DYKWIA

Fake dog poo from Amazon £2.95 will do the trick - can be used to reserve your own sunbed, or an affordable way to signal to others you're unhappy that they've hogged a sunbed

On 9/17/2019 at 3:12 AM, smile842 said:

Am I able to get martinis at the martini bar using the classic beverage package?

On the Infinity recently we found it depended on who was serving. The person in charge of the bar never charged and I guess just made them slightly smaller or used a slightly cheaper brand of spirits.  Other servers charged the $ or so price difference. 

3 minutes ago, ak1004 said:

 

You seriously believe they reversed the decision because of this thread? I can guarantee this is not the case.

 

And no, none of us touches the TV during a cruise. Not for free movie or any channel. 

Perhaps you can explain how you are in a position to guarantee this one way or another?  

I think there's some merit to the argument that this thread and the ensuing social media and direct approaches to Celebrity some of which were initiated by the publicity given to this matter on CC) had some effect. I'd put more weight on that than the the sweeping statements on what the majority of passengers think and want based on your self-selecting survey of a few passengers by you and your companions.

3 hours ago, ak1004 said:

....

 

We spoke to dozens people on our cruise. None of them cares about free movies, foot stools etc. But most of them mentioned mediocre food, amateur entertainment and declining service. 

Are you a journalist or a student doing research speaking to these dozens of people? Was it a representative selection? How do these dozens equate to the thoughts of the "vast majority" you mentioned earlier. 

Did you specifically ask these dozens of people for their views on free movies and foot stools - if not, how do you know whether they care about them or not.  

People query why my wife would want to go on a cruise and watch a movie late in the evening before going to bed, but she's not the one spending her vacation wandering the ship interviewing dozens of people

12 minutes ago, ak1004 said:

This is good news for people who come to a cruise to spend time in their cabin watching movies. It's not so good news for vast majority of cruisers who couldn't care less about free movies but care about more important things like better food, better entertainment, more activities etc.

How exactly will this impact food, entertainment, activities? Where's your evidence that the vast majority of people couldn't care less about free movies in their cabins?

5 hours ago, Happy Cruiser 6143 said:

 

I agree.  Was on the same cruise and the previous one.  Some of my best cruises.  The food and service were outstanding.

 

The waffle cones are just another of LLP's death of a thousand cuts.  At some point, she'll make so many cuts, the product will no longer be appealing.  Perhaps the board will come to its senses prior to that and send her on her way with her golden parachute.  I'm not holding my breath.

Watch out for a restaurant or bar to be named throughout the fleet as "Lisa's"

Let's hope the reinstatement remains in place and the quality of the movies doesn't suffer.  I recall, when travelling through Asia for many years a lot of the hotels offered a free satellite movie channel - on average there was one decent movie a day (typically 5+ years old) and the rest of filler made for TV melodramas.

2 hours ago, RichYak said:

If the average cruise is 7 days, those 27.2 million people are spending 4.569 billion hours on cruise ships. If the average flight is 3 hours, those 849.3 million passengers are spending 2.548 billion hours on planes--a little more than half the time. I made up these averages and have no idea if they're correct or even relevant. I'm just providing an alternate viewpoint.

Few things with this model - aren't the flights with the free movies the long flights 5-18 hours in during which a lot of people are doing little else other than watching the free entertainment for the duration of the flight?  On a ship, those watching the movies are, on average, probably only watching for a couple of hours a day

58 minutes ago, Hlitner said:

Just an observation from a very long time extensive cruiser.  I did not realize how naïve and "head in the sand" I was until reading this thread.  Had no idea that folks went on cruises to watch movies in their cabins.  ......

 

 

and some people go on holiday to sit at a bar and drink beer, wine and spirits (the same they could do at home) or queue to eat food at a buffet they'd probably pass and ignore at the local supermarket....

I suspect very few people actually go on holiday for the purpose of watching movies, many probably choose to  to while away a couple of hours in the late afternoon before evening meal, or to fill the "dead" time between evening meal and the late show in the relative peace and quiet of their cabin.

My wife and I currently each work about 60 hours a week - we currently don't want our holidays to be action packed food and booze filled partying.  

In 12 nights on the Infinity last month the only two songs I heard from the last 5 years were Fireball by Pitbull and Uptown Funk by Bruno Mars, the latter we heard A LOT.  Almost everything else I recall was 10-30 years old - recall hearing some late 80s stuff. 

3 hours ago, txflood33 said:

This thread is amusing to me...and I say that with all due respect.

