A different kind of cruise

by | Jul 25, 2019 | Uncategorized

Tomorrow we embark on a different kind of cruise for us. After 26 cruises, we are going to take one that is less about us than it is about family. On Friday of this week we are taking my daughter, her husband (who we love very much) but most importantly we are taking our grandson and granddaughter on their very first cruise. We are boarding Royal Caribbean’s Ovation of the Seas for a seven-night cruise to Alaska and we can’t wait!

Neither Kathleen nor I cruised until we were almost 50 so the very idea of starting our grandkid’s cruising life at five and eight years old is way cool! I am posting this news because I want you to know that I will be doing a complete set of posts on our cruise but I am not sure when I will be able to upload it. We won’t have (because that isn’t a perk that Royal gives its repeat cruisers…what exactly does Royal give its repeat cruisers that is worth a damn?) internet on board. We will have T-Mobile when we are ports so I should be able to post on those days. We are in Juneau on Sunday so hopefully I will get online there.

On the other hand, we may be having so much fun, you just might have to wait until we get back for a full report. Either way, more content is coming—hope you are ready. By the way, we are also going with two of our best friends, their kids and their grandkids as well so it is bound to be amazing.

AWESOME! I went looking for a closing quote about grandkids and found one by one of my personal heroes, Rita Moreno!

My grandkids are everything to me. For me, family is all! —Rita Moreno

This ship is and deserves an Ovation!

by | Jul 13, 2019 | Uncategorized

Yesterday we got a chance to see a new ship and it was really special for us because two weeks from yesterday, we will be sailing on her…with our grandkids and…their parents. Because of that we were totally into this tour. So far in our travel agent lifetime we have only toured two ships that we hadn’t been on before…or been on their sister ships. But we had never toured or sailed on this class of ship and we were worried that we might not like it. But all is AOK as we were totally impressed with Royal Caribbean’s Ovation of the Seas.

We boarded around 10:30 and I had an entire list of questions from the folks on our Cruise Critic roll call that needed to be answered. To start with, I want to state that Ovation is in awesome shape. The ship (which is only three years old) looked super, lunch was great and the food was excellent. 

Some general observations:

  • People were boarding at 10:30. That’s pretty early and it also means they got everyone off fairly quickly.
  • The buffet was SLAMMED every time we went by from 11:30 (when it opened) on. If you are cruising on this ship, try and find someplace else to eat when you first get on board. Pizza at Sorrento on Deck 4, Hot dogs at the Seaplex Doghouse on Deck 15, lunch at the Solarium Bistro on Deck 14 (if it isn’t reserved for a private party as it was when we were touring), sandwiches and salads at Cafe 270 on deck 5. One place that was completely empty was the Fish and Ships, a very cool Fish and Chips place on Deck 14. It doesn’t show on the deck plans they were passing out so that may be why it was empty.
  • We were really impressed that all the pools were open, with lifeguards at 11:00 am. Also, we were impressed that for those that have kids, they have life jackets/water wings for kids at both family pools.
  • The staterooms were really, really nice (so nice that I actually used “really, really.”) Lots of storage…much more than on any ship we have sailed on before including our favorite S-Class.
  • The ship was recently converted from serving the Asian market. The changes were fairly minor. They removed a high roller’s casino and turned it into a very nice music venue, they flipped a ramen restaurant and turned it into the aforementioned fish and chips restaurant. There were a few other changes we heard about but you certainly could not tell that they had been made.

If you would like to find out more, I have added captions to the pics below. And I will have a full report on Ovation after we finish our Alaska cruise on August 2.

Photos are below and are best viewed as a slide show. Just click on the first photo and then hit your right or left arrows.

