Areya220

We sleep on a memory foam mattress at home and I have a really hard time sleeping on anything that doesn't conform to my body. I never get a truly good night's sleep on cruises for that reason. Everything always feels hard and like my spine is unsupported. We bought hikkero self inflating sleeping pads for this time around and I'm hoping that helps.

I suppose it is dependent on so many variables, but I have yet to find a vacation option that was more affordable than cruising, even with fare increases. Granted we only leave from ports that we can drive to (Boston/NY/NJ/Baltimore) and have no children, but even with airfare aside-- the cost of renting a hotel, buying all meals, and spending money on entertainment anywhere we could want to go far exceeds the cost of cruising. I just looked at all inclusive resorts and they were 650 a night for two people at absolute minimum. This would be roughly twice the cost of getting a balcony room on a ship departing at roughly the same time next year. My observation is that Royal's prices are fairly in line with the other big cruise lines and cheaper in some cases (ex: Virgin, Disney, etc.).

To be fair, one of the reasons I chose this date is because I work at a college and it's our spring break dates. So I'm guessing it's probably a popular college spring break time period. Although when I was a student I remember my break being in April 🤷

It looks like my hopes of getting an upgrade are probably not going to come true though, c'est la vie

I'm booked to go on the Anthem on March 10th of this year, and I just looked on a few different websites (I was interested in trying to get an upgrade in room) and that date is no longer listed. Does that mean the ship is 100% at capacity? 😱

I have heard that the crew gets a set wage and our “gratuities” simply make up a part of that. Anything we don’t pay, RCL pays. So really our gratuities are just reducing RCL’s payroll and not additional to their salary as we are led to believe. Does anyone know the validity of that?

Are you still able to prepay gratuities if you did not elect to at the time of booking and already paid off in full? I booked through a third party website that didn't offer the option to pay gratuities up front, but would still like to pay for them ahead of time if possible.