POA1

Lemon Drops aren't $12. The BB King version made with Grey Goose are, at least they were as late as Saturday night. That's why I made the recommendation about subbing out the expensive call liquor. I doubt anyone would be able to tell a vodka swap. There's a $12 Cosmopolitan on the MDR menu. Sub out the Cointreau for Curacao and, viola! SBP drink.

I'll throw this last menu up. It's from the Half Moon Bar which is exclusive to the Rotterdam. This is a high end bar and it's got fairly complicated craft cocktails with prices that reflect it. I'm not 100% that I will have to all the pages in the right order. It's a big menu.

Most normal drinks, unless they have very high end "call" liquors, are covered by the SBP. I drink Maker's Mark on the rocks. My wife drinks Ketel One with a splash of soda and a lime. Both are now, and have been since the dawn of HAL drink packages, been covered by the SBP. (The Bubble of Awesome pretty much guarantees this will always be the case.) Both of those spirits are top shelf "call" brands on land. Try not to stress about things that don't matter or random rumors on the internet. If you drink expensive booze, you already know it and you are expecting to need the EBP.

The Rolling Stone bar menu. FWIW, there are less expensive Chardonnays than the $12 Kendall Jackson. Just ask.

Because we have a Rotterdam Cruise booked, I can see some of the drink menus in the Navigator app. I can also see the dinner menus, Lido menus, etc. in real time. The restaurant menus are the same as what's on board. The drink menus will as well. (Again, I know this from last week.) Here is the current BB King Lounge drink menu. If you wanted the $11.50 Rhythm & Blues on the SBP, they'll make it with a less expensive bourbon than Buffalo Trace. Same applies to the Hoochie Coochie. (These drinks are sugar bombs though.) Bottom line: You can get almost all of "over" drinks made in an "under" way. All you need to do is ask. Preferably at the bar, so the bartender can hear you. Out on the club floor during a band's set is not the way to go.

Nancy - We just got off the Nieuw Statendam on Sunday, a mere four days ago. We were on board a HAL ship, plying the same Caribbean waters as the Rotterdam was when the alleged price increases were taking place. Were there drinks over $11? You betcha. There have always been a few cocktails over the SBP limit. There probably always will be. You know what was over the limit? Some cognacs, some high end Scotch, some tequilas, and some wines by the glass. You know what was over the SBP limit in 2014, roughly ten years ago when I started writing about the beverage packages? Some cognacs, some high end Scotch, some tequilas, and some wines by the glass. The big change was that you didn't used to be able to pay the difference. Now you can pay a buck or two for that one or two beverages that you would like to have - but they're over the SBP cap. Before the change, you either upgraded to the Elite Beverage Package or you paid full price. Were there pictures of the drink menus with these new, higher prices. (I'm asking because I don't honestly know what the thread said. I was on a HAL ship at the time and I knew it wasn't true in my case. So, not feeling the need to introduce an unnecessary chunk of negativity into my life, I ignored the thread.) If there are photos of the new prices, as there surely would be - 'cause it ain't like it's hard to find a handheld device with a camera from which you can post photos in 2023 - I would like to see them.)

Thanks for sharing! I did know this, but not everyone does, so it's good to share the info.

As a general rule, we are a late fixed seating people. We have had second upper, main seating since way back when there were four assigned seating times. It may seem shocking to you young whippersnappers*, but there was a time when everybody had scheduled dining times. Given our busy days in the lab, experimenting amongst the beakers, bunsen burners, and erlenmeyer flasks - having a known, fixed time for dinner is a comfort - one less variable in the quadratic equation that is our life at sea. Club Orange, on the other hand, is an open seating product. You dine when you want. (Designed by long-haired, free spirited, hippies if you ask me, by jiminy.*) We like to have the same wait staff every night. That way, we can build a relationship based on mutual respect, admiration, tips, and making sure Mother* is served her cappuccino with dessert.. So, we hatched our evil plan. As soon as we found a server we liked, we would ask for him or her every evening - thus making an oasis of fixed dining amongst the throngs of "oh... We'll just eat whenever we want" people. (Take that, ya tie-died, flower children!) Witt that in mind, we found "our guy," Tri, and were seated in his section for every meal. Well, except for the last breakfast, when our waiter was a guy we called "not-Tri." There's probably a point to all of this. Hmm.... It'll come to me. Oh, yeah. I got it. While we like the Club Orange Dining Room, we'd be in late, fixed, second seating if we were on any non-Pinnacle class vessel. *- I turned sixty earlier this year. Like a fine wine, I have aged into the HAL demographic and have earned the right to use words like whippersnapper, dadgummit.

