ProgRockCruiser

No sweat, it had related context, so a valid quote.

That is not true. The timing of the offering of FTTF is seemingly quite random, in my experience. I've seen it offered a year in advance, and I've also seen it only pop up (to my observation) a few months out. My cruise later this year offered it about six months prior to sail date, I think - I wasn't looking for it, but did spot it. However, sometimes the people who buy it cancel the whole cruise or just FTTF around the two-or-three-month-prior mark, and therefore their slot becomes available to purchase because they got a refund.

A friend went on cruise a long while ago, and she had a cabin mate that wasn't a direct friend - not sure if a friend of a friend, or what. Anyway, that other person was really excited to be on the cruise, because the crew member she had hooked up with last time was going to be onboard again, and her romance would be able to rebloom and continue. Except it didn't - said crew member was too busy sleeping with another new guest. 😲 Friend's cabin mate spent the whole cruise in her room, crying and dining on room service. Anyway, back to the speculation of this thread: I would want to look at exactly Carnival said (or was reported to say, which could be very different). It is quite possible that, although they have no evidence of this person going overboard, that doesn't mean they didn't find (intentionally or not) the one spot on board where it might be possible to evade observation. Or a camera was down and the line doesn't want to admit it.

Not sure what company you work for, but many companies allow "Leave Without Pay", or LWOP. Your profile says you live in SoCal, which should have labor laws to "assist" in such accommodations - at least better than the rest of the US - well, maybe Massachusetts would be best.

The OP will need to apply for a NZeTA (electronic Visa), assuming they are a US citizen, if they intend to stay off the ship. This is what the official NZ site says (my bold): Arriving in New Zealand by cruise ship When you arrive at your first New Zealand port you will be deemed to hold a visitor visa. This expires 28 days after the ship arrives at its first port of entry in New Zealand or when the ship leaves — whichever happens first. We will check you meet our entry permission requirements and are of good character. ARRIVING IN NEW ZEALAND If you are staying on in New Zealand If you leave your cruise to fly home, or to stay on in New Zealand, you need to apply for a visa and entry permission by completing an arrival card and presenting it to an immigration officer at the port. You must show evidence of your onward travel arrangements such as a ticket for your flight out of New Zealand. Start here for further info: https://www.newzealand.com/us/visas-and-immigration/

There are two factors at play: Not everyone who procures "CBD" does so from the (relatively legally safe in the US) vitamin section of your grocery store or health food co-op. And there is apparently a lot of "CBD" sold that has more than the max trace amount of THC they are supposed to have, because the process is still relatively unregulated. Secondly, if CBD in any form is illegal in the ports being visited (and it seems to be) then Carnival has to assure those ports that their pax are CBD-free, and therefore they ban the substance. Until there is more-universally accepted international laws regarding CBD this isn't likely to change, unfortunately.

It's actually the Spittr - avoid the Cove Balconies, you get all wet all the time... (They did finally get it right.) Good for Mobile. Lousy reporting.

Sorry, let me clarify: The Sapphire is doing a 14 day cruise (still on it, returning to Vancouver in three days). They seem to have booked the first 10 days, with a land combo tour, I guess debarking in Skagway for the land portion - that would have been yesterday according to the plan. They did not book a back to back or anything like that. Upon further thinking, I am guess Princess decided it was better to debark them in Anchorage (Whittier) early in the planned trip because an airport is right there, vs letting them continue to Skagway which might have not been as useful for travel home - and they weren't about to be allowed to continue with the land portion. And they weren't returning to Vancouver. There was paperwork slipped under their door the day before they got to Anchorage telling them they were going to be shuttled to the airport. I have no idea what it said, other than "pack yer stuff, yer getting off the ship" essentially. When they get better I will follow up with some questions, but I guess I was mostly questioning the seeming abandonment of so many pax. But I _think_ I've now rationalized it to myself - no sure how well it was communicated to them, and maybe being under the weather they didn't really have a chance to process it.

