hawkeyetlse

You have to sail to get points. Solo cruisers get points for one person, not double. They have no idea if you're married or who you're married to. And even if they did, if that person is not on board, they don't exist.

The real pro tip is to do that, but first replace your dinky starter with a Shellfish Platter.

This page is at least one, possibly two years old, but it has the menus for all the Virtuosa specialty restaurants in GBP: https://www.visitwithus.co.uk/home/visitwithus-msccruises-dining-bar-guide With the dining package, you get to choose from the "dining experience" menu at each venue. At Hola! Tacos, you get the all you can eat option. Kaito is either a sushi bar menu, or teppanyaki (where I think you get the "Samurai" menu). According to these menus, Butcher's Cut is £43, Teppanyaki is £42, Indochine is £34, Kaito Sushi is £31, and Hola! is £16.99, and all of these prices will likely have gone up a bit by the time you get on board. So you will certainly save money with the dining package, even if you choose some of the cheaper options.

That is unfortunate, but if there are two people on your booking now, there will still be two people on it in June, so you're going to have to call sooner or later no matter what. Unless you are OK with paying for two packages and then hoping that MSC eventually refunds one of them. For sure do not wait until you're on board, because then you will have to pay the 18% service charge on top of the price of the package.

I have not had recent experience, but yes, in the past this was allowed. I would be nervous about testing this with any countries with "weird" EU/Schengen status on the itinerary (like Cyprus or Norway) but for the typical Italy-France-Spain circuit I wouldn't worry about it at all. Just to be clear, I know that a passport with lots of validity is always the best choice. But I can certainly understand if someone gets into a situation where this is no longer available as an option, and they want to find out if their existing documents will allow them to travel.

Sounds like a pretty tame charter (classical music, ballroom dancing, and… an astronaut?): April 15-27, 2024–Where is Sky Princess? I don't think it'll be particularly demanding (physically or morally) on the bar/dining staff, so you shouldn't notice any effects lasting into your sailing. You can ask them about it and maybe there will be some interesting stories about celebrities on board, rich folks being rich, etc. The entertainment may "reset" on your sailing, if the ship takes the opportunity to switch out the guest acts, and if the production cast get to take a 2 week break (from performing, not from practicing/rehearsing/working out).

I got this, too, but I resubmitted the request for the same booking and it was validated pretty much instantaneously.

They have had several opportunities to remove the free steam room in the gym locker room on the Jade during various refurbishments over the past 10-15 years, but it's still there on the deck plans (Deck 12 FWD).

In the past booking through a TA has never been a reason for NCL to automatically refuse the shareholder benefit, and I doubt that it is suddenly the case now. But lots of fares are ineligible for the benefit, and when you go through a travel agent, you might be booking one of these fares without knowing it. These are the exclusions listed in the fine print: "excludes Reduced Rate programs (e.g. employee rates, interline, friends /family rates, vendor rates, cruises taken via cruise credit certificate, or free cruises earned through Oceania Cruises loyalty benefits), and travel agent rates, and charters" Technically "travel agent rates" can mean any rate you pay through a travel agent, but again, up to now, this has not been a blanket exclusion for NCL. Without more details from the OP (who may not actually know all the details of the rate their TA booked for them), it's not possible to know exactly why their shareholder request was denied.

But you can't upgrade to FAS+ on board, as far as I know. You can purchase some of the individual upgrades (P+ beverage package, unlimited wifi), but you can't get the whole discounted bundle.

I know this was the case for "free" drinks, but can you also confirm that people actually paying for drinks on board while the ship was in/near Spanish ports were not charged tax? (On the Gem, right?) It's a nice surprise if they weren't, but it's hard to understand why they weren't charged. Not that I'm really trying to understand NCL's rules on this anymore. I fully expect this season to end, and when the ships come back to Europe next March/April, the whole mess will start up again.

Just off the Dawn (Rome to Bilbao) and they were not serving any wines by the bottle on this cruise. I didn’t have P+ this time, so I don’t know for sure if this also applied to the included P+ bottles at dinner, but my understanding was that no one could be served wine by the bottle, period. (Then again, I was given my free Platinum bottle with no issues.) As usual, they blamed it on an unspecified tax issue from some unspecified country, and it was completely out of NCL’s control. On the current sailing (Bilbao round-trip) they are supposedly able to serve wine by the bottle again, so I guess that means the problematic country was Italy.

