Wine packages-short cruises

[vandalayceo]

My understanding is wine package cards are only offered on cruises 10 days or longer, as minimum package is 10 bottles.
Is there any logical reason they don't offer it on shorter cruises, and then allow unused portion to carry over to next cruise-like a coffee card?
This would especially be useful on shorter BTB's, and I don't see how Princess is any better or worse off, one way or the other. Edited December 11, 2013 by vandalayceo

[Dudleydog73]

Even on longer 10-day+ cruises it is not always offered as it stands today. It comes down to logistics and the wine supply onboard whether it is offered or not, and you usually will not find out the answer until you board on day 1.

[Nan_Sea]

Good idea. Maybe Princess will read your suggestion and give it some thought.

[Dudleydog73]

Could be viewed as a liability though as each punch equals a bottle of wine that needs to be loaded and stored. I think it would be hard to determine how many folks are bringing onboard old wine cards with unused punches.

Its not like coffee where it takes just a bag of beans that they run through their machine to make a much more reasonable amount of fresh brewed coffee. The storage and liability of breaking bottles or other mishaps might make this sort of transferrable card unreasonable.

[Crzn-Life]

[quote name='vandalayceo']My understanding is wine package cards are only offered on cruises 10 days or longer, as minimum package is 10 bottles.
Is there any logical reason they don't offer it on shorter cruises, and then allow unused portion to carry over to next cruise-like a coffee card?
This would especially be useful on shorter BTB's, and I don't see how Princess is any better or worse off, one way or the other.[/QUOTE]

The minimum package isn't 10 bottles. We completed B2B2B cruises on the Crown in November. We purchased 10-bottle packages for the 1st & 2nd cruises, and a 7-bottle package for the last one. We had wine left over from the previous cruises. The card doesn't carry over to the next cruise, but if you have wine left over, you can get it the last day and either take it to your cabin or leave it with your servers. We did the latter since we had traditional dining and the same servers for the 3 cruises. Edited December 11, 2013 by Crzn-Life

[vickie_bernie]

I feel Princess has really dropped the ball on the wine card. I love the idea of a wine card; however I have sailed on five cruises over ten days since it's implementation and they have never had it on board. Like the poster above said we didn't find out till we got on board that it was not available. We have had a variety of reasons why it is not available (even different answers from the same sailing).

Reasons have been, not enough stock (which seems odd since they have never said they are out of a wine when we ordered a bottle from the menu), no sommelier on board (again kind of odd since I always seem to order from waiter or head waiter), and last reason, they have never heard of it. :)

The downfall is when Princess brought this in whether people wanted it or not is that if it is inconsistently being rolled out and that just creates negativity.

We are sailing again in the new year on a cruise longer than 10 days, we will see if they offer the card.

Vickie

[geoherb]

I enjoyed the wine card that Holland America used to offer. It was like the coffee card except that each punch on the card was for a glass of house wine. We had the bottle of wine card on our short Carnival cruise--three bottles at a slight discount.