside as they prefer to sit inside in a bar or lounge drinking or attending some game show etc...up to you and good for me as more space for me to enjoy the view outside. My ex who would never ever go to a restaurant alone on land loved going out to eat alone on a ship as she would always find a bunch of people to sit and talk with for hours and felt totally safe...it was also good for me if we did not want to eat at same time etc as we could each do our own thing and then meet up later.

If you like being nickle and dimed to death at every turn you will love NCL as they have taken it to a new level. The last ncl i did was on Getaway ...they had lots of restaurants avail but the problem was they were fee restaurants....so naturally the non fee restaurants were packed full and hard to get into so many people coughed up the fee just to eat and avoid standing in line for the non fee ones...not my idea of a more or less inclusive cruise and you can spend a lot of extra $$ on ncl...holland does have a couple of fee restaurants but thankfully nothing near the level of what i saw on NCL. NCL is likely better for those who don't mind forking out more $$ to experience different restaurants and also more water slides and all that type stuff for kids....holland has no water slides and really not designed to be an amusement park.

https://www.kitv.com/news/lahaina/multiple-insurance-carriers-providing-assistance-on-maui/article_dc29e5c6-42ac-11ee-b8fa-cb5cba585776.html good news insurance companies seem to be trying to move claims along faster.

Don't think hmmmm will help much? Got any ideas to share?

There are going to be billions of $$ of govt $$ flowing into maui....i suspect if they wanted the govt could pay the car rental companies and get reimbursed by insurance. And if you have no car i would think any car would be helpful. There are lots and lots of rental cars that are not mustangs or jeeps. Easy to criticize every idea but what Maui needs is helpful ideas and they can sort it all out as to what may or may not be helpful or possible.

Been here a long time but never thought about that old song til recently and never even thought that the pink hotel was the royal hawaiian....thanks for the tip...she is still a wonderful old hotel...the first night i ever spent in hawaii was at the royal hawaiian in 1972...good place to start my love of hawaii.

Another thing that was reported last night on local news....the car rental companies on maui have all these cars normally out on the road but with no tourists they all got returned...problem is the car rental lots can not even begin to hold them all so they are scrambling to rent parking lots and find places to park them...meantime lahaina residents lost lots of cars that were burned to a crisp... During covid the car rentals had a similar problem and on oahu they rented the parking lot of Aloha Stadium and other lots which was wall to wall rentals...eventually they shipped most of them to the mainland to be sold...problem was they shipped too many and then suddenly tourists started to pour into hawaii again and there was a severe shortage of rental cars and prices shot through the roof...It has only recently returned to some normal balance of car availabity matchind demand.. and NOW Maui....it is a fact that many maui people are going to have to buy a car to replace their burned ones....i highly doubt there are enough cars for sale on maui to fill the demand....also apparently a lot of people are having trouble getting claims resolved with insurance companies (imagine that)... I have to wonder if somehow a deal could not be done for a lot of the excess rental cars to be sold to local maui people in need of a car and payment postponed until the insurance settlements are made and then eventually the $$ can be sorted out? I suspect it will be a long time before Maui tourism and rental car demand returns to pre fire levels so I would guess the car rentals may well ship a lot of cars off to the mainland. It seems at least on the surface this could be a win win for the locals and the car rental companies? Just yet another in the domino effect caused by the horrific Maui fires. Hopefully some in hawaii leadership positions are at least considering how to potentially solve the car problem as not having a car on maui would be tough as public transport is not very good.

I am not here to argue or try and convince anyone of anything. Having lived here for 45 years I have seen and heard lots as to tourism, hotels, cruises, cost of living, how much and what kind of toursists would be best, overdevelopment, locals being priced out and on and on. One person's idea of affordable and what is a modest profit is open to discussion. There are a lot of challenges that will have to be dealt with over the coming years as the can has been kicked down the road for a long time. Having said that all things considered I still think it is the best place on the planet to live. And i for one hope that the old Joni Mitchell lyric is still remembered..."They paved Paradise and put up a parking lot" And back to the original topic I am hoping for the best for Maui as it is one of the worst disasters that I could ever imagine.

Of course lot of $$ goes to corps whether hotels or ships....the point that you seem to miss is that building more and more hotels adds more concrete and highrises ON the islands that a cruise ship does not add. I have lived here for 45 years and have seen more and more buildings and many people say enough....there are pros and cons to more cruise ships but they generally do not take more land or involve pouring more concrete.

