Marauder

They need less people manning the phones and there are less mistakes.

Are people still able to get upgrades on board? I understood it when the ships were sailing half full but now it seems like they're mostly sailing full or close to it.

Interesting. I have never experienced any of the issues described. The Website always works perfectly for me. The app is a different matter altogether. Curious what browser you are using? I use Chrome.

Hmm. On my Sapphire princess cruise to Hawaii last November, I had no problem connecting to my work VPN. I logged in every day both from my work laptop and my phone. I'm planning on doing the same on my upcoming Emerald princess cruise. I hope it still works. It will be a pretty big problem for me if it doesn't.

This is interesting. It used to say you were guaranteed the same category you booked or a higher category. If they've changed it to "a comparable location" and considering a BD as comparable to a BA, that's pretty bad.

I have a follow up question and this seems like the right thread for it. If we don't have any of the packages and I just want a cup of hot water from the IC, does anybody know if they will charge me for it? Background, My DW brings her own tea bags. She likes specialty Japanese green teas, and the green tea at the IC doesn't cut it for her. We don't drink Alcohol so the drink packages are not worth it to us. In the past, we would buy one coffee card between us. Between our occasional cafe latte's and my ordering specialty teas, one card was well worth it to us. Now that the coffee cards don't exist, I'm fine with paying for the teas and latte's with my OBC but she drinks a lot of green tea so I end up ordering hot water a lot, maybe 5 or 6 times a day. If we're sitting in the IC area I don't want to have to go up to the buffet area to get it for her. I'm hoping they don't charge me $2 every time I ask them for a cup of hot water at the IC.

On my Sapphire cruise to Hawaii in November it was really slow on sea days mostly because that's when everybody is online using up bandwidth. I got into the habit of getting up at 5:00am every day (I'm an early riser anyway) to check my emails and do my web surfing. At that time it was great. Really fast.

On the Sapphire in November the posted hours for the gym was 7am-10pm. We like to work out early in the morning so we started showing up at 7 and there were always people already working out so we started going a little earlier. After about 4 or 5 days they suddenly started enforcing the 7am opening, not allowing anyone in before that. A crew member told me that was because people in the cabins on the Lido deck were complaining.

Oh, I completely agree that the blame in on Princess. I'm just pointing out what the problem is. Princess's IT team seems to be completely incompetent.

On my recent Sapphire cruise to Hawaii I found that getting up at 5:00am and getting on the internet worked great. Much much faster at that time than at any other time during the day no matter where we were in the Pacific ocean. IMO, the biggest problem is caused by Princess switching to unlimited plans rather than x minutes for x dollars. Having unlimited minutes makes people feel free to stream movies, youtube videos, zoom calls, online video games, etc. I call those bandwidth hogs. When you have hundreds of people streaming at the same time of course it will be slow for everyone.

The same thing happened to me. I was charged the full amount on the app. When I got on board, I had to go to the passenger services desk to have them apply the OBC for the 50% elite discount. It did not happen automatically. It was not a refundable OBC though. I didn't complain about it because I knew we would use the OBC anyway but I agree that based on the wording in the terms and conditions it should have been refundable so I would suggest letting them know (and bringing a copy of the terms and conditions with you) when you go to the passenger services desk.

I don't see anywhere it says that. It does say that payment is due within 48 hours. It's not clear what happens if you don't pay within 48 hours. I think some people are assuming that if you don't pay within that time you will be reverted to you old cabin but I'm not so sure about that.

Sapphire is one of our favorite ships in the fleet, definately our favorite Grand class ship for a lot of the reasons mentioned above. We've never sailed on the Diamond and quite frankly probably never will simply due to the fact that there is no IC. Alfredo's is a nice to have and one of the reasons we like Sapphire over the Grand class ships that don't have it but the IC seems like a must have for us, especially on cruises with a lot of sea days. Everybody is different though. If you don't get a lot of use out of the IC or Alfredo's either one would probably be fine.

This is where I'm at too. The minimal OBC that I've gotten from TA's in the past is not worth it to me. I usually email my CVP and I've never had to wait more than 15 minutes for a response

Funny, with us it was just the opposite. We loved Crown Grill (as usual) but were very disappointed with Harmony. My DW is from southern China and lived in Hong Kong so we're used to really authentic Cantonese food. We were looking forward to Harmony since the Majestic was built for the Asian market but when they brought the ship to the west coast they Americanized the food way too much. Maybe if you like Americanized Chinese food you'll like it but we won't go back.