My thoughts on the Club Orange experience, part 2: On the Pinnacle Class ships, Koningsdam, Nieuw Statendam, and Rotterdam, there is a standalone Club Orange dining room. On the first two Pinnacle ships, the CO dining dining room started out as America's Test Kitchen. As such, it had seating more akin to a bistro. The chairs and tables are more casual than those in the main dining room. Arguably, the seating is not as comfortable. By the time the Rotterdam launched, the Club Orange Dining Room was purpose built as a restaurant and the decor is more upscale. The seating is decidedly more comfortable to boot. (We got to tour the Rotterdam in November which allowed us to make a comparison.) We sail on the Rotterdam in the Spring as Club Orange passengers which will enable us to evaluate the Rotterdam in depth. We can butt-test the seats and see what differs between the two newest Pinnacle Class ships.

The SBP has always "indexed" when beverage prices went up. I tried to find a spirits list last week, but the bars no longer have them. If enough people get in line and ask the price of a couple dozen types of liquor, they might realize that having a booze price list is in everyone's best interest.

The only upside to a shorter cruise is less email and work backlog when I get home. However, the next one encompasses Good Friday and two weekends, so we pick up two cruise days and don't add any extra missed work.

It was very speedy throughout the voyage. With the last iteration of shipboard internet, you noticed slow periods at certain times of the day. Not so now - and Have It All has got to mean more users.

Just off the Nieuw Statendam on Sunday. Performance was great the whole time. The only glitch was about 2 hours of an outage one evening when the HAL RADIUS server or whatever they use for authentication went down.

In another thread about "Orange Club," a solo traveler, @Toofarfromthesea posted that it was a great value for an ocean view.

My thoughts on the Club Orange experience, part 1: There are three main components to consider when deciding whether or not CO is worth it for you. They are: 1) Priority embarkation and disembarkation, including tendering. 2) Stateroom upgrade inside the meta category. 3) Club Orange dining. There is also a fourth major reason to choose Club Orange, and it's probably the number one factor, garnering the vast majority of the vote for #1 reason to choose Club Orange. (I only surveyed myself, but the results were crystal clear.) Topping the list is the nonpareil of cruise line souvenirs, the Club Orange tote bag. Let's start with priority boarding. We're four star Mariners, so priority boarding did not add any value for us. In talking to people around the ship, priority boarding seems to be a pretty worthwhile thing if one doesn't get it on the basis of starishness. As for the stateroom upgrade component, it can definitely be worthwhile. Based on 50 to 60 seconds of deep and thorough research, it looks like booking an obstructed verandah (VH) and upgrading to the highest verandah categories (VA, V, VS, or VQ) can be worth the entire CO add on price. If you are stupid, like I was, you will book the exact room you want, in the category you want. In our case, a cat. A Vista Suite. Then, when I added CO, the only upgrade was an AS, aft Vista Suite. We wanted to be midship, so we declined the upgrade. If you are already in the highest available stateroom and they can't upgrade you, you get some OBC. Not this guy! We paid for more than we had to, turned down the upgrade, and got nothing. (We did get the tote bag, so it's all good.) By paying extra, we get to blame everyone else for cut backs. 😉 The CO upgrade is a really good deal for solo travelers. Singles only pay for one CO, but get the benefit of an upgrade which is normally at double occupancy rates. I'll cover dining in a subsequent post.