 

Look, I get it. I have watched a movie in the room before...more than once. There will be an adjustment. This thread makes it sound like they removed breakfast.

 

It makes sense to be disappointed. Everyone has their routines and comfort zones. There are tons of things that can be a swap for a movie.

• Read
  • I understand some ships have better libraries than others. E-Readers are amazingly inexpensive. If you're not looking to spend the extra money, most of us have an ipad or tablet of some sort. Kindle has a free app and you can read on your current tablet.
• White noise to relax
  • many free apps that could be used on your smartphone 
• Music
  • make a playlist from Apple Music or spotify or your own collection of digital music. Relaxing songs...upbeat songs to get the evening going...the sing-a-long songs you both love. Make multiple playlists that are about your destinations.
• Laptops and tablets
  • I know this is a huge assumption on my part, but the majority of us travel with a tablet or laptop. For work or for entertainment on the flight or whatever the reason...the bulk of us have them and bring one, if not both. Get a thumb drive and load it up with movies.

There was a poster that said her son liked to play his switch on the tv......I don't really know how else to say this, but, the Switch is a handheld game system...designed to be played in single player mode or across a LAN in handheld mode. The ability to play on the tv is a nice feature, but is not needed. It's absurdly silly to use the Switch reasoning for being upset you can't access the HDMI ports.

 

I guess what I'm saying is put it into perspective. You're in a floating hotel somewhere in the world where you were not yesterday. Send the emails. Express your displeasure. However, this is a relatively easy problem to solve. Is't one of the cool things about vacation trying new things?

Thank you, this is most helpful. I had no idea there were alternatives to watching movies. I’m also grateful for the suggestion  that I should try to do other things as I’m on holiday.

 Next time you are on a plane and the in flight entertainment doesn’t work a good alternative is to look out the window or browse the inflight magazines....

yes, you could describe a ship as a floating hotel, - but every land based hotel I stop in these days (on average 2 nights a week) seems to have at least 50 free TV channels and free high speed internet.. 

If there is no going back on the free movies, the ability to plug a USB stick in to the TV (virtually every TV has a media player in these days) would, in our case, go a long way to improving the situation.

My wife likes going to bed early and watching 30 mins of a movie. On our previous cruises on an S class ship it wasn't unusual for her to take 3-4 nights to get through a movie

1 hour ago, Lilikins said:

Well that’s disappointing. Yes, it’s a small thing but it’s the little touches that make a difference. When royal started charging for room service it was enough to make me book elsewhere. Sure in the grand scheme of things $5 for room service or a movie charge isn’t a lot when you are spending thousands on a trip but it still matters.

On the infinity 2 weeks ago on demand movies were $14.99 (or thereabouts).  There was only one free choice  that was not on demand and changed daily - like it or lump it.  This was significantly less than previously on the Eclipse, which were also on demand. The system has always been glitchy though in our experience.

Wife and I decided we would bring our laptop next time - we have 1000s of films and TV programmes on our home Network so it's easy for us to bring a good selection with us.

7 hours ago, Atwell said:

My opinion is that the MDR food is definitely not as good as 20 years ago but the buffet is better than it used to be and dinner in the buffet is definitely an option.  The service in the MDR seems to have slipped but maybe because the wait staff is responsible for more tables but they try hard.  There doesn't seem to be the selection of really good entrees on the MDR menu compared to years ago though I can't give any specific examples.  The food choices around the ship are still plenty good enough to keep us cruising. 

We noticed a definite dip in quality at the buffet this year on the Infinity.  On our last cruise on the Eclipse 3 years ago - there were some good themed evenings in the Buffet (Seafood, Chinese, Indian, Grill Night).  This year the themes seemed much more basic and slight  - German Sausage, Nachos, Crepes are the ones I recall

We did notice on our recent cruise on Infinity how plain and basic the majority of the tableware is in the MDR.  Even in a modest mid range restaurant on land I would expect to see better tableware. The majority of the tableware, particularly the soup and dessert dishes, and coffee / tee cups,  were very plain. I feel the dining experience would  be lifted considerably with a better choice of tableware

2 hours ago, marshabear said:

Crazy pool games ONLY on sea days?  Just great, we have 7 sea days in a row on the TA!! UGH

 

It has been reported that the CD is the one initiating  the pool games and such.....so now what?

 

 

 

Marsha

The CD was someone called Luigi.  Didn't see him about too much, but didn't go on the lookout for him either.  One of his Activity managers (chap from Turkey) did a lot of the pool stuff, nice enough chap but very very loud on the microphone.

