NoahtheRed

Will do. It'd have been nice to get an upgrade earlier just so we could budget around that better, but meh, we'll see what happens 😛

Same deal here. We sail out on Sunday. Only difference is there appears to be 1 or 2 haven cabins left still....and I've got a pretty solid bid...so we'll see what happens. Now that we're inside the 2 day window though, the chances of last minute cancellations has gone up as people get their pre-cruise covid tests. Also, the weather in Florida seems to be throwing off air travel all the way to the Rockies right now, so weather related cancellations might be on the menu as well.

Most likely, yes...for one person.

Correct. NCL does online check-in 21 days in advance. I don't know that it makes much difference really.

Unless your cruise has a pretty wildly late departure, you'd be fine just heading to the port terminal. It'll take you some time to get from the airport to the terminal anyway.

Good. Time to bug the cruise director at the M&G and see if I can get some of the games on the Atrium screen 😛

Yeah, but only one of them has Reavo......so...... (I'm a VGK fan first, a Predators fan second, and in the absence of them...I'm chasing former knights :P)

We're cruising on the Encore next week and last I heard (late last week), the ship was hovering around 60-70%

It's got a Humidor Cigar Lounge on deck 6 near the casino

Hi, We're heading out aboard the Encore on June 5th....which means we'll be smack dab in the middle of the Stanley Cup Conference finals. Does anyone know if any of the onboard venues can air the games live?

It may have changed, but they'll handwrite luggage tags at the port as long as you've got the cabin # on your boarding docs.

It varies depending on the markets. Some friends of ours are on Delta for their flight to Honolulu while my wife and I are on Alaskan to Seattle.

If you don't mind me asking, when/where is your cruise?

I fully support holding NCL accountable (and really, business in general), but BBB might be the most meaningless rating possible. Frankly, I'd consider a chargeback with your CC at this point.

Yup, upgraded to business in our Alaskan flight from Vegas to Seattle without any issue whatesover. Folks, check your airlines and see if they'll let you upgrade. They probably will.

That was indeed news to me. I called up NCL and managed to secure some for my upcoming cruise though, so that's a win 🙂 Saves some stress on Day 1.

Generally, the boarding times are kind of superficial. They're mostly just to try and artificially space guests out so they don't get rushed at 9am or whatever. Realistically, it'll be around lunchtime before you're able to actually board anyway.

Lol, been doing product management for nearly a decade now and I bet if you had 4 drunk PM brains to pick, you'd end up with 4 different sets of (conflicting) business rules 😛

Wait, how are y'all pre-purchasing thermal spa passes? I've been under the impression it's still a "Can only be purchased on-board" thing?

Honestly, the mechanics of how it all works are probably only known to a couple product managers and business stakeholders at the third-party that runs it. I'd go as far as to say it's probably proprietary and not even NCL knows the exact business logic. NCL just contracts with this company to fill empty cabins at reduced rates closer to the sail date and there's probably certain controls NCL has, but it's otherwise a grey box system with some kind of contractual obligation for certain performance metrics. If there is a specific cabin type you're trying to get, I'd recommend having that be your 'best' bid of the lot....but it generally depends on the availability and demand more than anything. It's a big number crunch, basically. NCL obviously wants to maximize their capacity aboard the ship and getting the 'potential upgrade' numbers early lets them adjust pricing on the lower level cabins as necessary. If they're at 50% capacity 3 months out, knowing their capacity to top fill the higher level cabins helps them get a better idea of A. what sorts of thresholds they want to place for those cabins and B. how many of the vacated cabins will be available closer to sailing. So to get a short answer, they've calculated that there is a point of criticality in each sailing where opening up the bidding lets them forecast the departure day supply and demand ratio.