Before I forget - here's a tip for better performance from the Navigator app when you are onboard. As you move about the ship, you are staying connected to the same SSID. In our case, it was NieuwStatendam-Guest. Even though the network ID or SSID, stays the same, you'll connect to different access points on different radio channels as you move to different areas of the ship. For best results, disconnect and reconnect when you get to the new location. Otherwise, your device might not do a hand off to the closest access point and keep a weaker radio connection alive. The disconnect button is shown below. It's in Settings > Network in Android and probably somewhere similaron iOS.

There had been quite a bit of discussion about the Nieuw Statendam's television during the cruise prior to our sailing - the transatlantic crossing. If we aren't the worst people to weigh in on TV watching, we're definitely positioned to make the playoffs for worst. Other than having the bow cam channel on to hear announcements, we watched less than 10 minutes of actual TV. We never even watched long enough to see if the "TV would freeze up," a common complaint amongst the repositioning crowd. (I'd have unplugged the TV, counted to 5,and plugged it back in. I feel that calling tech support for anything other than a password reset hurts my geek street cred. 😎) I do agree that the TV position is not ideal in the Vista Suites, in terms of watching from the sofa. However, the sofa is across from the desk and the mirror behind the desk is both a regular mirror and serves as the makeup mirror. (It's lit, but not magnified.) We travel with an music player and rechargeable speaker, because the Bubble of Awesome deserves its own soundtrack. The little green Sandisk player has 8 GB of internal memory and a 32 GB micro SD card. It's loaded with around 25 different Christmas mixes that are appropriately an hour and 20 minutes each. That was our in-cabin entertainment. The little green player has 60 mixes, 80 hours, of what I call cocktail music which is what we listen to on our balcony at home. There also another 80 hours of more upbeat music. The battery life on both the speaker and the player are over 12 hours per charge. 😔

There is a package price for Surf once you get onboard. You'll see it once you click connect to the internet in the Navigator app. You'll get to choose from day, remainder of voyage, in either Surf or Premium.

This is not going to be 100% perfectly accurate, but the prepay cost, which gets you Premium Internet, tracks very closely with what Surf costs onboard.

My little Android countdown widget on my phone tells me that it's now 100 days until we leave for our Rotterdam cruise. It's a 9 Day Southern Caribbean sailing. I expect that, like the 7 Day Eastern we just finished, we're going to think this one's too short as well. The itinerary was originally supposed to be the ABC Islands and Half Moon Cay. There were two pair of sea days bracketing the Dutch West Indies. We were pretty stoked to have a "double-double" of days at sea, because they really help with shipboard research. Alas, the dreaded itinerary change struck and Curaçao was replaced by sea day. (Our expected speed will be 2.4 knots as we zoom past Curaçao.) The second double sea day was replaced by a stop in Grand Turk. If we had been smart, we could have changed shirts, been careful to avoid getting Christmas decorations in the background in a second set of photos last week, and already have our "April" Grand Turk content in the can.

Thank you! It's good to be understood.

Happy to help. I'm glad someone mentioned this during our trip. I'd have never known about it otherwise. I'm hoping to get an advance copy of the guide for the Rotterdam. I'm envisioning a combination art tour and pub crawl. Our working title is "A Toast to the Arts." It won't be a traditional pub crawl because we're a little old for that, but maybe we can spread it out over a few days.

You're very welcome! Tune in again in 101 days for the next scientific expedition.

Speaking of the wonderful Club Orange tote bag... Here are the "Poohbies." From left to right: Poohby Joe, Round Poohby & Big Poohby. Poohby Joe is sporting his Christmas shirt and all three of them are looking sharp with their new Club Orange tote bag.

By request: The Art Guide from the Nieuw Statendam, scanned to a PDF and ready to view or print. The link is to the file on Dropbox. You may get a prompt from Dropbox to download their app. You do not have to. You can simply open the link in your web browser and download the file from there. https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/ro7mqfxmidjlzn36d2sbf/Nieuw-Statendam-Art-Tour-2023-12.pdf?rlkey=2ypbisphmhpxhns6twizmk5vd&dl=0