I usually hang out in the Carnival section, because that's what we cruise. A friend recently sailed the Sapphire Princess 10-day Alaska cruise* (see note), starting 23 Aug out of Vancouver (I assume that's where it started based on what they've written elsewhere). EDIT/Note: I just saw that they did indeed book a cruise-land excursion combo. The normal cruise is 14-day, still on-going. The first four days were great, but then one of them got sick, with, well, that virus. When the ship docked on Day 7 in Anchorage, they, along with 40 other pax, were "escorted to" ("unceremoniously dumped at", in their words) the Anchorage airport, with no flight arrangements made. After a couple of days scrambling to get a flight home, they eventually did. Others in their party were fine, and continued the cruise as scheduled. Um, is that typical behavior of this cruise line? From what I've gathered where I usually lurk, the cruise lines usually just quarantine you in your cabin for the remainder of the itinerary. Perhaps because they booked a partial itinerary? (See note above.) This really irks me - I feel like, as a fellow cruiser, that my friend and his wife really got let down.

Or, as others have stated, not just acceptable, but perfect. YMMV, as usual.

Hmm, same in my case. If a background check is normally needed as part of the process, that can take a while, whereas it's easy to check on me in the right system.

As noted, at worst you will lose your deposits, and get refunded everything else, if you cancel before final payment. It is possible you can transfer it all to a new cruise, where you probably will only have to pay a $50 pp transfer fee, and even that might get waived, as others have noted. It really depends on which rate code you booked under, and how cooperative the agent is when you phone.

I recently paid the expedite fee, plus fast return shipping, plus paid to have it express mailed in (to the PA office) for my passport renewal. New passport was mailed out two weeks and one day after being received, total turn-around was less than three weeks. This was early August. Maybe I got lucky. Maybe expedited passports renewals are finally actually getting the attention they deserve. Hmm, if you didn't pay for the expedited processing, that might be why it is taking longer - it sounds like you sent it express, and paid for express return, but not expedited processing. Standard processing is 12-13 weeks, supposedly.

I am confused. You get the voucher at the VIFP party, but you can use it as early as an hour before the party? Are there time machines involved? Or is the voucher delivered separately, perhaps the night before? Doesn't really matter to me, I'm not going to be Platinum for a while, if ever...

Hey, I have an idea! How about, instead of Auto-Grats, Carnival includes FTTF with every cruise fare! That way everyone gets to benefit from it, regardless of how many cruises they've taken, and they can all get into the Priority line at GS, and...oh wait... 😉 To be honest, I'm not sure of whether being able to "buy" perks normally earned by "loyal" customers is a good idea or a bad idea. Airlines changed their approach to Lounge access, with Delta (for example) restricting the sale of Lounge Access passes to their Silver and above members because too many of the hoi polloi were clogging up the lounges. The idea of "earning a perk" because you've spent a lot of money (and therefore sailing days, or vice versa if you like) over time with a provider, vs being able to "buy" that same perk for one time use via an extra fee has a lot of cognitive dissonance for me. Maybe it should be more like the "old days" of actual class fares, or how some lines are doing the ship-within-a-ship thing (Yacht Club, The Haven, Havana?). Bring back First Class, Second Class, Third Class, and Steerage! That way, if you want all the possible perks on your first cruise, you don't need to "earn it" via 200 days of sailings, just buy it! I dunno, not sure I really prefer any solution.

Yeah, the more I try to recall, it seems to me the BMs that I most recently had on board Carnival were made with a standard BM mix, and the bartender defaulted to adding a horseradish mix as the "spice", but you could dial that back or omit it and ask for Tabasco instead. Well, that's a Bloody Caesar, and yes, that is very yummy. Thanks Canada for making it so popular!

If FTTF could jump into the Priority Line regardless of Arrival time slot selected (like they could last month, evidently), then FTTF could save you from boarding a couple of hours later if you were sluggish is snagging an early arrival appointment. That benefit has apparently gone away. But if you want to get up or stay up to 12 mid (ET) and snag an early arrival appointment, you will at best be about 5 min in front of the first non-FTTF group that stayed up late like you. Last two sailings the FTTF group was at most (IIRC) five minutes before my wife and me, and we weren't in the first non-FTTF group. To me, because I always have tried to snag an early arrival time slot anyway, FTTF's potential benefits are (now) priority water shuttle / tenders use and the priority line at Customer Service. And therefore FTTF isn't worth it (to me) at the current pricing (especially with no tender ports). Yet Carnival has sold out for my sailing, thus maximizing their revenue from offering that low/no-cost perk.

