cruiseej

I'd note that the Seabourn website describes The Restaurant as being open for lunch and dinner. Breakfast is not mentioned or promised. Our experiences on Seabourn cruises have never had terrible crowding in the Colonnade for lunch. On one or two occasions when a large number of people returned from excursions around the same time, they opened the back door to The Grill restaurant (on the Odyssey-class ships) so everyone could get a table without waiting. I think we have dined in The Restaurant for breakfast twice. As other have described, the venue was nearly deserted, with us and perhaps two other tables. While there are indeed white tablecloths and The Restaurant is a lovely space, we didn't particularly love the feeling or consider it a "luxury" experience. Service was slow, but more importantly, it just felt too empty. We talked in hushed tones because it was so quiet and we didn't want to hear or be overheard by the two other couples dining there. I understand we all have different expectations and different definitions of a luxury experience, so please don't read this as a knock against breakfast in The Restaurant; I'm only sharing our experiences and observations.

I don't think it's quite that simple. 😉 Onshore, we too don't go to any buffet restaurant. Most are low-quality, mass-volume, all-you-can-eat, lower echelon offerings, and you can't pay me to go to one of those! But over the years, we've been to some fabulous, memorable, brunch buffets at very upscale resort hotels and top-tier city restaurants. You can visit various stations to select food and return to your white tablecloth table, while a waiter refills your champagne glass, and it can be a wonderful dining experience! I'd go back to some of those we've experienced in a heartbeat. Now, I wouldn't say the offerings on Seabourn are at the high level of some of those experiences I've described, but neither are they in any way comparable to Golden Corral or Old Country Buffet or Shoney's or [insert any other all-you-can-eat buffet chain]. Just because I make my own fruit plate, or make a bagel with lox just the way I like it, or have a caesar salad made for me, or have a slice of beef tenderloin cut for me, in the Colonnade does not make it a dark, undesirable experience. At least for us. Too many people crowding a line, poorly presented food displays, unsanitary serving implements — those are things which in my opinion can take an otherwise acceptable buffet experience on the ship to undesirable. And to me, the presence or absence of white tablecloths for breakfast or lunch does not make or break whether the overall experience feels worthy of "luxury cruising". Just my opinions, and yours may differ… my point was really to say that I think there are luxury buffet dining experiences in this world, and that what we may think in terms of onshore buffet restaurants in the US does not define what a more upscale buffet experience can be.

Seabourn will offer the choice of a direct morning transfer to the airport, or a tour (possibly with lunch) ending at the airport in mid-afternoon, which you can book while you're onboard. It is not included; there's a fee as with an excursion.

@Vineyard View For whatever it is or isn't worth: does Seabourn actually advertise that The Restaurant is open for breakfast? When I look at the Seabourn website, on the Life on Board tab, and click on Gourmet Dining, the page for The Restaurant mentions lunch but not breakfast. (Not that the website is the definitive arbiter of what is or isn't offered — the page for The Patio mentions Earth & Ocean in the evening, but there is no sample dinner menu listed as there is for the other dinner venues.)

Ah, right… Now I have to regularly check both MySilversea and the American Airlines website to make sure no one is making changes without notifying us! This trip can't arrive soon enough! 😉

When you book a B2B (or B2B2B), don't you get a discount, part of which encompasses the lack of air for the second (and third) cruise?

@alithecat Just when our flights were settled and I figured I didn't need to keep checking My Silversea on a daily basis… 😉

I see some potential advantages to this change, though. If you were in the Observation Lounge when an emergency signal was sounded, you would have needed to return to your suite to claim your life jacket, then proceeded to your muster station. If the life jackets are all stored at the muster station or near the lifeboats, then no one needs to fetch them and clog the hallways, and there's no danger of people tripping over the straps while rushing to their stations — overall a more expedient and safer experience.

Overpriced? Absolutely. Crap? I'd argue that one. (That's not saying a different brand of phone might not be better, but it's a far cry from the Apple phones being "crap".) In the US, Apple employees do get discounts on Apple products. I believe the amount varies; it's more on a Mac than on an iPhone. It's not a massive discount, but on products which are rarely discounted at all, something > nothing. 😉

Well, Silversea — as part of a change for all Royal Caribbean family ships — will be getting new Internet service via Starlink over the next few months. Starlink is Elon Musk's company which has launched more than 3,000 low-earth orbit satellites to provide high speed Internet to large parts of the world (full earth coverage in another year or so). Because the satellites are in low orbit (about 200 miles high), they're moving at a different speed than the earth, so service to a location on earth is frequently switching to a different satellite as it comes into range — thus the need for such a large network of satellites. Traditional satellite Internet service uses geo-stationary satellites, which are about 22,000 miles high in order to stay in position over the same spot on earth. Because the round-trip Internet signal on traditional satellite Internet travels more than 45,000 miles, versus a few hundred or few thousand miles with Starlink, there is much less lag with Starlink. The overall quality of service on a cruise ship will depend on the capacity (bandwidth) a ship is able to use, but this has the potential to radically change the performance of Internet service on cruise ships. Well, at least on Silversea cruise ships. On Seabourn…?

