john2003

We hope to visit Australia and NZ in October/November. Our return to Canada is from Perth with a connection in Japan. I am really regretting this routing. We have to have a Covid test within 72 hours of the flight. We will be in the Margaret River area at that point. Can someone tell me where as a visitor we might be able to get a Covid test or at least the type of facility to look for. The qualitative antigen tests are not acceptable so I suspect a lab has to be involved. Probably Perth.

I hope they up their food game before our October cruise out of Sydney. I am expecting a quality experience.

On our May NA cruise we got the tiles but no lunch. There was a drinks reception but no officers turned up. Weird, I thought but maybe Covid precautions.

I am also still waiting after about a week.

This port is in the middle of nowhere and not served by public transport, except by climbing over a dike! Would not think the ship transport would meet your time requirement so I think a private transfer would be the best bet. Google maps if you specify the day of the week and time of day will give you a good idea if how long it might take.

I have only once had guarantee that disappointed me. In this case because people were getting better cabins for less than I had paid. I certainly knew they had no obligation to make a change but they did, albeit a small one.

Upsell will deal with you directly.

Thanks for this. We just made our final payment on our October cruise. I had some uncertainty but mostly about the impact on our post cruise travel. I think if I had read this first it might have tipped me to cancel.

We have a Celebrity cruise booked for October. I used to think HAL had a more enlightened policy for bringing wine onboard. I gather as we have the drink package we can bring 2 bottles each onboard with no corkage. Seems a pretty smart move. Let us drink some of our wine rather than theirs at no cost!

We did the train to Katoomba (?sp) and Hoho bus a few years ago and it worked well. I thought we got a better price by booking the bus and train on one ticket. May be worth checking but perhaps it was just more convenient.

Thank you everyone for your feedback.

We are on the Eclipse in October out of Sydney. Have travelled several lines and this will be our third Celebrity cruise. Anytime dining has proven a bit of a challenge compared to our other experiences so I thought I would pre-book. We prefer to share. I have booked either 6:30 or 7 with 7:45 the first night. Sails at 630. Anything I should consider, or is this reasonable. I also booked a dinner in Murano's for one night. I paid with my OBC. I see it is now a bit less expensive. Can I phone and get this changed or do I have to live with it? I am reluctant to cancel and rebook as the time might not be available. Any feedback will be appreciated.

The one sailing I was checking doesn't show crew appreciation when one gets into the detail despite having this sale as a filter when I did the original search. Probably an IT issue.

We thought the train was great, we were on the regular scheduled train. My critiscm is that there was a lot of hanging around. Not sure if the same for the HAL train.

In the case of Seaborne they have not exactly been building a large number of new ships and as such the relative amount of debt is pretty low. Thus the reason why it might actually get sold, along with any debt it does have, if it raises enough cash. Except that they replaced their entire fleet a few years ago which now sail for Windstar. Relative to their revenue they may still have quite a debt load but tiny in the overall picture.

We took the regular train to Whittier last month and passed a HAL train so they are clearly different.

This is a great service. We are 4* so don't pay but it is so good we would if we had to.

Apart from the yummy food, the other advantage of Tamarind is location. They do a good job with Canaletto of separating it from the Lido but it isn't its own space. Go early to Tamarind for a beverage in the bar area. Makes a lovely evening.

No idea but we managed to get an earlier time on our recent cruise, when we were onboard.

You are correct there is the extra step.

HAL removed two of the FCDs today from the booking and put them back in our respective accounts. So now we used one $100 FCD for each of us which what I expected. We also got an offer from HAL to add HIA to our booking for $50 us each which seemed a good deal so our TA added this.

Sad to see her demise. She was a beautifully built ship which we really enjoyed.

But you can also call HAL which is what I did. Need to talk to the upsell dept. Reservations won't be any help.

Interesting. My TA questioned but was told there was no option.

Have a followup question. I bought 4 of these for $100 each, 2 for each of US. My TA booked a cruise and HAL insisted they had to take all 4 which they did. This makes no sense to me. I planned on using the second one for a future cruise. Unsure if they took them all as deposits or 100 was a deposit and the second 100 was a payment against the final balance. Clearly I am very confused about the rules.