ExArkie

I just received emails on the two Cunard trips we have booked. M239, Dutch Christmas Markets, leaving Southampton 10 December M240, Transatlantic leaving Southampton on 15 December As noted on the list from @bluemarble, testing is required for M240, but not for M239. Since we will be on board two days before the one requiring testing, will Cunard be providing these tests? Or, are we expected to get the test performed on the turnaround day in Southampton? I will call Cunard for clarification when I get a chance (this is our moving week, changing residence states), but I thought there could be an answer from the group to give me some idea.

And accomplished my purpose, too. I got enough CC points through PUP to move up to Elite…without having to pay for a cruise.

One more twist...we are in the process of moving, so within the next couple of weeks we will be at a new address. My wife and I are splitting the "change of address" notices and she ended up taking the Cunard booking as one she would deal with. She logged into "manage booking" using Chrome and the CWC tier DID NOT show up. (Address change was easily accomplished, in case you were wondering.) I tried logging in using Firefox, which is generally my default browser choice, and the CWC status DID show as noted in my previous screen shot. For grins, I also tried Microsoft Edge and Safari browsers and found that the status DID NOT show up on any of them except Firefox. I recall that when I checked on the page from eastern Europe (per discussion above). I was doing so on the iPad, so the browser was either Safari or Chrome - I don't recall which.

Well, that explains a lot. I vaguely recalled having posted a photo from the Celebrity transpacific we did some time back, but since the latest version of “unseen” included Hakodate, I assumed - without verifying, which is against my training and instincts - I’d posted a different photo. Obviously, the port was correctly identified above. By the way, I deliberately reduced the resolution on the photo before posting. Zooming in on my original version allowed one to read pretty much all of the lettering in the picture. Apologies for re-posting a port photo, but mostly apologies for not checking first when I suspected I had actually done so. A lot has happened during that year between posts…

I reviewed the unseen port list and, out of the couple of hundred locations, I have actually been to one. This was not on a Cunard ship, but the picture below was taken as we were pulling into the port, just before docking. Unfortunately, my wife was ill for a couple of days and indisposed during our time in port, so I wandered about the ship taking pictures while she rested and recovered. She was okay for the rest of the trip. Not a lot to go on in this picture, so if no one gets it, I'll post a second picture from the location that is more easily identified.

Having returned to the US a couple of days ago, I decided to check on the Booking Summary again, as follow-up to the discussions above. Turns out that the CWC status IS shown on our summary for the December TA, in the same place I had noted before my sojourn in eastern Europe this month. See screen shot below.

I’m at the Helsinki airport, en route to Germany, and discovered we were playing this game again. Great, it was lots of lockdown fun. This photo looks like Copenhagen to me. I have spent some significant time on the ground there and recall that multi-point roof by the first cruise ship as being their “new” cruise terminal. Plus, the wind farm in the harbor looks familiar.

Sometimes, shirts branded with a previous crossing date are sold at a discount. In 2015, for instance, I bought a polo shirt with 2013 Transatlantic markings for about $10. I also purchased a couple of t-shirts with the 2013 markings that had a price tag showing $5, but rang up as $1 at checkout. Both the clerk and I were surprised.

The other option is to book passage on a cargo ship making the transatlantic crossing, either going to Europe with a repositioning cruise coming back, or vice versa. I have never done this, but have heard of others doing so. The cargo ship is definitely not a cruise ship experience, but does appear to be very nice. If you are interested, an Internet search will turn up lots of useful information. Personally, I recommend Cunard for one leg. I have done the UK to NY crossing many times - for a few years, I taught classes in the UK and Ireland with Queen Mary 2 being my ride home. Currently, it appears that there are two formal nights per seven-night TA, but there are also options for dinner that do not require formal attire on those nights (e.g., buffet or the pub). It truly adds to the experience to do the “dress-up” though, because everything feels different when all are formally attired. Plus, the dining room menus are much more elaborate on formal evenings. Doesn’t have to be over the top in terms of dress. For men, a dark suit and tie is sufficient and would not be underdressed. The Cunard Web site has a description and the Cunard board on Cruise Critic a rather thorough discussion. (By the way, ignore the snobs that sometimes show up on the Cunard board. You’ll never meet them on board.)

Actually, the UK site didn’t acknowledge my CWC number, showing it as “not provided” on the profile page. For grins (I’m easily amused), I tried to edit the profile to add my CWC number and got an error message that it “…did not match our records…” Perhaps not “throw a fit” so much as “conspicuously ignore.”

Figured out how to bring up the booking summary from here. CWC status is no longer displayed where it was a few weeks ago. Couldn’t find it anywhere on the booking summary, so as with many things related to the Web site, “here today, gone tomorrow.” Evidently, though it did log me into my account when I tried earlier, it just wasn’t apparent until I went all the way back to the landing page for Cunard. There, at the top, it showed me as logged in, where it had not shown that on the My Account page before. Still no information given on CWC status in the summary of my account, though.

I am currently in Eastern Europe (land-based travel, no Cunard involved), so I thought I’d give a try at the “My Account” page from here, having set up an account during the brief time it was available in the US. Got nothing…no incorrect password, no “not available”, nothing. Only response was to go back to the main page, essentially the same response one gets from teen-age children when they don’t want to hear. The default is to the Cunard UK site from here. As for the status showing on the booking page, I had noted that ours did show up on the “Booking Summary” page for our December TA. It was located on the main part of the summary page, not at the top. As I recall, it was just below where your screen shot cut off the bottom of the page. It was fairly obvious, so it probably isn’t on your summary or I think you would have seen it. CWC status did not show up on our summary about three (roughly) months back, but did when I checked just before leaving the US on this trip. We were just past final payment date, do you think that matters? (I know, it’s pointless to speculate on reasons behind Cunard IT.)

