luckybecky

The cruise was $100 ($50 per person) and we received a $100 OBC. Taxes and port fees were $209. And prepaid gratuities were $192. So all in it cost $501 at the time we booked. We also used AARP gift cards (Allstate also sells them and possibly other places) which were purchased at a 10% discount. So our bottom line was about $450 to book this cruise, and we got $100 of that back in OBC.

Forgot to post the Fun Times. Here it is for day one. My pics are terrible. I'm going to try to retake them tomorrow to see if I can do better.

West Indian pumpkin soup crab cake Stuffed mushrooms Caesar salad Teriyaki salmon with noodles Filet mignon -- it was quite good! Grand Marnier souffle. Was just OK. Not much grand marnier flavor, was pretty plain vanilla.

We usually go to supper early when cruising, earlier than we might eat at home, because we want to have time to go to the shows in the evening. I used the app to sign us in around 5:30 and received a notice within minutes that our table was ready. Supper went VERY fast!! We had four courses in like 45 minutes! I could have handled it if it were just a bit slower so we could take time to savor the food. But it was fine. I would prefer a fast paced meal to one that takes too long and makes us miss showtime. Our servers were friendly and attentive. The food was good.

Monday May 15 – A Sea Day We slept late. The bed was really comfortable! We went to the gym for a run on the treadmill. It was moderately busy but not a problem to get a treadmill. Then went to test out the hot tubs. A big fail in my opinion. The hot tubs are not jacuzzis, ie, they don’t have jets or bubbles. I don’t really understand the point of sitting in a tub of warm water with a bunch of strangers. I love a good jacuzzi with jets, which is relaxing like a massage to me, but the warm bathtub just wasn’t doing it for me. If this is your thing, you have a lot of options. There are plenty of hot tubs in various locations but none of them appeared to have jets, they only slowly circulate with very low power but don’t have vigorous, bubbly jets like a jacuzzi. Afterwards, I went to the ladies’ locker room in the spa to shower while Paul showered in our room. The locker room has two showers, one a huge accessible shower and another that is smaller but still much bigger than the one in your cabin. By the time we finished all this, breakfast was winding down. Still available but we decided to just wait for lunch. I looked at the Carnival Hub app to see if the dining room was available and it did not show up. I looked twice, maybe I missed it. Later in the day I went to Guest Services to get a paper copy of the daily schedule and it showed a Sea Day Brunch from 8:30am to noon. This was not showing up in the app for me so I had assumed the dining room was not open for lunch. Sorry we missed it. I would have liked a Guy’s burger but there were dozens of people in line. The Mongolian Wok, another favorite of mine, also had many people in line. So we hit the buffet. Of course it was crowded but not as bad as yesterday and we found a seat. I had pot roast, mashed potatoes, and roasted veggies. It was good. We had sort of a lazy afternoon. Tried our luck in the casino – not hitting yet. Briefly browsed the shops. Took a long nap. Our room wasn’t cleaned until 6:30pm. We had been in and out of our room multiple times – going to the gym, lunch, casino, etc. Paul bumped into our steward in the hall in the afternoon while I was napping; he said he would service our room while we were at supper.

After the welcome aboard show, I wanted to go to the comedy show but Paul was tired and went back to the room. I know that the comedy club is very popular and you have to arrive early to get a good seat. The Welcome Aboard show didn’t end until just a few minutes before. So I knew I was taking my chances, but I was alone so I thought I might be able to snag a single seat somewhere. Sure enough, I spied a seat with a decent view of the stage. I asked the lady sitting there if the seat was taken and she snobbily assured me that it was. She even had 2 glasses of wine in front of her, like someone else would be joining her. I found another single seat further back and the couple there welcomed me to sit with them. It was a great show with comedian Merl Hobbs. I really love the comedy club. These shows are a highlight of the cruise. We attend them as often as we can. The first seat I tried to take? Empty for the entire show. The woman was apparently saving it for someone who never bothered to show up. DO NOT BE THIS PERSON. There were MANY people at this standing room only show who would love to have a seat. It is beyond selfish to hold a seat empty. The rude lady drank both glasses of wine, by the way. Although the seat was wasted, at least she didn’t let the wine go to waste. I’m sure this same woman will “reserve” a couple of seats by the pool tomorrow and not use them for hours on end. I am a night owl and enjoy a late night snack. Snacks are not available on this ship. They did have popcorn available during the movie on the Lido deck, charging $4 for a small box. As I recall, this used to be free – and wasn’t even that good. On our last cruise with NCL, bar snacks were always available as well as potato and tortilla chips at the lunch buffet. We often would take a bowl of these back to our room for late night munchies. Not happening here. About the only sort of snacky food I found the whole cruise was potato strings at Guy’s Burgers.

