Mickey S

when you are talking about a med cruise where someone has booked international flights and perhaps made accomodations, a 100% refund leaves a tough decision. get the 100% refund to offset the cost of cancellations, or just take the cruise and miss out on the key ports. A few hundred of OBC woudl ease the pain.

I for the last 5 years at least have felt there are two operations at X. The shore side and ships, and the shore side has been a pain in the tuchis, and the ships/cruising experience has saved the tuchis of apparently more than a few shoreside people. With the screw ups-much of which is the shoreside and administration created, cruising has become less magical on X, still pretty good soone way away is to go to the smaller ship more luxury brand companies. There is another way and this ends up a big risk for cruiss in general, which is the land based traves and we are about to embarfk on a 5 week trip through Greece and Italy. So I will have a subjective basis of comparison in 7 weeks and we have not done a land based trip in almost 10 years. I have planned this one myself and now I better undersand and enjoy what goes into the planning. VS a good cruise is oretty much a non brainer. Or should be.

Just thinking, I do not watch the TV shows that some top chef or investor goes in and does a makeover of a restaurant, what if one of the myriad of streaming companies would do that for cruise line administration-it would be boring but they could spice it up with side stories as part of a made for TV programming. Just kidding around using spare time.

your e mail ends up there anyway inside a network of staff located around the country and world which might have a metric of closing out issues quickly by blowing them off. I raised what I thought was a serious issue that needed to be bumped up but it was not. I would send to legal group or investors relations to see if they think its significant but they too apparently do not care. That's the culture of the company thats driven by CEO's including the RCCL corporate CEO.

when they screw up that bad they need to be real gracious. like equal or better cruise both type of ship, itinerary and class of service. And it woudl cost little to give the customer the captains club points they woudl have received on the problem cruise.Or, if you cancell a cruise after the final payment. We did they kept our money and we got nothing zero. Not even the points which would have been a nice touch.

Royal also has had several sailings oversold. Its not like airllines where they give you a few hunded in credits and you hopefully take the next flight out.

Way back in the 70's I went on a TWA arranged trip to Portugal and Spain. One of the guys on the trip was a former pilot in "Nam" and knew a lot of the TWA pilots and upon leaving JFK he went to the Flight Deck to check out who was in the drivers seats --to, as he said, make sure it was not one of the party boy's who could not be trusted. eg, Bob Moriarity, the Marine Pilot in Nam era ( I was a co speaker with him at an event years ago) who for fun flew a Beechcraft under the legs of Eiffle Tower.

if your requirement is the best pilot you will never fly anywhere as the single best pilot only flies so many hours a week. . However, you, I assume know what I was saying.

to be blunt, I thought about placing a ships captain into the role of CEO. Why? They manage everything aboard the ship from personel to safetly to keeping the paying customers wanting to stay paying customers. Bring that hands on expertise to the front office and I think you have a real winning situation. Big PIcture.

Who do you want piloting a plane on the way to your cruise? As long as they are honestly qualified, its fne with me regardless of any criteria.

we too are venturing back to land based. It's funny in that when we had 8 hours in port it was not enough and now we will have 3-5 days in a town city, area and thats not enough. I guess its never enough. But its nice to not be on the clock in so far as the gangway being pulled up 30 minutes before departure. No so nice in that it is a spot of a challenge to visit 8 places in 5 weeks --the trains are not bad but catching the 45-75 minute flights is a pain that goes with the territory. Never let the "pain" exceed the "gain".

have to read it soon, but there are changes and its probably where they had a recent problem. eg, one of the terms of hte existing contract is they can do an oil surcharge at their discretion. So now, after you sign a contract with them and cabin service changes and food fees (upcharge for lonster rtc) might need to be spelled out thatthey can cheange the rules any thing and you cannot say tha X changed the deal. Not that it easy to fight city hall. They are pretty tone deaf there. They wear you down. How much time does anybody want to spend on this stuff. Where the cost of your vacation goes up and it does appear that gone are the days where it goes down and it gets adjusted.

anybody receive the X e mail just now where its changing hte contract effective immediately, and has the time and inclination to look at it. So now we know that when we pay and sign the contract, they are able to ignore that contract if it does not suit them. and I bet thefood issue, new charges etc are covered in thenew contract.

since it only applies to bookings made on board, I have no clue but I think it redices the pricing bemefits and OBS overall benefit and other costs. THey don't do anything now unless it improves the bottom line. And one reason would be to just get more bookings to make lenders more comfortable. A lower deposit with less risk is a way to get more future bookings.

just for the record, RCL consolidated was sailing at 103 to 104% of occupancy in 2019, 3rd and 4th in cabins. Also in 2019, RCL has ~20% profit on sales which is a great neighborhood to be in. Except since RCL is so capital intensive its ROI was not all that good. Now wth all that debt if they get back to 20% profit on sales the ROI due to leverage should be fantastic.