fizzywm

Thank you to everyone for the advice. I will call to switch to regular dining today. Thanks for all this info! It is great to hear they have successfully accommodated your wife's dietary restrictions. I appreciate the advice on restrooms and making it work with MTD if necessary. Great to hear this. I will be calling today, fingers crossed. Thank you! It helps to hear they have been able to make food without the common herbs and spices. That's been the most difficult part for me on land. I imagine the rice part is hard with so many dishes having it so it's good to hear they've accommodated that too. Thanks for chiming in with your experience. I appreciate the advice about the WJ as well. Do you have any tips on finding the chef or manager? It's something I've tried to do in the past (at that time avoiding dairy) but it seems difficult at least when it's busy. I have to give Carnival credit, on the one cruise I went on with them they had someone called the "Menu Mate" at the entrance to the buffet and they could look up all the foods on a tablet at their podium. I wish Royal would do something like this.

I've seen a lot of good comments about the GL.iNet Beryl and some of its siblings. They are bigger and draw more power (so maybe can't be used as easily with a battery pack) but still a reasonable enough size to pack. I can't share any real life experience though.

Yikes! I had read about changes to MTD but wasn’t fully informed. My last experience with it was on Adventure in mid 2022 and even then the reservations line could take 30 minutes. Sounds like it’s still a mess. Thank you for this info.

Thank you for the info. I’ll try calling tonight or tomorrow to switch to traditional dining. I’m nervous it will be full this close to the cruise but maybe the allergy thing changes the calculus.

The NCL cruise I took in 2018 was playing Pitbull *everywhere*. I think he was an ambassador or spokesperson for them at the time? They even had a Pitbull themed Zumba class IIRC. If not themed it was 90% his music. People were definitely enjoying it!

I am sailing on Freedom of the Seas in just under 2 weeks. After I made my booking I was diagnosed with a gastric disease, and for the time being my diet is much more limited. The list of foods I can't have includes a lot of common herbs, spices, and seasonings like black pepper, oregano, basil, and rosemary. If I eat them it can trigger some really nasty symptoms, including uncontrollable vomiting. Nothing fatal, but for all intents and purposes I'm allergic to these foods right now. I find it difficult to eat out even in land based restaurants since black pepper is hidden in a lot of foods. I've emailed foodallergies@rccl.com with the full list and asked them if they could accommodate me, but only received the auto response that the information was forwarded to the ship. I plan to bring printed copies of the full list and take one to the maitre d' on the first day and one each night at dinner. I was only able to book My Time Dining at 7:45 or 7:30. With my dining reservation being so late, if I decide to join the no reservation line and eat earlier, might it be a problem that I may not have the same table or servers? I'm really worried it will be difficult to find things to eat, especially with the new menu apparently being more limited. I'm ok with simple things like pasta, even multiple nights in a row, but I know even that usually has oregano and basil. I guess my main question is has anyone recently sailed on RCI with food allergies beyond the standard stuff they're more used to dealing with (thinking of gluten, nuts, shellfish, dairy)? I'd love to know if the Windjammer might be an option for the nights I don't want to eat at 7:45, but I'm guessing it's mostly out of the question aside for salads and some of the bland sides like mashed potatoes. Thanks for any input.

This might help, watch from the beginning but the relevant part starts a few minutes in when he uses it as a wifi repeater:

Great to hear the Mango works. I just snagged a refurb on sale for $17 and have only tested it at a McDonald's so far. I think it will be replacing my ancient but trusty HooToo TM-02. Edit to add I bet it may be hard to pick up in the cabin across the hall due to the signal passing through two rounds of steel. But I have had mine work in the hallway near the room. I'd be interested to hear your experience after the next cruise. Heads up you can buy it directly from the manufacturer for $21 right now with free US shipping. https://store-us.gl-inet.com/products/usa-only-mango-gl-mt300n-v2

I’ve always had good connectivity in my room (including on 2 Oasis sailings and one on the 12th floor forward of Adventure), but not always good speed. This pre-Starlink but I don’t think the Starlink changed anything about their router placements. Also no problems using my travel router. I can’t speak to Symphony specifically though.