We went to the welcome aboard show with cruise director Franco. It was fun, and ended with a short set from the Playlist performers. The CD said we have 4057 passengers on board, which surprised me because I thought capacity was less than that. In fact, the Carnival website says the Dream capacity is 3646 so we are considerably above that -- and it showed in the long lines, crowded breakfast and lunch buffet, and packed elevators. The average age was much younger than our last cruise. Lots of young adults, and families – though not a ton of school age kids because school is still in session.

This is an amuse bouche slider The french onion soup was exceptional Shrimp cocktail I had a spinach salad but asked for it without the mushrooms Surf and turf NY Strip Ice cream for dessert If you don't try anything else on this cruise, you MUST have this chocolate sphere dessert. It was out of this world. 20230514_190511.mp4

This is the iced and smoked oyster appetizer 20230514_180942.mp4

Here is the Steakhouse menu

Around 4:45 or so, while I was at the spa raffle, the captain came on the speaker and said, you may have noticed that we have turned the ship around and are returning to Galveston. We have a guest in need of medical attention and are returning to port to disembark the person. We had Steakhouse reservations at 5:30. We could see from our window seat that we were docked at the Royal Caribbean terminal. We were there for awhile. I think we departed for the second time at around 6pm. The captain said the delay would not impact our ports. We have a sea day tomorrow so plenty of time to make up the delay. Dinner at the steakhouse was great! They still do the free bottle of wine on the first night. Yes, I know. It is cheap wine. If you are a connoisseur you won’t like it. But we are fine with cheap wine. LOL All wine by the bottle is also half off on the first and second nights. Cheers does not kick in until tomorrow, so we enjoyed the cheap wine with our meal and ordered a second bottle to take with us for later in the evening. (They open the wine; you can’t just go order a bottle to go. But whatever you don’t finish, you can take with you.) Here is the menu starting with the current wine list with prices

Sailaway was around 3:30 or 3:45. The sailaway party was moved from the usual Lido deck location to the atrium, due to rain. You'll see that the rain did not deter a couple of intrepid kids who were going to get in the pool, come hell or high water! 20230514_155130.mp4

Paul took a nap in the afternoon while I explored a little. We were having heavy rain off and on so couldn’t check out the outdoor decks quite yet. I usually post lots of ship photos from my first day tour of the ship, but the Dream has been around for awhile and so there are lots of pics available online already. Plus I couldn’t tour or photograph the outside areas anyway. But here are just a couple of photos, the gym and thallasotherapy pool which looks amazing. Someday I'm going to get to try it. I went to the spa where they were giving mini massages. That was nice! Signed up for the raffle to win free spa services. I returned at 4:30 for the drawing (must be present to win) and sadly was not one of the lucky winners. They had a spa special that was extremely tempting and really did sound like a good value compared to normal pricing, but I resisted the temptation. I’m sorry, I forgot to get a menu of spa services. Our luggage arrived quickly, I think it was outside our door around 2:30 or so.

Went up to the buffet but there was absolutely NO seating available. Everyone was waiting for rooms to open at 1:30. We looked around the ship a bit, then got a little BBQ at Guy’s Pig and Anchor smokehouse. There was almost no line there. Maybe many people don’t know about it yet. First impression of the food: just so-so. The BBQ beef wasn’t bad. The mac and cheese was cold, dry and pretty much inedible. By the time we finished eating, rooms were open so we went to drop off our backpack. As we approached our room, a crew member was knocking on the door. We said here we are; he apologized that only my room key was ready. They were trying to print one for my husband but having trouble for some reason. He said he would return later with a key card for Paul. We never saw him again. Lines at guest services were quite long all day but finally after supper, still with no key card for Paul, we went there to get a card. The line was actually a little shorter than earlier and (only) took half an hour. Here are photos of our room. I always book a balcony but this last minute special was for an inside. The room was fine. But I really miss having some sort of seating in the room. This cabin had only a stool at the desk. I don’t like that at all. Our room was clean, but not perfectly so. If I’m going to be picky, the drawers needed dusting or vacuuming, and the refrigerator weirdly had glitter in it. There were two very large bundles of extra bedding stuffed into a closet, which prevented the door from closing properly. We moved them to under the bed so we could use that storage space and close the door. Speaking of which, the closet space was great! Plenty of room. There was another smaller bundle of bedding stuffed into a bedside table. Not sure why, since there were no extra beds in this cabin. Also, important to note: the cabin had only one US style electrical outlet. That’s it. And one European outlet. So you will definitely want to take some kind of power strip with you. Be aware that you cannot use anything with a surge protector.

