MacMadame

4 hours ago, Cruisin Kay D said:

Burnabyjean -- Thanks for that link to that spreadsheet!!   It says based on 8/2023 pricing.  Wonder what has changed since that was created?  Noticed several cruise lines have bumped the daily gratuities from $16 to $18 per day.....has Princess?   Any changes in pricing of beer, wine etc?  

Gratuities haven't changed since last year. The drink prices look right too.

1 hour ago, Gunner 66 said:

I received an email saying to make MDR reservations starting today also. It says I cannot until Final payment is made.

Same.

I expected this but was hopeful since I was able to before (there was a glitch at one point and I got in). 

Since the majority of the ship won't be able to make reservations until they pay in full and the majority won't pay in full until final payment is due, I am not worried too much about not being able to reserve dining right now.

1 hour ago, clo said:

One quick compliment and I've had them say "you just made my day."

That's not the same as chatting with them.

40 minutes ago, Treasure Hunter said:

Yes and your photo

I now have "baby did a bad, bad thing" suck in my head. 🤣

On 6/12/2024 at 2:45 PM, SoloAlaska said:

If you have a hard case then put stickers on it. Trust me stickers make it impossible to mistake for another.

Great idea!

On 6/14/2024 at 1:15 PM, clo said:

I find your criticism/judgment of TSA agents very, VERY offensive. Do you ever chat with them? Maybe pay them a compliment? It's a tough as hell job. I thank them every time. Sheesh.

The last thing a TSA agent wants is for people to chat them up. They need to be alert and aware of what is going on around them.

Also, I'm not sure what this has to do with the original question of how a TSA agent will treat checked luggage with a luggage cover. They aren't even the same TSA agents since they work behind the scenes and don't interact with the public.

9 hours ago, Essiesmom said:

You need to watch some of To Catch a Smuggler on NatGeo or Smithsonian.  Granted, they are HSI and looking for drugs, agricultural products, etc.  but they do care a great deal.  EM

I guess you haven't seen those news reports where people attempt to smuggle various things by TSA agents and succeed 90% of the time. 🤣

We used to have soft-sided luggage but it would get battered and the zippers would stop working. Plus I have not found luggage with two wheels to be particularly easy to pull on any surface. They were always flipping over, falling over, and getting caught on things.

I *love* my hard-sided luggage with spinner wheels. It does get scratched by the luggage handlers but so far it's held up pretty well. We do find the largest one can't be packed to capacity without going over 50 lbs. So we mostly take it on car trips.

On 6/12/2024 at 2:30 PM, Mum2Mercury said:

I once saw the ship's staff unloading luggage -- saw it through a door that shouldn't have been left open -- they were literally throwing suitcases down the stairs, and they just land on the floor, where staff on the lower floor picks them up and moves them.  

This reminds me of when I qualified for an event in another state and so did one of our club's coaches. I didn't need a bike for my event but he did. He showed up at the hostel way late and without his bike. It seemed that the luggage handlers at the airport took his bike case out of the plane and proceeded to drop it from the top step of the stairs. (Not on purpose.) It was a soft-sided case and the bike did *not* survive.

2 hours ago, Treasure Hunter said:

Even if someone was looking over your shoulder when you put in your pin they would still need the medallion 

Except in the case of the OP since someone used his account without his medallion. 😉

What can I say? I have to take security courses as part of my job (basic stuff; I'm not a hacker or anything) and a bunch of people on a cruise all having the same PIN on purpose makes me queasy.

In fact, I wonder if the OP had the same PIN as the player and the player tried to activate play with their medallion as the OP walked by and the machine picked up the wrong one. If they had the same PIN, how would the player know the wrong medallion was connected? Do the machines show your name when you connect?

7 hours ago, Itchy&Scratchy said:

last week on Enchanted it was ALL cans. Once in a while a bar didn't have cans or cold cans, but had a fountain soda machine.

What I found more interesting is that they didn't charge us for Red Bull, San Pelegrino or Perrier, but the app said we only get 25% off of them with premier package.

The app is wrong. Those things are included. It's weird though because they have been advertised as included for as long as I've been booked on my cruise (almost a year ago). So why the app was wrong, I have no idea.

People have reported on CC that it can sometimes be hard to find the juice bar and that it's not open all the time.

47 minutes ago, PR-Texas said:

FYI, "I don't choose to answer that." is a good response to inappropriate questions.  None of your business works for really aggravating folks.

Also "why are you asking that?"

On 6/14/2024 at 6:14 PM, Papa Yoda said:

I do think that on longer cruises the 2 specialty dinners should be 1 per week at least.

I do too! (And the 2 casual dinners and 2 fitness classes if you have Plus.)

On 6/13/2024 at 1:52 PM, memoak said:

Almost all pins are birthdates

Even ones not related to Princess. 😉

On 6/13/2024 at 2:51 PM, azbirdmom said:

That's the way it used to be.  However for our last three cruises it was preprogrammed as two digit birth month followed by two digit birth year.  It's that way for everyone.

So everyone who was born in the same month and year has the same PIN? Great.

20 hours ago, VL1 said:

I really want to believe this ship will sail, but these delays are troubling.

At least they actually have a ship. My friends were burned by Life at Sea with their "we're having trouble transferring the funds but will have the ship next week" week after week.

22 hours ago, lwid77 said:

A fan is not permitted?

It's not on the forbidden list for my cruise line. The USB ones are touted by cruise influencers as cruise friendly as well.

This was reported here on CC previously. Maybe a search to find the existing thread will give you the information you seek.

13 hours ago, Luvsnorkeling said:

But it seems like the medallion may gum up the works. 