I’ve had all that you could ask for. The fat lady has sung, and there’s a standing Ovation. —Flip Wilson

Quick Shots

by | Apr 1, 2019 | Uncategorized

Viking almost catastrophe follow up

Tonight just two quick things I want to share. The first is an awesome story about Viking Cruise Line’s ship that ran into trouble last week off Norway. If you missed it, I wrote about it late last week. Their crew and the whole company stepped up big time. You can click here to read the article. Worth the few minutes. Warning thought, it is a harrowing account. I would not have wanted to be on that ship. But I would have been thrilled by the way the crew onboard handled things.

Watching a big ship sail down a tiny canal

MeyerWerftAll through 2008 we were anxiously waiting the building and launching of Celebrity Cruise Line’s Solstice. This was not just a new ship, this was an entirely new class of ship. We (Kathleen and I) along with our Martini Mates were booked on Solstice’s 8th cruise in early March. So leading up to the launch we watched her being built at the Meyer-Werft shipyard in Papenburg, Germany. They had web cams all over her and we checked every day to see the progress. We would try to figure out where our staterooms were and how the rest of the ship was coming together. Finally, after waiting for months, they had the “roll out.”

They call it a roll out because the ship literally has to roll to the sea though some pretty tight places. We watched that journey on webcams and from people posting photos taken along the way. When ships roll out from Meyer-Werft they are quite a ways from the open ocean. It is really quite a site to see a GIANT cruise ship in a tiny little canal floating through farm lands. I bring this up because it happened again this week. It wasn’t a Celebrity ship but a Royal Caribbean ship. Their new behemoth, Spectrum of the Seas, is really something to see. And she was captured in a really cool YouTube video being towed out to sea. You can watch it all by clicking here. It’s one of those things that I find fascinating and you might too. It’s only a little over a minute.

We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend. — Robert Louis Stevenson

 

It’s never too early—NEVER!

by | Feb 20, 2019 | Uncategorized

TravelPlanning.jpgSorry I haven’t posted in a week. Shame on me. It’s been a busy week with my grandson’s birthday in snowy Wenatchee and our traveling buddy Holly coming north to visit. But I was back in the office again today trying to figure out how to help out an old friend who was looking to take his family of five on a cruise this summer. Here’s their story.

About a week ago this old friend (who is also a client of mine in my other life) sent me an e-mail that said, “My wife and I are thinking of taking an Alaskan cruise all by ourselves and we thought that maybe you have cruised to Alaska and could give us some recommendations.” Immediately after slapping myself on the side of the head for not having told him that we were now in the travel business and that we had cruised to Alaska six times, I offered to help him set it up. So armed with three possible cruises for him out of two different ports, I sent him some numbers. He got back to me right away. Forget Alaska.

He and his wonderful wife had decided that maybe they would take their three teenage kids along after all and not to Alaska but to the Mediterranean. Someplace he had seen an ad for Norwegian (NCL) Cruiseline’s Epic and wondered if I could check on prices for that ship. Of course I could. In fact, I came back to him later that day with pricing on a suite that would fit all five of them or two adjoining/connecting staterooms on the sailing of the NCL Epic he was interested in. After some questioning and answering back and forth they reserved the two side-by-side verandahs that connected. They would take one the the kids the other. We booked their flights through the cruise line and we were good to go…until my friend asked, “Have you been on the Epic?” I replied that I had not but I had been other NCL ships. He was worried about what a friend had mentioned to him about the stateroom bathrooms being “different” on the Epic. I assured him they were the same as every other cruise ship stateroom bathroom. They had to be… didn’t they? Of course as it turns out, they weren’t.

Early the next morning I was lying in bed at about 3:30 wondering, “What if he was right? What if there is some problem with the bathrooms.” I decided to post on the NCL boards on Cruise Critic and see if I could find anything about the Epic bathrooms. When I got to the NCL boards the first thread I see is, “Why does everyone hate the Epic so much?” Yikes! All of a sudden I knew I was in trouble. So I did some more searching (the Internet is a wonderful thing) and found this video that will show you the problem. Or this video which I like even better. Aren’t those bathrooms the stupidest thing you have ever seen? And they definitely would not work for three teenagers when two of them are  17 and 16 year old boys and the other is a 14 year old girl. Not a chance. BTW: I also texted my personal cruise expert, Seth Wayne who told me he and Jason had cruised on the Epic. They had a great cruise but the staterooms were HORRID! (The capitalization was his.)

