Jump to content

sbjornda

Members
  • Posts

    142
  • Joined

About Me

  • Location
    SK, Canada
  • Favorite Cruise Line(s)
    Scenic
  • Favorite Cruise Destination Or Port of Call
    Europe

Recent Profile Visitors

The recent visitors block is disabled and is not being shown to other users.

sbjornda's Achievements

Cool Cruiser

Cool Cruiser (2/15)

  1. We did the Scenic 11 day cruise in July 2022 (with the Lisbon and Madrid extensions). It was different from our previous river cruises (Rhine and Danube), and I wasn't familiar with the language. I've got some fond memories now, though when we arrived back home I had the feeling that it was the weakest experience of our 3 river cruises - very good but not outstanding. But looking back at the photos and remembering the excursions, I'm glad I did it. Yes it was different from previous river cruises, and was paced more leisurely, but in hindsight it was worth it. It had a different "feel" to it that has taken me some time to fully appreciate. As others have pointed out, at many of the docks there's not much close by to where you are docked, but on those days the evening's on-board entertainment was quite sufficient. In Porto and one or two other places you'll find on-shore options. Most excursions were within an hour's bus ride of the dock. The ship's guides travelled with us and provided enjoyable commentary along the way, of history, geography, economics, culture, nature, etc. (The crew and staff were all from Portugal, which made for a more integrated experience than I found to be the case with the Rhine and Danube cruises.) Scenic uses their own buses, which are very clean and comfortable. There were one or two excursions every day except for a couple of "sailing days". We took their excursion to Vila Real and it really was a slice of small town life up in the hills; very charming and rustic (I chose to buy my souvenirs there). One of the guides had grown up near there in an even smaller farming community - so for her Vila Real was a large town 🙂. Especially there at Vila Real I felt that rural Portugal had a bit of the feel of "eastern Europe" - a bit run down, but clean and safe, very proud of their history and culture. We chose the bus tour to Salamanca despite regrets expressed by some on this board that it was a long bus ride, but I'm glad I went - I suppose it depends on how much you're interested in history and art; during our free time we visited the Art Deco / Art Nouveau museum which (lucky for us) was displaying all 100 of Dali's prints illustrating Dante's Divine Comedy; that was a major highlight of the trip for me. Salamanca was a long day, but we had several hours to wander after the guided portion so if you're in good shape and enjoy exploring an old, historic city, it's worth it. Or enjoying a coffee/beer in the Plaza Mayor, people-watching. The Côa Valley Archeological Park is worth it if you're interested in paleology. It was really well put together, very clean and modern. The actual rock carvings themselves are difficult to get to (several hours in an ATV), so the museum mostly displays copies, moulds, and rubbings. They do a good job of showing how this site compares to other paleological sites in Europe and around the world. We took their excursion to Aveira, south of Porto, for an example of a smaller seacost city. The guided portion was a canal cruise, in case you hadn't had enough water yet. 🙂 There was plenty of free time to browse shops afterwards. So yes, it's a different sort of cruise from the Rhine or Danube, more leisurely and charming. It took me some time and reflection to appreciate it more fully. Of course it didn't help that we were distracted by COVID and the horrible air travel experience of 2022 and lost luggage - but now that those painful memories have receded, it really was a nice little cruise.
  2. Six days prior to our departure (flights booked by Scenic) I emailed info@scenic.ca to ask where our documents were. We had received the backpacks, but they included none of the hotel and transfer information, meeting points, etc., that we used to get.. The next day a helpful customer service representative called me in response to my email to sort things out - apparently Scenic's "Documentation Department" had emailed the documents to me the day before -- but they never showed up in my email. Not in my junk mail, which I check every day. I didn't have any blocking for Scenic email. So they just disappeared! Fortunately the Scenic rep was able to get copies and forward them to me herself, while she was on the phone with me, and they arrived immediately. So yes, there is cause to be concerned and stay on top of things, but as you're still more than two weeks out I wouldn't expect anything quite yet. Seems like 6 or 7 days is their current standard. BTW, we're booked on the sailing just before yours. We'll take good care of the ship for you. 🙂 This will be our 3rd Scenic cruise. Every single time, their back-office processes have stressed me out, while their front line staff have been wonderful. (If I were still in the work force I would try to go work for them to bring them into the 21st century regarding business processes. Heck, some of these business process standards have been around since the 1950's and they don't seem to know a thing about them. It's almost as though their management team is just making it up as they go along.)
  3. I agree with the suggestion from notamermaid that you should start by trying some options closer to home to judge your tolerance level. The UK has canals and ferries; there might be something close to you. Google for UK canal cruises. One I'm thinking about is https://lordoftheglens.co.uk/ Best wishes, Sterling