So currently there is the band, which plays the production shows and with some guest performers in the theater, and also plays in the Club some nights; a trio, which plays in the Club before and after dinner; and a piano player in the Observation lounge for pre- and post-dinner music. All the musicians participate in some of the pool deck parties. So are they replacing the trio with a single guitar player in the Club? That would be a step down, but possibly not a major downgrade. But if they eliminate most of the live music in the Club in favor of a DJ, however, or if they eliminate the band for live performances, that would significantly impact one of the aspects we've always enjoyed on Seabourn cruises.

And this is an illustration of the problem Seabourn (and other luxury cruise lines) face in an era when prices have gone up significantly due to higher operating costs and they need find ways to trim costs around the edges without affecting the overall cruise experience for the majority of customers. But we all value different things: from top-level food ingredients to reasonably good quality included wines, from unlimited caviar to pillow chocolates, from premium soaps to afternoon tea, from pre-travel packets with travel wallets and printed luggage tags to printed copies of the Herald delivered daily, and so on. It seems apparent they can't deliver the exact same experience they did 10 or 15 years ago without pricing their cruises too high to fill their ships, so senior management makes decisions about what is expendable or not to shave a few dollars of cost here and there. Whatever they choose to eliminate or reduce or substitute, some customers will be unhappy and others will shrug and say "I never used/cared about that anyway". Hopefully they are smart enough to survey customers before making certain changes, and to listen to feedback if they significantly miscalculate customer reaction to a change they make.

If your husband works for Apple, he can get an iPhone at a discount... why wouldn't you have one? Why would he divorce you if you got one??

I think the issue is that some tour operators are set up to work with scanning tickets; it's probably how they bill the cruise line or make sure they get paid for everyone on an excursion. In other cases, once the cruise line checks you off by name and room number, the tour operator has a headcount and that's all that's needed. This is why it can vary at different ports, and even different excursions at the same port.

We've got no status with SS, yet we're departing "on time" the evening the cruise ends. So go figure. Maybe people who had been canceled the past two years got priority this year? 🤣

@safarigal Your PDF isn't viewable. Well, at least you know how you will be spending the last day of your trip. We're still in the dark. Bus tour and then 6 hours at the airport? Day room at the Holiday Inn? I guess it doesn't really matter, but it would be nice to know — and to be 100% certain they don't think we're overnighting in Santiago like they're doing for you! If nothing shows up on MySS in the next week or two, when I ask my TA to straighten out the correct date for our Blacklane transfer, I'll see if she can also find out what they plan to do with us in Santiago.

My Silversea as of today shows our pre-cruise hotel as the Mandarin Oriental. Yay… that's progress! But there's still no information about what they're doing with us at the end of the cruise. Sigh. 😉

Thanks for all the information and advice. In the past three days, our air has finally been ticket, and now our pre-cruise hotel is listed. After two years of canceled cruises, it's starting to look like the third time might actually go! @alithecat As of today, it finally shows our pre-cruise hotel (booked through SS) as the Mandarin Oriental. I know you booked on your own and were guessing where we'd be; that question has now been answered. 🙂

Well now I'm really confused! We are on the December 17 cruise, and I've never seen any mention of a hotel for the night of January 4. (We were booked in 2020, and again in 2021 — both canceled — but at no time was there an overnight mentioned at the end of the cruise.) It has always showed that the cruise ends the morning of January 4, we get transferred from the ship to the charter flight to Santiago, that they do something with us during the rest of the day, and that we fly home from Santiago late night on the same day. (Our flight from Santiago now departs at 11:59 pm!) From My Silversea currently: From my Invoice/Voyage Confirmation (from months ago): Our air is booked through SS, and it make sense to take the late night flight on the day we disembark the ship. I'm still puzzled why @safarigal would have an overnight stay after her Cloud cruise, and why @lkbside had an overnight stay scheduled on the same Cloud cruise we're on, while ours has always showed flying home the night we disembark. I don't mind; I'd rather fly home that night than hang around Santiago an extra day (we'll be there for two days prior to the cruise). I'm just trying to understand what people are seeing versus what I'm seeing, to make sure I'm not missing any clues that our air will be messed up. (I already need to contact our TA to contact SS, because the end of our itinerary shows the Blacklane transfer from airport to home on January 4, when we don't arrive home in the US until January 5!)