Simplest method would be ambient air monitoring along the ship’s pathway, particularly in a directed channel environment like a fjord. Compare concentrations before and after the ship passes, correlate to weather and dispersion conditions, and you could get a reasonably statistically valid emission rate. Not saying they did this, but it could be done that way.

This is what we experienced on an Oceania TA earlier this year, where the stop in Bermuda was cancelled due to weather conditions. Cancelled during embarkation in Miami, three days prior to the Bermuda stop. The amount we spent on Bermuda travel authorization was added to our account as refundable OBC.

I would disagree with the "most seats" part. Depends on the airline, of course, but the percentage of aircraft across all carriers that have the fully enclosed suites is almost certainly less than 50%. My experience has been that fewer than one out of four or five times when I'm in business class, it is in the enclosed suite. Granted, that is a function of the airlines I have chosen to fly, but the industry standard for business class seats is a lie-flat seat with direct aisle access (1-2-1 configuration, usually). Business Traveler magazine published a guide to the current configurations last month. https://www.businesstraveller.com/features/business-class-seat-guide/ For example, we flew business on Air Europa (US-Madrid, booked with Delta miles) this year and theirs was a 2-2-2 configuration in business on a 787-8. Comfortable seat, but not every seat had direct aisle access, much less a door.

Anthimeria: using one part of speech as another, or as I call it, “verbing one’s nouns.”

Isn't there a distinction between "type," which would be the first grouping on the booking page (i.e., inside, ocean view, balcony, Club, PG, QG), and "category," which would be the narrower distinctions that give rise to fare differences (e.g., obstructed/sheltered/unobstructed balcony, P1/P2, etc.)? The way it was explained to me - not that it was necessarily correct - was that the "next type" would be balcony-to-Club, Club-to-PG, etc. If so, open to any upgrade would mean moving from (for example) P2 to P1, but open only to next stateroom type would mean moving from PG to QG (which would almost undoubtedly be to the lowest QG category).

I was curious, so did a search or two. I found a couple of photos and a video that may be useful, although not from the Eclipse. Video is from the Equinox and the photos from Reflection, both of which I believe have the same layout as Eclipse. https://boards.cruisecritic.com.au/topic/1806175-celebrity-reflection-cabin-6305/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lg2uC4AJd5s

I feel as though I've been lost at sea since about the mid-1980s

Once, we heard two groups of two people on the Grills deck discussing which seating they were assigned in Britannia and whether they could share a table. That would tend to be a dead giveaway that they weren't Grills passengers. As long as they are not using up all of the hot tub space on the QM2 Grills deck, it isn't my problem.

I take it by the direction of the discussion over the last couple of pages that we have exhausted the "Why Cunard" topic of the thread? It should go without saying that we all make our choices based on what is important to us in making those choices. I was interested in finding our what other people use as selection criteria, but it appears we gave up on that approach.

Just because I have a rather odd sense of purpose in life, I had to take one more look. If one were to choose one's route judiciously, it would be possible to cross the International Date Line FIVE times between Hawaii and Samoa without changing course significantly. See below (Apia is marked with the locator symbol, otherwise its specific location gets lost).

I looked at that region of the Pacific on Google Maps. There is a section between Hawaii and Samoa where the International Date Line runs east-west, practically coinciding with the equator - if I did the copy-paste correctly, it will be shown below. Based on the scale of the map, I estimate the distance between the equator and the International Date Line as being around 150 miles (very roughly). I would hazard a guess that the Date line and equator will both be crossed on the same day. Of course, that map also suggests that, if one to choose the appropriate route, it should be relatively easy to cross the International Date Line three times on the same day while steaming along a constant heading.

Apparently, the "3 months before" limit no longer applies. Or at least it didn't for me this week. The story: we have a booking on QM2 this December: the westbound TA leaving on the 15th, to which we added the December 10th "Dutch Christmas Markets" (only one of four ports is in the Netherlands, so why "Dutch"?). I understood that one couldn't request shareholder credit until 3 months prior to sailing, which would be mid-September for us. We have also sold our house, are buying one in a different state, and will be moving at that 3-month window. Considering that address changes would have to be accomplished to make the request at that time (i.e., my brokerage account address would have to match the address Cunard has for us) and the instructions no longer specifically state that one cannot request the benefit more than 3 months prior, I sent the request about noon yesterday just to see what happens. I received a reply around 5 PM that the credit had been added to both bookings. By my calculations, that is 173 days prior to sailing. By the way, I used the e-mail address cited earlier to make the request. Seemed to be no problem.

Not sure what that code is, but to check the flights and, on many but not all airlines, make seat assignments, you will need the airline record locator number, which may or may not be the same as the code given to you. If you were given the airline record locator, but the flight is a code-share, (e.g., listed as a Delta flight number but the operating carrier is KLM), you will need the record locator from the operating carrier (KLM in my example), which is rarely the same on both airlines. Some airlines either will not allow advance seat selection or will require additional fees to select seats. Very few (if any) will allow seat selection before the ticket is actually purchased.