  4. We found it to be very much worth investing in European SIM cards, letting folks back home know the European number if they need to voice us. Voice mails on the "home" number can be retrieved by email or through an online portal. When one is spending "free time" in an unfamiliar city it's quite handy to google things including pointing the Translate app at a sign, or checking QR codes, or using Satellite View in Maps if one is on a footpath not marked on regular maps. A SIM card costs a bit but it's still one of the least expensive parts of the trip over all. We've used Orange Holiday Europe purchased through amazon.ca, but there are cheaper competitors; there have been a few discussions in the CC forum you might search for.
  5. Received backpacks and luggage tags today, 16 days in advance of flying to Portugal. Unlike previous Scenic river cruises, though, there was no paperwork. I presume that will come separately; email is fine by me. Makes sense from a production point of view - process the bulky, non-personal stuff as quickly as it comes into the warehouse, decouple it from shipping the personalized documents that need to be checked over more carefully.
  6. Sorry I can't help you with that, but here are some off-the wall ideas. If you're on LinkedIn professionally, you might be able learn something from their site, including some names and contact info. https://www.linkedin.com/company/scenic-luxury-cruises-tours/ If you're able to get through on the phone and their call centre staff have received normal training for call centres, the magic word in English is usually "escalate". They'll talk with you for a few minutes and eventually you'll be able to say something like "I need you to escalate this" or "I need this issue to be escalated", and then they should bump you up one level, to a supervisor or manager, at which point you can use the same words to get bumped up another level. Might not work, might be a waste of time, but it might work really well too. They won't be happy because that's usually a negative performance statistic in call centre management. I haven't tried this with Scenic myself yet. If they can give you a ticket number or incident number, that will help them keep on target, but some systems don't make it easy for them to give that info to you. If you have a Booking No. that helps a lot. If it's serious, your solicitor may be able to help, for a cost of course. If you want to bring social media into play, on Twitter they're @scenicluxury.
  7. Fair enough. Three things to keep an eye on, cost-wise, are: a) drinks, b) shore excursions, and c) tipping (including tipping your guide & bus driver on each shore excursion). If you go high-end on the drinks, take all the offered shore excursions, and give the recommended tips, the cost gap with the "all inclusive" lines narrows considerably. Additionally, for those of us traveling from farther away, Scenic offers some great air fare options when booking early. But I do understand the economics of reducing the up-front sticker shock and spreading out the rest of the costs in a more controlled fashion. And if you choose all-inclusive and don't take advantage of the inclusions, particularly the excursions (e.g. you want to do your own thing in a particular town, maybe you've been there before and have a favourite place) you're throwing money away. So you're doing the right thing by figuring out what's best for you and your traveling companion.
  8. I vaguely recall that according to legend, Casanova created the recipe for this spiced vinegar to give him more stamina, to offer more of himself to his lovers. Apparently he had some medical training (18th century) and was not merely a pretty face. 🙂 But don't quote me; I may be wrong.
  9. Those are the prices. There are incentives to book early and pay the full amount early, e.g. they will cover the cost of flights (coach class, up to a certain limit), and once you're on board you really can leave your wallet behind except for any local souvenirs you might want. Beverages, tipping, minibar, snacks are all covered. You pay extra for massages, haircuts, and some laundry (depending on cabin class), settling your on-board tab at the end of the cruise. (One of the things that I find amusing is that according to the brochure, if you take the Salamanca excursion (on the Douro cruise) they even give you back 20 of your own Euros to buy your own lunch at your leisure, rather than making everyone sit down for a restaurant meal at the same time.) But yes, it is expensive and does require some budgeting for most of us. And given how expensive it is, the poor communication and customer care in the days/weeks leading up to the departure flight can be quite frustrating - though that all melts away once you're on board, I find. Once I'm on the sun deck with camera in one hand and martini in the other, watching the castles and vineyards and picturesque villages roll by, and the waiter says "Would you like another martini, sir?" - I'm in heaven.
  10. I'm sure you're right about that. There would be nothing for the hotel/hospitality staff to do! What I recall is that the sailing crew and the hospitality/hotel staff are actually from different companies; the sailing crew is subcontracted. There were only 6 sailing crew members iirc - 3 officers and 3 "seamen". The First Captain "belongs" to that particular ship (or vice versa 🙂) year after year, but the hospitality and hotel staff can change each season. The Cruise Director, though, belongs to the specific itinerary you are sailing, and if you have to make a "ship swap" mid-cruise the Cruise Director comes with you but the hotel and sailing staff stay with the ship.