I certainly can't speak for the Hawaiian people but can tell you that many are opposed to more and more hotel/condo developments. On the other hand a lot of people make their living from tourists so that is always a factor. Part of the thinking is that ships are sort of floating hotels that would come into the ports where people would get off and take all kind of tours, passengers would go shopping, spend a pile of $$, the ship would likely buy all kinds of supplies from local vendors/suppliers, there would be more jobs at the ports tour companies shops etc.....and best of all the toursist would get back on the ship and sail away at the end of the day leaving lots of $$ behind. Of course as said there are limits as to how many passengers how many ships in one day etc...i suspect that could be somewhat controlled by local laws or port restrictions...it is a balancing act between more and more concrete and 24 hour a day tourism and possible filling some of the high demand via cruise ships. Many many of the dollars spent in Hawaii hotels do not necessarily stay in hawaii as they are owned by huge corporations and the profits may well flow back to the corporate arm...I would guess that most locals are pretty tired of more and more condos and hotels being built everywhere most of which is controlled/owned by foreign owners willing to pay millions ++ for a condo that sits empty half or more of the time while many locals are piled on top of each other because they have been priced out of the market. How a young hawaii couple could ever afford to buy a home unless they inherieted something or had a very high paying job is a mystery. The downpayment alone is likely to be 150 to 200 k plus can u qualify for the rest in a mortgage...condo HOA fees alone are more than many can afford. Hawaii is not a cheap place to live and slowly the locals are being forced to move to vegas or washington or somewhere else to have any hope of buying a home. So maybe just maybe cruise ships are at least a partial answer as to a way to keep the toursit money flowing without building more and more hotels? One thing is pretty certain and that is if u let the developers build all they want they would want it all.

i thought $250 for 14 days? Did that change?

The only way Hawaii will ever offer a variety of cruises like 7 day, 3 day, 4 day, 10 day interisland cruises is to have a carve out of the pvsa act that allows foreign built and crewed ships to operate freely instead of having the POA restrictions. Currently the only way around that is to come all the way from the west coast with a vancouver or mexico stop or go all the way to fanning island and back ...either of those options requires a lot of sea days ....and even with that the sale price of those cruises is less than a basic 7 day interisland cruise on most POA sailings due to the higher cost of the pvsa act. In my opinion Hawaii without the pvsa restrictions would have several ships based here year round offering affordable 3, 4, 7, and 10 day interisland cruises...especially as hotel prices as well as F & B car rentals interisland air etc would make those cruises extremely popular as the price would be well below a land based Hawaii vacation. One of these decades it will happen but probably not anytime soon.

Most all are being housed in kaanapali hotels as well as airbnb, peoples homes who have welcomed displaced to live for free at their houses etc...from what i have seen i do not think a cruise ship could have in any way rescued people from the burning fires..there was no way they could have brought any tenders etc into lahaina during the fires as boats were on fire in the harbor and the wind was blowing massive amounts of furnace hot embers everywhere.. it is /was horrible how fast and how hot that fire was...a lot of lahaina was old wooden buildings that got hit by a blast furnace and were gone in seconds/minutes.. .a tiny bit of good news is that the experts have gone over the banyan tree in detail and seem to think that it will survive it all which does give a tiny bit of hope to many who loved that tree as a center point of lahaina for 150 years

Good luck to you. I can tell you living here and watching story after story and interviews of maui people is enough to bring you to tears almost daily...the big worldwide media of course covers a lot but the local tv stations dig much deeper and it is even worse than most outside of hawaii can imagine....it is hard to watch but the people living it have been through pure hell.

I attended some of those hearings....there were some high paid lobbyist there totally against anything that would open any tiny cracks in the entire jones pvsa acts...between their power and Inouye pushing for the ncl deal there was pretty much zero chance of any carve out.

Yes i was around in the travel biz in Hawaii when it all happened....it appeared to many that Inouye was determined to push the deal for a variety of reasons some of which made no sense at all other than for his PR people to say look at what Inouye is doing for hawaii workers.... in the end he was a very powerful force and got what he wanted....and NCL seemed very happy to have gotten what they thought was a monopoly that would be a gold mine...so now here we are with one ship that charges several times the price of non usa staffed ship and yet they apparntley are challenged to make a profit....to most rational people that might be a good indication that the business model is not very viable especially as hawaii hotel and land vacation rates continue to soar and yet this floating "hotel" struggles....personally i would like to see a carve out to allow a work around of the PVSA and open the Hawaii market up to cruise competiton but there are many powerful people and lobbyists who do not want that to happen.

As said if NCL doesn't like the deal that they made they should pull out....they obviously did not do a good job of researching the operating costs in Hawaii. Maybe then Hawaii might take a good hard look at why the NCL model did not work and reconsider the entire cruise situation in the islands. Hawaii could and should be a major cruise destination but it obviously does not work the way it is currently structured

if they are not profitable then they can pull out of the hawaii market i suppose? with crew costs 5 times an international crew maybe it was never ever a good idea to begin with..

HNL elks lodge re Maui. Members have patiently waited to hear from me about what the Honolulu Elks Lodge will do to help Maui’s people. The Board of Directors met last night and with well attended members at-large there, the board decided on several items. The board vetted the various helpful organizations providing services to Maui’s people in need. The board decided that the Hawaii Community Foundation “Maui Strong Fund” would be the organization to assist monetarily (give money, not in-kind donations). The website is: https://www.hawaiicommunityfoundation.org/ There were two motions approved which will now be decided upon at the Lodge meeting on August 22nd, 6:30pm. The first motion is for the lodge to donate $25,000 to the Maui Strong Fund. The second motion is for the Honolulu Elks Lodge to match monetary donations up to a total amount of $500,000, made by Elks lodges, members, families or friends, to the Hawaii Community Foundation's Maui Strong Fund, through the end of this fiscal year. Again, these are board motions – the lodge (members) will decide “yes” or “no” on them at the August 22nd meeting. Mahalo for your concern. Live Aloha and with Mālama to all.