The medallion is basically a smart cruise card. If you could do what you want before the medallion, no reason you can't do it with one.

My husband doesn't like seafood at all and he does all the cooking so I never have lobster unless I'm willing to order it at a restaurant. And since it's expensive, I never do. So I've only had lobster once. On my first cruise! 🤣

ETA if I'm ordering seafood at a restaurant, I usually get shrimp and once in a while, salmon.

On 6/12/2024 at 7:10 PM, ldubs said:

The slide about the reason behind ice cream parties was interesting.   

But lies. Putting bodies into a place where food is stored violates so many health standards and even laws.

The person who started this rumor claims that "Maybe four to ten people die every cruise" which we know is nonsense. Every time someone dies on a cruise ship, it's big news because it's so rare.

We call these people bandits when they are tagging along to a race or event of some sort (running race, century ride, triathlon, etc)

These people justify this behavior by saying that the event cost so much and they can't afford it or that the race as sold out. They also say they aren't taking the free stuff (medals, food, t-shirt). But the issue is, if enough people do this, it makes the course crowded -- especially for a sold-out race -- and degrades the experience for the people who paid.

9 hours ago, CDNPolar said:

For anyone that is not experienced using a drone, they typically return to the GPS location where they launched. 

The expensive real ones definitely do this. And even some "toy" ones have a "stay by the operator" setting. Mine is a cheapo one that doesn't do that and can't get more than 300 ft away from me.

But the flip side is that it doesn't need to follow the drone law as it's not considered a drone. (I'm sure the cruise line would still confiscate it though.)

4 hours ago, TheMichael said:

Why not just grab a couple of bags left in the hall on embarkation day or disembarkation eve? Way easier than finding a random medallion and wandering the halls aimlessly, hoping it doesn't get replaced/deactivated before finding the room.

 

There seems to be a very outsized concern about thieves onboard a ship that cost between several hundreds and several thousands of dollars just to board, in an industry where there's almost zero reported theft despite belongings being left out in the open.

 

I have this picture in my mind of a gang of thieves booking cruises and spending all their time on the ship looking for lost medallions so they can rob cabins of some clothes and maybe a computer or two. 🤣

On 12/30/2023 at 8:56 AM, Charles4515 said:

As far as I know the coworkers never got audited but they might  not have told me.  They also may have been exaggerating to me what they did. 

I've had a couple of businesses and I did get audited once. It was a legitimate business but a few of my expenses were not documented that well so I ended up owing the IRS about $250. 🤣

I watch a lot of cruise YouTubers and not one of them has ever been "sponsored" by a cruise line. However, at least one of them has been hired by cruise lines to produce content for that line. I don't know how they get paid but it's possible a free cruise was involved. 🤷‍♀️

On 1/4/2024 at 11:33 AM, ldubs said:

 

My kids laugh at me for arguing with the GPS lady.  😀

My GPS doesn't know how to pronounce the simplest of street names. I yell at her a lot.

On 5/21/2024 at 6:37 AM, CDNPolar said:

 

Makes sense.  Ships don't want them buzzing around.  Even as a past drone user, I would find that annoying.

I'd be afraid mine would end up in the ocean!

2 hours ago, Mary loves to travel said:

Think of all OBC as a form of "sale".    When one applies for and receives those OBC, it is accounted for.    Whether it's out of the advertising budget or what have you, the money is accounted for.    There are strict accounting rules governing this.   

Yes. It's real money even though it's mostly moving entries around in the accounting system. 😄But the accounting rules say it has to be treated as real money.

6 hours ago, SCX22 said:

and one poster has already said they don't withhold CA paid solely out of promotional OBC from the pool,

They said it. That doesn't make it true, right? 😄 Someone said the excursion operators don't get paid if you pay for your excursion with OBC and that is clearly not true.

My understanding of how Princess works is that they have made every position have a higher salary than before the fleet-wide pool came into being and that is guaranteed pay some of which comes from CA. Obviously, if there isn't enough CA, Princess is contractually required to pay crew what their contracts say anyway. (But that is unlikely to happen given that 75-80% of pax have a package and can't remove CA.) The rest of the CA comes to crew in the form of bonuses for performance. Princess determines who gets bonuses based on criteria that hasn't been made public. (But it seems that naming crew in the post-cruise survey has something to do with it.)

So they are not equivalent to the tips that restaurant workers get. With those tips, the boss has ways to deny that tips were paid when they were. I have read that they sometimes fudge the top-up when tips aren't enough to get to minimum wage as well. But CA isn't worked like tips so that kind of fudging can't happen. The worst they could do was claim that they didn't receive the CA that they did and so there isn't as much available for bonuses but if they did that and got caught, they would be in major trouble and I just don't think the reward is there for them to take that risk.

As for buying OBC via the GC, I am paying for my cruise with GCs and I will end up with some left over because my cruise will not cost exactly as much as the GCs are for. So that's one way to get OBC with real money. Other people say they know they will spend at least X on board and buy GCs to cover it and put them to OBC. I think a lot of them either gamble so need money for the casino or they don't have a package or they buy things like spa treatments that aren't covered by packages. I have a package and don't gamble so I won't be doing that, I think. I'll decide closer to.

15 hours ago, SCX22 said:

OBC comes out of thin air and nothing is paid to the cruise line.

This is not true. OBC comes from many sources. Sometimes customers buy OBC with real money. Also, if you get refunded some money via OBC, that is real money that Princess got and didn't give back to your CC but put into  account via OBC. It's real money.

Yes, some OBC is a promotion and does not have real money backing it. But that doesn't mean that no one is paid if something is bought with OBC. Do you really think the jewelry store or excursion company only gets money if the price comes out of "real" money and not OBC? That makes no sense.