  11. I have a concern that people are calling the ships directly with questions about future sailings. The hospitality staff on the ships will not have this information yet! Head Office does not give them much of a "heads up" at all. The on-board Reception Desks are there to handle current passengers, for example, people calling the ship when they have missed the bus back to the ship and need to describe its docking location to a taxi driver. Thanks, Sterling
  12. I don't know Emerald, just their parent company Scenic, but I believe they share some infrastructure such as the call centres. In my experience you just need to persevere on the phone until you can talk to someone who can get it done. Apparently call volumes are a bit lower in the middle-to-late afternoons, at least here in Canada. They are totally swamped with changes due to COVID and the war in Ukraine (lots of their staff come from Eastern Europe including Ukraine, and I'm sure some have gone back home to fight) and they are still recovering from a massive computer system ransom attack a few months ago. Best wishes!
  13. Yes, that. Whenever I call Scenic Canada's number, it seems as though every decision has to be approved by a Supervisor and I'm put on hold for unreasonably long times while this bottleneck is managed. That, combined with the same observation you had about communication with customers, leads me to think that the Scenic corporate management philosophy is the old-fashioned Command And Control model, a.k.a. "Theory X" rather than "Theory Y". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_X_and_Theory_Y If any of those folks went to business school then they must have slept through those classes, or simply chosen to ignore the evidence. Empowering your employees and engaging your customers in business processes is a healthier approach, though it does require that all levels of management get smarter about how people work. I think it's gotten worse since the cyber attack happened, which is an understandable knee-jerk reaction ("circle the wagons") but not very self-reflective. I've used a Lean approach to reduce wait and call duration times on a Service Desk, increase First Call Resolution Rates, and reduce mistakes. It works well - you have relatively high volumes and relatively consistent deliverables that lend themselves well to trial-and-error, A/B testing, and gathering actionable metrics, even though the result is not a physical product. A lot of call centre tools will capture most of the data for you, but managers have to be willing to manage by the numbers and actually pay attention to what's going on. You have to put in some effort to define what "defects" look like, and you shouldn't do that in the absence of your customers. You should trust your staff (most managers have two ears, two eyes, and only one mouth and they should be used in that ratio when observing your staff) and let workers suggest and attempt reasonable improvements with their teams' processes (while always keeping safety as the top priority). In the end, though, it's a culture change, and that takes years to happen and is not at all a comfortable experience to those whose only life so far has been Command And Control. Sorry for the off-topic rant. 🙂 Sterling
  14. We were booked on the "Unforgettable Douro with Lisbon & Madrid" tour starting in Lisbon on June 8th and boarding the Azure in Porto on the 11th. We got informed by email that the land portions were cancelled due to low enrollment, and were given the option of sticking with that sailing and being refunded for the land portion, or switching to a different date for the original itinerary with Scenic absorbing the cost of re-booking flights. We chose the latter, departing just 3 weeks later on June 29th. Other than waiting on the phone for over an hour to talk to the representative, the switch has been smooth. Fortunately we have no other time commitments that got in the way.
  15. One large suitcase each (i.e. "checked") that you can empty out into the drawers & closets and store the suitcases under the bed. Plus one backpack-sized (i.e. "carry on") item each; if you choose to use the backpacks supplied by Scenic you'll know they aren't too big. Plus one "personal item" each. I've never needed more than that, but they are very hospitality-oriented so if you do happen to have one or two extra small things, as long as they fit in your cabin, they won't complain. I think if you were both going to have large suitcases AND large aluminum-framed back-country hiking backpacks, you would have a problem. I don't think it would be easy to create a vacation that combines river cruising and hiking/tenting. 🙂 Depending on where you are staying pre-cruise, it might be best to ask the hotel to check your bags until you're ready to head out to the docks. Even if Scenic were able to store the luggage (they're busing cleaning like mad to get ready for you to board), you may waste a lot of time simply getting to and from the docks - I've read here that the main tourist docks in Amsterdam are undergoing renovations so Scenic and other ships are having to use more remote docks right now. I've always booked my pre-cruise hotel stays through Scenic, so there ends up being a bunch of passengers at a single hotel and it's worth their while to send a bus for everyone and their luggage to get to the dock. It's maybe a bit more expensive, but it's worth it to me, to reduce stress by that extra bit. Best wishes, Sterling
×
×
  • Create New...