You're assuming that everyone would have kept sailing with SS indefinitely had senior management compensated them or traded them better. I think it's more complicated than that. A life on a cruise ship is a very unusual life, and not for everyone for an entire career. People decide they don't want to be away from home and family for 4 or 6 months at a time forever, and they move on to other jobs not at sea. I don't think RCL's ownership of SS can be blamed for that. I don't know all the people mentioned, but assuming many of them worked for SS from its early days in the mid 90's, it's not surprising some have "aged out" of cruise ship life. And yes, some have found greener pastures with other cruise lines as well. they may have been blocked from reaching higher positions at SS — there are only so many cruise directors, hotel directors, etc. on a cruise line with a small number of ships — which they could achieve with a different cruise line seeking to fill vacancies from expansion or retirements. In not saying RCL has been flawless; I'm only saying you can't blame them for every veteran SS crew member who has left.

If it's any consolation, American just did their major schedule adjustments for December, so I think it's unlikely the intercontinental flights will change at this point. 😉 (Of course, any issue from bad weather to staffing shortages to equipment problems can conspire to mess up carefully arranged travel plans at the very last minute!) I still don't understand why your trip is overnighting in Santiago post-cruise. If I understand correctly, if you hadn't called SS to find out if the LATAM flight would work for you, you wouldn't even know that you had an extra day added, right? While I'm happy with have our business class air booked and now ticketed through SS, how would we even know if they decided to add an extra night at the end? It's an interesting idea. I think I'd probably prefer a bus trip and a meal somewhere to sitting in an airport Holiday Inn for 10 hours, even though we'd be with the herd from our cruise. Of course, it would be nice if Silversea just told us what the plans were for the day, so we could decide if we wanted to make alternate plans — but that seems to be asking too much of SS these days.

I appreciate ALL the comments, even those which say if we're worried about the weigh limit we're packing too much. We're continuing to think and rethink about what to pack. 😉 Let me ask this question about dinners. I know there's no formality on an Antarctica trip, and I'm happy about that. But I'm often cool in the evening in a restaurant or bar; a basic button-down shirt isn't always warm enough for me. So I'm trying to decide what to take for my "evening layers". If I took one sport jacket — for a warmer layer as well as being slightly more dressed on some nights, even with jeans — would I be completely out of place? (Consider we're traveling over Christmas and New Years, if that makes any difference.) Otherwise, a couple (I mean two!) sweaters would likely be what I bring for warmer clothing aboard the ship. And since the cruise is 18 days, I'm reconciled to using the ship's laundry. @retiredand happy In terms of the weight limit, I know there's a reasonable chance every checked and carry on bag won't be checked and weighed. After all, they don't weigh the human cargo, so the aircraft weight limits can't be that tight! On the other hand, I've also read the horror story of some people's luggage being left behind because of a flight being at its limit, and I don't want too be "that person" who endangers someone else's cruise, or my own cruise, by ignoring the weight rules. That's why I'm asking all the questions. I imagine the weather in Antarctica is variable; it might be in the 30s or even 40, but it might be colder. (Just like when cruising to Alaska in the summer: I wore t-shirts some days because it was so warm, while passengers other weeks have had temperatures 20-30 degrees colder.)

I don't think it's right to call everyone who has Covid a "superspreader". It diminishes the real import of that word. And it conveys blame on someone who might be nothing more than an unfortunate victim of catching the virus — and who may have self-identified to the medical staff to prevent themselves from infecting others onboard.

Hmm, that's so interesting. I would think they have the post-cruise charter flight back to Santiago at the same time at the end of each cruise, so why would they add an overnight for your cruise but not for others, I wonder? So were you able to change your LATAM flight to the following day without trouble?

I think "good service for all at a reasonable price point" may be nearly impossible to achieve going forward, if by "good service" we mean what's been described here as a "luxury" experience. In order to provide the service and food levels of the past, they would need to charge even more than today's already high prices. But is there enough of a market for that? Or they can cut back around the edges, keep price increases from being too extreme, and hope that will keep their ships and coffers full. I'd expect one of the new cruise lines will try a "truly luxury" experience for a price that might be 50% higher than what one pays today on SB or SS, and if they have limited capacity to fill, they might succeed having a differentiated luxury product. But they might also flop if they hit a price point at which they can't consistently fill their ships to 85-90% capacity.