We have done a few cruises out of Galveston. It is about a 4 to 4.5 hour drive from our home. We have always driven over the night before just in case of any issues (a wreck on I-10 can add hours to the trip) but we didn’t do that this time. We left San Antonio a little before 8am. Arrived at the port just after 12:00. We had parking reserved in the express lot, very near the terminal (no shuttle needed). Had to wait in line for several minutes to drop off our luggage. Arrived at the terminal at 12:15 where we were directed to the very long early/late line (our arrival time was 11:30-12). The on time line was very short. Kinda annoying but whatever. The line went fairly quickly. Security presented a bottleneck, didn’t seem very efficient but we got through. They did not check the two bottles of wine that we had in our backpack. Side note: our last cruise was a 2 week Panama Canal cruise where the average age had to be 60+. Not a party cruise. I will say that before we even got inside the terminal, we noticed, shall we say, a different dress code for this cruise and a substantially lower average age. Our second sign that this cruise might have a different vibe was when the woman in front of us in security was forced to surrender her brass knuckles. Not kidding. We walked on board at 12:42pm, a little more than half an hour after arriving at port. We were *immediately* directed to take a hard right into the theater to complete muster. We waited several minutes for the presentation to begin; then a crew member gave a brief demonstration of how to put on a life jacket. Not exactly how I want to spend my first moments on board, but good to get it over with and really happy we don’t have to do the old style muster drill! Here we are getting on board:

We are just off the Dream. I have a detailed trip report with current menus and Fun Times and more. For months, I have been receiving offers from Carnival for a “free” stateroom on select sailings, but every time I would try to book one, I’d get an error message that this room “just” sold out. It was beginning to feel like a bait and switch gimmick. But on Friday evening, May 12, I received an email offer that included the May 14 sailing of the Dream out of Galveston. That’s our home port – we live in San Antonio. I clicked the link, same error message as usual. This time I tried calling, the rep said their computer systems were updating, call back in an hour. Instead, I tried the link online one more time and it finally worked. We were booked into a 1A upper/lower inside cabin, no room number was assigned yet. When I booked, I thought it was a standard inside – didn’t realize I was getting bunk beds until I looked at our confirmation after booking! We are in our early 60s and not really into climbing into an upper bunk. I probably would not have booked it if I had realized this – but glad we did! The next morning, I logged into my cruise planner and happily discovered that our room had been assigned and upgraded to a 4E cabin on deck 7! Yay! I looked at deck plans and was happy with the location. Forward, but not ALL the way forward, not too far from the elevators. So we had about 36 hours to get ready. I reserved parking at the pier, and booked Cheers and a steakhouse reservation for the first night – happy Mother’s Day to me! Found a Belize snorkeling excursion we wanted to do on a popular trip advising website and booked that. Several hours later I received a notice from the tour operator that as of now they don’t have enough people signed up and may have to cancel the tour if they didn’t get more people. We didn’t want to wait until the last minute to find out if the tour was going to go, or not. So I canceled it and booked a Carnival tour instead. Normally, I avoid ship tours. I have found that we can get smaller group tours, at better prices, using outside providers. But I always research those providers pretty carefully to be sure they are reliable. With so little time to plan this trip, we just went with a couple of Carnival tours in Belize and Costa Maya. We have been to Cozumel several times and didn’t plan anything for that port.

Yes that is correct. It was a medical issue with a guest. The captain came on the intercom around 6, 6:30 and said "You may have noticed that we have turned around and are going back to Galveston..." LOL We docked at the RC terminal where the Allure had been and set out again an hour or so later. it did not impact the rest of the trip.

Well good news! I just logged in to Carnival and have a room assigned. And it's not bunk beds! 🙂 We were upgraded from a 1A cabin to a 4E on deck 7. I'm happy with the location, and definitely happy that neither of us will be having to climb into an upper bunk -- was seriously considering Sillyjilly's solution of putting the mattress on the floor. We also got Your Time dining, which had been showing as wait listed. So all is falling into place. I was even able to get a steakhouse reservation for Mother's Day -- it's early, but still, we got in. Our first time on the Dream... looking forward to it. I'll do a review after we get back next week.