I’ve never heard of any one package per person rule. Is it the website that won’t let you add a second package, or did someone from Norwegian actually try and fail to add these two packages to your booking? On my last cruise I had the basic UOBP and I certainly had the option to add the Starbucks package on top of it. I didn’t do it, so I can’t say for sure that it would have gone through, but I’m pretty confident that you’re seeing a website/app or human glitch.

Yeah, this sounds like a case where it works great for the vast majority of people (access to 2 cabins without having to carry around 2 cards) but the previous solution was more generalizable to 3 or more cabins. While I am sympathetic to the inconvenience that the OP experienced, I really don’t find it outrageous to put a strict (and low) limit on the number of cabins that a single guest can access.

You can order one bottle per card at dinner, so yes. But you can’t take the leftovers with you. And the same wines that you can get by the bottle with P+ are also available by the glass, so you can also just order glasses if you can’t finish a whole bottle by yourself at one dinner. Or, eat with other people who don’t have the package, and share your bottles with them. So far this is still allowed. If you are dining at a time when they are charging taxes on beverage package drinks, think carefully about what you order, and how. It makes a difference if they charge you taxes on one bottle vs. however many glasses they think you drank. (I was once charged for 10 glasses of champagne at one meal instead of one bottle!)

Each of the three steaks is listed with a specific sauce and one or two specific sides, but you can probably mix and match (see here for example). It's not the full Cagney's menu, of course, and I really doubt that the food is actually prepared at Cagney's and sent down to the MDR, but who knows?

If you buy one package, it is associated with one person, so you can only take that person's 300 minutes and get $200 off the upgrade. You cannot combine 2 people's minutes (600 minutes total) to claim $400 off a single package upgrade. But you should call them to be sure. Maybe they can do something that the website/app doesn't allow. (If so, please report back here!)

Sure you can. If you go into your vacation planner you should see options to upgrade to unlimited internet. As long as it says "upgrade" that means they are taking your existing minutes into account. Upgrading from 300 minutes should cost $200 less than the normal cost of an unlimited package.

Get these terrible sub-human beings to give you a hand:

For the 8 oz filet that costs like $40 at Cagney's? I know the à la carte prices at Cagney's are mostly meaningless, but do they have to make it so blatantly obvious?

Only because the UK ETA hasn't been fully implemented yet. In the end it will be for all visa-waiver countries, just like ESTA/ETIAS (with specific exemptions like Canada for the US ESTA, and Ireland for the UK ETA). None of these programs is designed to apply to "all non-citizens", as most non-citizens continue to require an actual visa.

Don’t worry about everything fitting inside the bag. Just leave this for your steward, like someone in my hallway did on a recent cruise…

Yeah, Starbucks is the tiny Deck 7 Atrium bar. Not a full Starbucks menu, they don't have nitro cold brew, etc. Also if you order espresso drinks in the dining rooms or specialty restaurants, that's on the Starbucks package (or you pay). Go ahead and reserve your specialty dining for 2 or 4 or 8 or whatever if you want to make sure you have bookings at your preferred times. Get them to correct the number of diners once you're on board.

Sitka has a 5 or 6% city tax. If the Bliss has been doing Alaska all season, I assume the staff are pretty aware of the tax situation in each port (from having to deal with passengers griping about it week after week).

I would go ahead and submit a case with post-cruise guest relations about the port day Latitudes discount. I would actually just say that you had the treatment in port (they can confirm with the ship what time you were there) and so there should be a 15% discount, period. In other words, don’t mention that the staff offered to help you evade taxes and that you agreed to this. Just say that you were overcharged (which is true). Because I’m pretty sure the spa staff were genuinely trying to save you the tax, and in general it’s a good thing (for passengers) when the staff on board suggests doing this. But it is also fraudulent (in a minor way) so it’s probably best not to draw too much attention to the practice in official communications with NCL.