chopped for brevity. Thanks for the explanation. Indeed, it does make sense that the usage on such large vessels, upscaling from ferries etc as you noted, is pushing the design of the mechanicals to their limits. One therefore wonders whether the XL class of ships will have learned form those mistakes and be more reliable, or whether in a year or three we'll be hearing about "propulsion problems" on the Mardi Gras. I was hope you (or someone else) "knows" that it is always the same thing going wrong - like how mid-1900s British cars always ended up with electrical problems... But I guess with it being (relatively) new tech, when you fix one thing the next weakest link in the chain snaps.

But that wasn't the question. The question was "what does an EU socket look like". Not "how does Carnival configure their electrical sockets, including whether the 220VAC EU-plug socket is next to the US-style 120 VAC socket". People have expanded the topic in that direction, but it didn't start there. To the OP: make sure you understand whether you just need to convert the "plug style" but not the voltage, or if you also need to convert voltage. Almost everything I have now runs off 100-220 VAC, 50-60 Hz, thanks to universal adapters, but some stuff won't (usually heat-related items like hairdryers, for example, and a lot of older equipment). And thusly: why do you need a Euro plug? Since you originally asked in the Carnival forum: Carnival ships usually have a US-style 120 VAC plug or two, so a non-surge-protected power strip or multi-plug "cube" is a good solution. Also: "generic Euro-style plug" is a bit of a mis-nomer - it is a family of plug/socket types, some under the CEE 7 standard. German shape (CEE 7/3 and 7/4) differ from French (CEE 7/5 and 7/6), which are very different from the older (non-CEE 7 series) Italian L-type. The plug you see above is the "one size fits all" accommodation.

All them old folks trying to get the early-bird special at Cracker Barrel. Oh come on, that's better than the derogatorily-intended comparison to Wal-Mart. Since your sailing to Newfoundland & Greenland, the ship's time of 5pm (Baltimore, EDT, GMT-4) would be closer to the local time of 6pm or 7pm for much of the journey. NS is one hour ahead (GMT-3), NL is 1.5 hrs ahead (GMT-2.5), and Greenland is two hours ahead (GMT-2). So dinner will match the sky behavior, which is one way how humans trigger daily rhythms.

That cocktail sauce taste is the horseradish they use to spice it up, instead of fresh ground pepper, tabasco, and or some other hot sauce (I like Caribbean hot sauces like a Scotch Bonnet Hot Sauce - whatever is yellow and hot!).

Last few times we've cruised we have found that some bars on board live and die by premixes, whereas other bars seem to have more available resources. Maybe just poke around to some of the other bars, see what they have? I definitely recall the Tides Pool Bar having additional horseradish mix to spice up their more-sedate Bloody Mary mix, if desired. However, from your descriptions that's exactly how we like our Bloody Marys, so now we just need to make sure the mix is "Filthy", lol.

Can any of our resident propulsion experts help explain why there is a seemingly "unfixable" issue here that appears to just get bandaged up and sent out to battle again? @chengkp75 maybe? What is it about the design? In the article I link below (from 2019), the main culprit in past has been bearings failing. Is this more a factor of poor design, poor manufacturing, overly-confident maintenance scheduling, or ... ? To quote: But the problem over the years has been that the bearings don't hold up. In 2010, Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd. was awarded $65 million in a settlement in a suit against Rolls-Royce, in which it alleged that the Mermaids installed on Celebrity Cruises' Millennium-class ships were flawed. https://www.travelweekly.com/Cruise-Travel/Insights/Vista-just-latest-example-of-azipod-blues And here's the ancient press release about the lawsuit Carnival won back in 2001: https://www.carnivalcorp.com/news-releases/news-release-details/carnival-corporation-and-abb-reach-settlement-azipodr-propulsion/

Well, Carnival (and most other companies) is not immune from poor communication of new/changed policies, and enforcement thereof. I mean, how many people ignore the rule about going to your cabin early on embarkation day (oh, it's just to drop off our bags) and say they got no argument from their stewards?

Ah, here it is: