gergles

Wondering if Celebrity OBC can be applied to book a future cruise while on board.

 

Thanks for any help.

No, future cruise bookings must be paid via credit card.

We actually don't know what the prices are from the "Standard" package. This is new to this season and nobody has actually sailed with it yet.

The prices you've been quoted in this thread are from the "Classic" package.

• If we buy coffee and beverages prior to buying the beverage package later the same day, will the individual beverage purchases made earlier in the day be removed?

No. Purchases made under a package are entered at zero price. Purchases made without a package are charged and the charges are not reversed if you purchase a package.

The crew can spend either (all onboard accounts are in USD, and of course they can leave the ship in ports in Europe to spend EUR), so whatever you have should be fine.

Am I correct in saying none of the white wines are in the classic package allowance? :confused:

Looks like it. The classic allowance is $6 for beer, $8 for cocktails and $9 for wine, so wine-wise, you can get the prosecco, the X house 'champagne', the syrah, the rosé, and the white zin.

The only beer you can get is the Heineken, and you can't get any of the cocktails.

Lois R, can you please tell me the cost of frozen drinks such as the Mudslide? We have a Classic pkg. included with our cruise, but we are trying to decide if we should upgrade to the Premium. We love the frozen drinks, and this sounds wonderful:D!!

Mudslides are included in the classic package.

Someone else asked about iced coffee -- you can order plain iced coffee at Cafe al Bacio with no problems. (The IGLU is a frappé and is sweetened and thickened.)

I don't believe that it is possible to know which menu will be served which night of your cruise in advance, even if you do know which menus are in rotation. You can ask at dinner each night for the next night's menu, but I don't know how far in advance they have them planned. (I mean, I'd assume they plan them all before the cruise departs, but I doubt you could get the information very far in advance of that date.)

My big box warehouse TA offers ~5% of the cruise fare in additional OBC and doesn't add on any fees or any other sort of nonsense. The only real catch is that they ask for final payment 2 weeks before X's final payment date.

If you are a member of a big box warehouse, you may want to investigate using their TA.

Also, the current onboard booking offer is Instant OBC (on the current cruise only) matching the price of the stateroom deposit. See the grid at the bottom of the first page of http://www.creative.rccl.com/Sales/Celebrity/General_Info/Flyers/CEL_FutureCruise_Cruise_Now_Overview.pdf. The price you find there is both the deposit you have to pay and the amount of OBC you get on your current cruise as your onboard booking incentive.

Note: These deposits are nonrefundable, even in the US.

Do you need to inform the TA of the transfer or? How does it work? :)

 

X has some nice goodies like the free in cat. upgrade and reduced deposit for Captains Club but we use an online US TA most of the time so those go by unused..

 

But, would like to know how it works! Thanks in advance!

You should still be able to get those benefits through your TA.

Some TAs will proactively reach out to you once the transfer is finished and make further arrangements, but some (e.g., big box TA) require you to call them to create a booking with them, at which point they can tell you how much in extra perks you're getting.

1) Yes, as soon as you book.

2) Yes, through the in-room bar set up. Search for that phrase on this forum and you'll find more information.

3) The buffet, or you can pay extra for a specialty restaurant. If you are in Aqua Class, you can eat in Blu (the Aqua restaurant) while still not dressing formally. This also applies to the Suite restaurant if you are in a Suite. You can also order MDR items via room service.

This is terrific advice. Can you switch from direct booking to TA after the cruise is booked and paid?

Yes, but only if it is within 60 days from when the booking was created.

Have been with Verizon for a decade. Would not change at this point.

However, my question is WHY would anyone pay for something called "global wi-fi"?? Seriously folks.... wi-fi is available everywhere! Just buy a drink and sit down. We have never purchased any special package to travel with. Turn OFF your data, and use free wi-fi throughout the world.

Verizon has access to paid Wi-Fi hotspots that you get included with a VZ International roaming plan.

Today I talked to them.

First, they now say that their international plans do cover, at least Eclipse. But your input on data charges thru Celebrity is scary.

 

Their $25 plan is 100MB of DATA only.

For $40 you can get the 100MB plus some talk and some text. Otherwise you are paying (depending on country, but in Europe and on ship) about $1.79 per minute of talk. Outgoing texts are 50 cents and incoming are 5 cents.

 

I am going to get the $25, not use text or phone, use Facebook messenger via data instead of text. And on the ship, I will get a Celebrity data package for the wifi. I think the 100MB will go very fast if I use it to check email or such, whereas Celebrity charges by the minute, so it is easy to keep track of your usage.

Their international plans **do not** cover voice on the ships, despite their CSRs saying they do. You can get the charges reversed if you have the voice package, but you will have to call and escalate.