Just booked a last minute cruise -- a first for us. Normally I am a big planner -- trips booked and every move planned far in advance. But we got an unbeatable deal from Carnival that we couldn't pass up. Just booked a 6 day Caribbean cruise on the Dream for basically free, except for port fees, taxes and gratuities. We leave in less than 48 hours. I have never booked a spur of the moment cruise before. Already learned one lesson: pay attention! I thought we were getting a standard inside cabin. No, we booked an upper/lower. LOL We are in our early 60s and thought we were past our bunk bed days, but apparently not. Shall we toss a coin to see who has to climb in and out of the upper bunk during our frequent nighttime potty trips? 😅 This will be the lowest category we have ever booked -- indeed, the lowest category on the ship. So that should be interesting. Normally I insist on a balcony. Does anyone know when our cabin number will be assigned? We are only a day and half from cruising, but I haven't printed luggage tags yet because they don't have a room number. We also cannot get dining time assigned. I'll post a review to let y'all know how it goes, but meanwhile wondering if anyone has any comments about this kind of last minute travel. How did it go? Did you like your cabin? Was it worth it?

Thanks to all who responded. I called our TA again today. Before calling, our inside cabin was still showing as an active booking on our TA website. After yet another lengthy call, it was announced that both cabin deposits are going to be refunded in full, AND they are giving us each an FCC for an equal amount! This is more than we expected or asked for, but after all the hassle we are happy to take it! Maybe after all the negative press and so many very unhappy customers, someone at Celebrity has determined to do some damage control. At this point I still have nothing in writing -- and I specifically asked for an email confirmation which they said they cannot provide. But I was given an FCC certificate number for each of us. We are still waiting for our kids' deposits to be returned, which they said would take 7-10 days. But it seems hopeful. Thanks again for the replies to our predicament. I hope things turn out equally well for the many people who have been affected by this oversold situation.

Very long story: I'll try to make it short. I've posted a few times about this saga on the very long thread about Celebrity canceling many Japan cruisers due to an oversold situation. We wanted to volunteer to be canceled. It would work for us and would open up our two cabins for cruisers who did not want to be canceled. We know there are many very unhappy cruisers who are being involuntarily canceled so we thought this could potentially be a win-win. It works for us, and hopefully also for Celebrity. Hoping it would work like an oversold flight; the airlines taking volunteers before involuntarily bumping people. We hoped this would be how it could work for us. We have called our big box TA several times about this and gotten different answers from Celebrity EVERY SINGLE TIME including multiple different answers within the same call. First, they said, sure, we can do that! We will refund your deposit to your original form of payment. More than we asked for! We were just hoping for FCC. Then in the SAME phone call, after we said, "great! we'll take it!" they immediately rescinded the offer. Another time they said they would give FCC. Great! We'll take it! Then when I called a couple of days later to follow up (since we had received no confirmation of this agreement) they said they could do no such thing. We had a lengthy three way call with our TA and Celebrity; the TA read them the notes of our prior call which documented that Celebrity had offered FCC. Celebrity said, "I'm not saying you're lying, but we will have to pull the recorded call to review what we said to you. " They said our reservation for both cabins is still active, although our TA is showing one of them as cancelled. And that is where things stood last time we spoke on Friday. Celebrity told us to give them a few days to conduct their review of our phone call. This evening I happened to be checking my credit card account and see a credit for $900 from Celebrity -- the full amount of the deposit for one of our two cabins. And one cabin is cancelled on the Celebrity website -- it was not cancelled last time we spoke on Friday. Meanwhile, the price of our other cabin was increased by $100 per person. (And the final payment date was moved from mid June to early July.) WTH? Can they just randomly tack on an extra $200 to the booking after we booked? Why would they move the payment date? But most of all, every conversation we had with the about this cruise involved BOTH cabins. We are a family traveling together and do not want to change one booking without changing the other. What the heck are they doing, and do we have any recourse? Now that they have canceled one cabin, we really don't know where we stand.

