mil76

You have rekindled my memories of working in the garment district in Downtown LA back in the early 90's. If I worked late and it was after dark, I used to fly down Los Angeles Street in my MGB to get on the 10. A red light could be a life or death situation. I was convinced the song "The Freaks Come Out At Night" was based on downtown LA.

You can call the casino number and pay to upgrade or try to Royal Up (RU won't work for interior to suite though). My wife gets GTY stateroom offers, and she'll call and pay for the upgrade to Balcony. We have done about 10 comped interior rooms so far and have never stayed in an interior.

At some point Royal will release unsold accessible rooms to the general public. Most of our cruising is casino comps so we are booking just a few weeks/months out. The comps are usually interiors, so my wife (the gambler) will call to see about paying to upgrade to a balcony. Sometimes they will offer her accessible staterooms that haven't sold. We try to stay away from them when offered since people would see us in that stateroom and assume we did something wrong (see previous posts).

Yes. It's per restaurant.

I can't imagine the Uber/Lyft wait times with both in port the same day.

From the site posted above, it does show that Quantum will be stopping in Cabo, which from my experience is the slower tender port. Catalina is the other tender port, but they have much bigger tender boats so it seems to go quicker.

One thing they definitely DON'T have is any of the T-shirts you see on Caribbean/Mexico/Alaska cruises. We asked if they had any Royal Caribbean T-shirts for the ports we visited, and we got a very snotty "if you wanted a T-shirt, you should have bought one while you were off the ship" response. 🥶

Any big ship with only one Flowrider is hideous to me from the back end as well. For selfish reasons in addition to the horrible feng shui!

Maybe it's just me, but I think Icon is pretty bad as well. By day it looks like Sergeant Schultz And at night it looks like a Cassowary bird

We only did Silver dining once, and the MDR the other 4 nights. There was very little on the menu that appealed to the picky eaters in my party. Are they allowing anything below pinnacle in the Golden Room? We are D+ and they told us we could only use the Silver Lounge.

Don't waste your time, there isn't. The area outside Silver dining is the Crown lounge equivalent.

Drone shows are only for special occasions, although they do have a light show every night. We watched the regular light show from our balcony at the Fullerton hotel. I read some of the articles on the CNY drone shows and it sounds like the crowds were huge and everyone stampeded inside the MBS when the rain started. Singapore crowds can get huge. We did Gardens by the Bay Christmas Eve and it was packed. I'm so glad it didn't start raining. We liked Grab because it had both taxis and private cars (Uber/Lyft equivalent). Booking taxis through the app was cheaper than just hailing one and paying the metered rate.

I can't believe they still haven't put Freestyle machines on Liberty. I cruised Liberty out of Galveston pre-Covid and thought they were way behind the times back then! They always gave the excuse that they couldn't get the Freestyle flavor cartridges in Texas. I remember they did have old school coke machines like most fast food restaurants have, but that won't help if you want anything non-carbonated.

Can't wait to see your impressions of Spectrum. We sailed her in December, and after previous sailings on Anthem and Ovation, this ship is very different. CNY trumps everything there. We were there on Christmas and everything was open.

The announcement volume control knobs in the rooms on older ships are a relic piece of obsolete technology from a bygone era. I tried using it on Navigator this week and it does nothing. We were waiting in the room yesterday for tender number announcements and you had to go out on the balcony and you could still hardly hear it. But day one when they were doing the muster station straggler announcements it blasted in the stateroom.

Ensenada is pretty bad. There are some good places to get Mexican food and that is about it. Plus Nassau will have warmer weather in the winter so you can still go to the beach. It checks the box for foreign port to keep the cruise legal and that is about it.

We drove a couple times when we were in Tucson. Now that we've moved it's still the most convenient port for us in Denver if we fly into Long Beach. We still do Galveston just for the bigger ships, but at this point the ports don't really matter between the two. Florida is still king for port-of-call variety though.

Lots of casino comps on the 3 day.

It would only be once a week. On 3/4 day weeks they hit Ensenada (dock) twice and Catalina (tender) once. On 7 day weeks they tender in Cabo and Mazatlan and PV are docked.

I think Navigator in LA is doing better for Royal than it was in the past, but this applies to just about every ship they have right now. It looks sold out for our cruise next week, and this isn't exactly peak cruising time unless you are going on Icon. In the past I could count on getting a Royal Up for minimum bid, and this time I put higher than minimum bids on multiple categories and got crickets. You rarely see it on Going, Going, Gone like some of the comparable ships doing 3 and 4 day itineraries out of Florida with listings for just about every week If the market is growing, maybe they will give a Quantum class a shot. I guess we will find out in a few weeks.

They need to be able to plug into this while in port instead of running the engines for power.

Flip phones rule! Mine works great on cruises. 😜

It's not just signing waivers anymore either. You have to watch one video for boogie board, then do another if you want to do stand-up. Takes forever if there is a queue.

Going back on Friday. Haven't been on her since last Spring, so I'm glad to see all is not lost after the negative reviews. We sail Navigator a couple times a year since 3&4 day itineraries regularly pop up on the casino list, and this time we managed to snag the 7 day itinerary. It's the easiest port for us to get to since we can fly nonstop from Denver to Long Beach and bypass LAX. Haven't done the 7 day since the NYE cruise after restart where they wouldn't let anyone off the ship in Puerto Vallarta due to COVID paranoia. We did our honeymoon in PV many years ago and haven't been back since, so hopefully this time it works out. We like the specialty restaurant selection so always do UDP, and Playmakers really makes it worth it for us. Hooked is great, but the DW doesn't like seafood so I usually only get one visit for the cruise. UDP hasn't gone up too much compared to some of the other ships, and it is usually our only onboard spending (besides my wife in the casino). I prefer the winter cruises since the chilly weather keeps the crowd down on the Flowrider. Wetsuit is packed and ready to go!

Went on Ovation the past 2 years, Once in August and once in September. Didn't make it to Dawes either time. Once for ice and once for a medical emergency. If you want to increase your odds, make sure I am not on the cruise!