The data service via ship's data was incredibly bad for me. I couldn't establish connections to my email or even to Google. I would not recommend attempting to use the ship's data service (cellular data. Wi-Fi is slow but works.) at all. Sure, you 'have' 100MB of data, but being able to actually use it is another story. :)

So really, any cruise line can come into Hawaii, do round trip cruises around Hawaii, all they have to do is pay US wages and follow all US laws - but costs/benefit analysis makes this an unsound business decision for expansion.

This is inaccurate. To perform cabotage between two US ports requires that the ship be US flagged (which requires it also be US built). The risk of Jones Act/PVSA violations is far too high doing cruises around Hawaii to risk it.

NCL's POA ship has a specific legal exemption (literally an act of Congress) to be allowed to be flagged in the US despite being a foreign-built ship, permitting it to operate a Hawaii itinerary without risk of PVSA violations.

It's per cabin. We purchased a smaller/cheaper package and was able to connect multiple devices.

Unlimited can only have 1 device signed in at a time, the per-minute packages can be signed in on as many as you'd like.

Just wanted to clarify some misinformation.

Your own link indicates the US limit for thujone is 10 ppm whereas it is 3.5 times that in the EU. Ergo, the drink called '(Lucid/[uS] Kubler/whatever) absinthe' in the US is quantitatively different from what you can get anywhere else. We can quibble over "real absinthe", but 3x the active ingredient is enough in my book to indicate it is not the same product people expect when hearing the word 'absinthe'.

My other points regarding X not wanting to have to source a US-specific liquor and the attendant expense are far more likely the issue, IMO.

Something strange happen with us. We were on a cruise with my MIL. DH and I put ours in airplane mode and turned them off. MIL had a older flip phone and we watched as she turned it off. We put them all in the safe.

 

Several hours later we heard something that sounded like a phone. We opened the safe and her phone was coming back on. Never figured out what was happening there. We took the battery out.

If she had an alarm set, sometimes phones that are appear to be really 'off' will turn themselves on to play the alarm. This is dependent on the particular phone, though.

This may or may not be true. One cruise experience Is certainly not enough to give a definitive answer to the question. A jacket is at a bare minimum what is frequently enforced on a Celebrity cruise. It has nothing to do with "pearl clutchers" but people who travel very frequently see people turned away or asked to wear a nasty loaner jacket.

 

The facts are that the great majority of people do comply with the dress code and you could very well be asked to leave. It's possible that you could be admitted but far from a sure thing.

The facts? We don't have any facts. We have anecdotes, which are spin from people saying what they wish to be the case. Searching the X forum on CC reveals literally zero reports (this year, I didn't go back any further, admittedly, as that was several hundred posts) from the actual person turned away saying they were turned away.

Until somebody posts that they were turned away for lack of a jacket, I simply do not believe it happens with enough regularity to make it worth constantly insisting that the Dress Police are posted outside the MDR conducting 20-point inspections and marching nonbelievers to the buffet.

I do not believe that on a forum full of people who will complain about the slightest thing that we have 0 reports from someone affected of something that you and others insist is so commonly enforced.

Thanks for this info and I will double check the list before we go in Jan. 2016 ! :)

 

If you want the "small" martini's at the Martini Bar, do you just tell them that you have the classic pkg.? :confused:

Bartenders at the martini bar may argue with you about the existence of 'small' martinis. Whether you can have them or not is completely dependent on the ship, sailing, and bartender. The best thing to say is "Can you make any martinis with the classic package?" and see what they say.

What is the difference between "turned off" and "shut down?" I did not think that a turned off phone could ever incur roaming charges.

Just touching the power button once is the state where some people think the phone is 'turned off'. However, the phone is still on and doing things despite the screen being off. On most smart phones, to "shut them down" - as in actually turn them off - you hold down the power button until a message appears on the screen asking if you really want to power the phone off.

The technical listed requirement is a jacket. You can almost certainly "get away" with wearing pretty much whatever you'd like; pearl-clutchers will certainly tell you fantastic stories of the time the Maitre d' personally walked a jacketless ruffian out of the restaurant to rousing applause and a sousaphone rendition of "God Save the Queen", but you can probably get the sense of how real those stories are from my description of them.

Try to look presentable and you will be accommodated. It's as simple as that.

I think a big part of the reason there's so much drama around grats is that people want to pay them out of their OBC. Being forced to not spend your OBC on grats is good for the cruise line (because then you have to spend it on high-margin services, not on paying the crew), so I think that's why they've left the system the dysfunctional way it is.

Practicing Christianity is banned in some countries:rolleyes:

 

It is legal in the EU, US, CAN AUS/NZ, in fact it was never banned in the UK! Some countries have banned on alcohol content over a certain amount (e.g. 54% Brazil) but not specific to absinthe.

The US has banned 'real' absinthe with thujone; I imagine the line does not want to risk having illegal absinthe when docking at US ports and is disinterested in serving (an expensive, US-only version) on board. US regs also prohibit calling the drink 'absinthe' without another modifier, which may also make it more difficult to source.

Gotta run, need to start booking our Specialty dinners;)

Make sure you give them an extra tip even though it's included in the price!