What a clusterf***! I'm so sympathetic to all of you who have been cancelled. What a disaster, especially when you have a lot of other expenses (air, hotels etc) invested. For many reasons, we decided our Japan cruise just isn't going to work for us right now. We have (had?) a concierge veranda and an inside, both with rooms assigned since September of 2021. So as I posted previously, we were willing to be voluntarily cancelled on our Sept 30, 2023 cruise which would be good for us but also hopefully be good for Celebrity -- that would be two less cabins they would have to involuntarily cancel resulting in very unhappy passengers, as many of you understandably are. I made a call on Tuesday. Bottom line is this: we know Celebrity has oversold this cruise. We are willing to cancel our two cabins, which would open those up for customers who do not want to be involuntarily cancelled -- but we don't want to lose our deposit. We asked our TA, is there anything we can do to make this work? This seems to us a win-win. Celebrity has the opportunity to make some other customers happy by not involuntarily cancelling them -- especially when many passengers have invested a lot of money in travel expenses. And it would make us happy by not losing our deposit. Those cabins are still filled with paying customers, and Celebrity still keeps our money as FCC. It does not seem to me to be a difficult calculation. Now keep in mind, we have not reached final payment date yet. Under the terms of our booking, we could choose to roll that deposit over to a different cruise as long as we do it before final payment -- we would only have to pay a change fee of $100 per person. So that was a viable option for us, but if we can just voluntarily cancel now and get the FCC, even better! We can take our time choosing how to spend the FCC -- but Celebrity still gets our business -- and someone on the current cruise is happy because our cabin can be assigned to them. Honestly I don't see any downside for anyone here, especially Celebrity. And on Tuesday that was the option that was offered to us and we accepted. Cancel our Japan cruise and receive an FCC for the full amount of our deposit. But 48 hours later I had never received any confirmation. So I called back our TA. What a mess! I was on the phone for 2 hours. Big Box C travel agent says they show that our concierge veranda was cancelled, but the inside cabin was not. They had no information about any FCC. They got Celebrity on the line. After much back and forth, bottom line is this: 1. Our concierge veranda was cancelled in the TA system, but is still showing as active with Celebrity. So we really aren't sure if we have that booking or not. 2. That concierge veranda on the Celebrity website has been downgraded from a confirmed cabin number (reserved and confirmed almost two years ago) -- to a guarantee cabin. 3. our kids' inside cabin appears unchanged and still active. We are a family traveling together. No way would we agree to cancel one and not the other. This was made VERY clear in our conversations. 4. Neither cabin is eligible for an FCC -- even though they told us the EXACT OPPOSITE and we accepted two days ago. When I repeatedly pointed out that this is not what we were told and accepted, the Celebrity rep said, "I'm not saying you are lying, but...." Ooohh boy. It is NEVER good business to say to a customer, "I'm not saying you are lying, BUT" 😡 My blood is boiling. As it is for so many others who have so much time, money and effort invested into these cruises. When we ended our call today, nothing was resolved. Arthur from the resolutions department at Celebrity says they are going to pull our phone call from Tuesday and listen to it to see what they actually offered. No matter that the Costco contemporaneous notes from the call describe exactly what I said above. Once they listen to the Tuesday call, they will contact us with their decision. OMG Sorry for the long post. I'm just venting. I know there are many of you who have it much worse than we do. At least we had not yet purchased air fare, for example. But the point is, there are SO MANY ways that Celebrity could have/ could still handle this better, and they just are not. We have only cruised with them twice and loved them: loved the food, the ships, the decor, the crew, the entertainment, everything. Really wanted to make them our favorite cruise line and become dedicated customers. But now....

I posted a few days ago that we wanted to volunteer to cancel our 2 cabins for the Sept 30 2023 sailing. I spoke to an agent with our big box travel agency, who contacted Celebrity. First, they offered us a full refund of our nonrefundable deposit because they were indeed oversold, "we just hadn't gotten the letter yet." When we jumped at that offer, they immediately rescinded it, saying oops, sorry, that was a mistake. You can't cancel or you'll lose your entire deposit ($1800). That was on Thursday, I think. I decided to try again today just in case anything has changed, because of the ongoing cluster that this has become and the mixed message from last week. After an eternity on hold with our TA, Celebrity first said no deal, then said we needed to talk to the Group Booking people, then dropped the call, then finally agreed to give us our full deposit back in the form of an FCC. This is fine with me. I have not received written confirmation of this yet. They said it will be processed and at some point I'll receive an email.

That's who we are booked with. Some people who are on our roll call have been involuntarily cancelled but we couldn't get cancelled even when we asked.

You are exactly right!! The discussion has been all over the place. People are getting all kinds of contradictory answers from Celebrity. It's very frustrating.