As long as you are both connected to the hub (these are often called travel routers) and it is logged in to Voom. The hub acts as the "1 device". The first step is you would connect your phones to the hub's wifi. Then visit the hub's admin panel in your browser to connect it to the ship wifi. Then, while your phone is still connected to the hub's wifi network (NOT the ship wifi), go to login.com to sign into Voom. Once you've signed in, any device(s) connected to the hub's wifi will have internet access. If you leave the travel router in your room but want to use Voom elsewhere on the ship, you would connect your phone to the ship's wifi and log in to Voom again, bumping off the hub's sign in to Voom.* Then only the person who signed into Voom on their device would be able to be online (provided you paid for one device Voom). *Sometimes the bumping off doesn't work for me, so usually I make sure to log out of Voom by visiting logoff.com before leaving the hub behind in the room. Once back in the room you'd connect back to the hub's wifi, visit login.com again to sign back into Voom, then anything connected to the hub has internet access. However, some of these devices are small enough to take with you with a battery pack. Look into the gl.inet Mango or TP-link Nano. I rubber band the router to an external battery and take it along if I want to share wifi outside the room with my companion. I've had a travel router for years and it's also great for using in hotels with devices that can't access these types of captive portals as easily, like older Fire sticks or if you want to take an Amazon Echo with you. Anything that has connected to the travel router in the past will easily/automatically connect to it again, so you don't have to do the annoying hotel login page multiple times. I've also used it at home during power outages when the internet is out. I don't get a great cellular signal so I can put my phone near the window where it works, enable tethering, connect the router powered by an external battery to my phone's wifi and then share it around the house for multiple devices.

That's always worked for me on Royal and the one Carnival sailing I did. The last time I tried on Royal was June of last year. Mine is small enough I can also carry it around with a battery pack.

Exactly right. If you think the cruise line isn’t advertising those positions as tipped to potential employees, I don’t even know what to tell you. I’m positive they aren’t paying them tips for fun or benevolence.

You could say any job is not a tipped job if you don’t tip them yourself. But it doesn’t change reality.

Pointless semantics when the money goes into their paycheck. On RCCL, back of house and laundry are tipped positions.

Tips are part of the employees’ pay. We all know this.

I’m 100% in agreement with this.

3/4 of a dining employee’s take home pay isn’t pay? (Number per former RCCL employee in another thread) Call it whatever makes you feel better. The end result remains the same.

I told you more than once that how you feel about it morally is up to you. But the fact is for the time being, unless things change, we do subsidize those workers’ salaries through auto gratuities. The tips are part of their pay that they factor into the equation just like people in land based tipped positions. I’m sure the cruise lines don’t pay them tips for no reason whatsoever. I’ve also said many times that I don’t like it either, but it is what it is.

You think a pay bump of less than 8% for working on a ship (comparing the $605/mo for waiters to $653/mo) makes the long hours, 7 days a week, being away from home for 6 months, living in a tiny room without a window all worth it? And don’t forget to factor in flights that cost multiple months of base pay on either end of the contract. Would you do that for 8% extra above what you’re making? I doubt it. Obviously tips are where the bulk of their pay comes from. Let’s be real.

My job? I don’t eat out or cruise to work. It is the employer’s job to pay employees fairly. The minimum guaranteed salary is all they should expect per the post I originally replied to. Your semantics over the word paying are laughable. When I give anyone money for any reason I’m paying them. And if you go back to the beginning of my posts in this thread you’ll see I’ve been consistent from the beginning in saying that it should be covered by the employer but it isn’t. No different for dining out on land (in US) than sea. I'll give you this one. I don't think the base salary is so great. That's only an assumption. But people take the jobs because it's still a lot more than in their own country. that’s all I came here to say from the beginning. The money they make gets competitive when tips are factored in.

I saw a post in another thread from a former RCCL employee saying that dining staff make “maybe a quarter” of their usual take home pay when they are on the ship while it is drydocked. So that tells me that for dining staff the oh so competitive guaranteed minimum probably isn’t the amount they are signing on for. I’m sure back of house make less from tips. But if their salary is so competitive, why does the cruise line include tips?

If it’s not your job to pay them, it’s not your job to pay them—period.

To point out the inconsistency of saying “not my job to pay them”. Restaurants should pay servers too but no one here is advocating not paying tips there unless service is bad. You have to wonder what’s different about land vs sea.

This only applies if you prepay gratuities which you have to go out of your way to do. Otherwise they are billed at the end. Why does it matter if they do a good job? It’s not your job to pay them, it’s the restaurant’s. That’s the mantra I’ve seen over and over here. They signed on to make $8 per hour, why should they expect any more? It’s not a false equivalency. Either way the prices would go up to make the difference—on land or at sea.

I don’t like tipping culture either. I have always said here that the pay shouldn’t be based on tips. I just acknowledge that for the time being, it is, and removing those tips only hurts the tipped employees. By the way, I don’t think RCCL allocates auto grats by attractiveness, but I could be wrong.