There were No belly flop contests!

Re the music - not exactly "First World Problems" IMO (as suggested by someone earlier)  To hear the same very small playlist of repetitive music for 12 days is not what we expect. I have a music collection of over 45000 records of all genres, so enjoy music.  Some subtle background music adds to our enjoyment.

The MDR on Infinity the last 12 nights  is the best food we’ve had in the MDR in the last 5 years (3 previous cruises on Eclipse) - superb, yes the usual menu, but a wide choice of veg and excellent large cuts of meat.  Tonight our final night prime rib must have been 16oz.

Buffet not as good

1 hour ago, marshabear said:

We are on the Oct 11 sailing too....between the CD's crazy pool games and hearing this about the deck music, we may avoid the pool deck!  😞

Crazy pool games ONLY on sea days. Not our thing at all and tha Turkish Activity Manager was very loud , but it didn’t last long 

3 hours ago, TeeRick said:

Wrong speed or too much to drink??

Wrong speed - same again today. Unbelievably sloppy or someone hoping we don’t recognise that they are playing the same playlist - beyond me how no one at Celebrity has noticed - poor standards,

you better like Bruno Mars as well that seems to be the only track in the theatre 

.....otherwise great cruise!

Our fourth cruise on Celebrity - first time on a Millennium class ship.  Food in the MDR has been excellent , wide variety of Veg and extra available - we reckon best of our 4 Cruises with Celebrity  in the last 5 years. Food in the buffet not so good and layout on the Millennium class ships is poor c.w. solstice class.

like the smaller size of the Millennium class but prefer look and style of Solstice class. Edge class doesn’t appeal at the moment.

Currently approaching the end of a very good 12 night cruise on Infinity, sailing from Venice to Barcelona.

Something is bugging me, I can’t figure it out. The poolside music they play from about 6 am until late in the evening, when no other entertainment is featured, is very strange.  They seem to have a playlist of only about 15 songs which are played on “random” meaning you sometimes get the same song twice or even three times in 15 minutes. No one from Celebrity seems any the wiser or to care.  

We had this for about a week, now, all of a sudden we have exactly the same playlist but someone has turned the speed down by 15% on all the same tracks (female vocalists sound male, male vocalists sound like Barry White) I have no idea why and requests to play the songs (which sound very strange) at the right speed are ignored - If they think we can’t tell they’re playing the same Lisa Stansfield, The Police, Empire of the Sun (etc) songs but slower they are wrong.

for the life of me I don’t understand why they seem to have such a ridiculously small play list of songs

2 minutes ago, alwaysonaship said:

Come on. This is a common slang term. Try and be nice. 

Yes, I thought the same.  Quite common to use this in the UK for something believed to be pricier than it should be.  You will regularly hear it about things in London c.w. the rest of the country (Taxis, Theatre Prices, Price of a Pint).  Generally I think it's used to describe a certain sort of buyer's remorse.  "I paid this amount, and all I got was this, if I'd have known before I wouldn't have bothered".

In some countries there are significant risks in taking taxis - a proliferation of unlicensed taxis, lack of regulation of taxis, taxi drivers and their vehicles, taxis with meters that don't work or the driver is reluctant to switch on, taxi drivers who either want to take you on a "scenic detour" or try to persuade you that the place you want to go to is closed.  In some places it is all of these!  Bangkok comes to mind - there I would happily pay the extra for a organised coach or hotel limo to avoid the aggravation.

6 minutes ago, Doubt It said:

Just read a number of reviews of the Silly in July/August in the Med.

 

Not flattering, nor aligned with the product/image marketed by Celebrity. 

 

Not an on board experience that I would tolerate. 

 

Brings up the issue of a company's obligation to deliver the product/experience/service that they market....

 

Many first time guests in particular book based on Celebrity marketing (modern luxury) and reviews because they have limited other information and no previous experience with Celebrity.

 

It would seem to me that the Silly experience could be questioned regarding its alignment with Celebrity marketing.

 

Of course defenders of businesses can always trot out the old saying "buyer beware".

 

Like many vacations, there is can be a seasonal/geographic etc variation.

 

It is an interesting question.

 

 

 

Without knowing which reviews and why precisely people have a gripe its difficult to know whether or not I agree with them or not.

32 minutes ago, lovescarborough said:

I always take my own hairdryer and the European adaptor works fine. My GHD styler will work on the US outlet as will ipad and phone chargers so I bring a US adaptor too. 

By coincidence on my Twitter feed this was mentioned in relation to older GHD stylers