So we cancelled that cruise. And I went off looking for others that fit my friend’s time frame (June 22-July 15) and the destination they wanted (the Western Mediterranean). I first tried Royal Caribbean (RCL) and they have one of their bigger ships, Oasis of the Seas sailing that route. That ship would be PERFECT for his teens. Lots to do.

The only problem was that there are currently only around 70 staterooms (out of 2742) that are still available. That’s almost five months before the cruise. And none of those fit what we needed—two adjoining staterooms that connected. You see we needed connecting because if parents traveling with kids don’t have connected staterooms, then they are required to have an adult in each stateroom and that wasn’t going to happen. I was able to find them a Star Class suite but the difference in price between the two staterooms on Epic (bad bathroom or not) and the Star class suite on Oasis of the Seas was a little more than $10,000. But it did come with a Royal Genie (I promise to explain this in a future post) and a whole bunch of other cool stuff. But it was still way outside their budget.

Today I booked them in two connecting staterooms on Allure of the Seas for June…2020. And that my friends is the point of this tale of woe. Book early. Book with a refundable deposit if you are worried that you can’t plan that far ahead. But BOOK EARLY! Many of the big cruise ships going to Alaska this summer are already filling up. We (Kathleen and I) have cruises this summer (one to Ireland/Iceland and one to Alaska with the grandkids) that we booked more than 18 months ago. We also have one booked for February 2020 from Fort Lauderdale to New Orleans during Mardi Gras as well as a Christmas market cruise with Viking River Cruises in December of 2020. And I am sure that we will book another on the day it becomes available for the fall of 2021 as well.

Can you still sail on a cruise ship this summer? Of course you can, but you will need to be flexible with your dates and the kind of staterooms you want. If my friend and his wife had been traveling with just the two of them, I could have easily found them something but when you threw in the short time until the sail date, the particular staterooms they needed and trying to book them on a teen-friendly ship, the pickings got really slim. You may find some staterooms open after final payment is due when those staterooms that aren’t paid for or are part of a group being held by a travel agent are released. But if you absolutely want to take a vacation at a particular time, to a particular place, with a particular bunch of people, BOOK EARLY! 

I think three-to-five years ahead minimum. I have a short-term plan, a five-year plan and a decade plan. —Steve Garvey

It’s the flu, people

by | Jan 10, 2019 | Uncategorized

Portrait of young man drunk or sick vomitingYou may have heard that late yesterday, the Oasis of the Seas, one of the largest cruise ships in the world is skipping a day at sea and coming home early due to…norovirus. I say you may have heard this because it was on all the nightly news on about every network and it will be covered by the other media. This is another thing I get asked about all the time by our non-cruising friends. “Aren’t cruise ships dirty? Everyone keeps getting that norovirus thing.”

Well I just have to say this…it’s the flu. The 24-hour stomach flu that you and I have been getting since we were kids. (See the CDC description here) But because people are in such close proximity to each other on cruise ships it tends to multiply a little quicker than other places. But not all other places. Schools are just as bad. Colleges, especially dorms and Greek houses. Then why do we only hear about it when it happens on cruise ships? My guess is that it’s because they actually do something about it on cruise ships. They take people home early. They stop and clean the entire ship. They sanitize beyond belief…because no one likes to be sick on vacation. Take it from someone who got a horrible cold on our last vacation, it’s a terrible place to get sick. All you want is your own bed, your own medicine, your own TV shows and books to distract you and you feel like you have to struggle through.

But it just frosts me that every time this happens, a huge deal is made about it. On the Oasis this time, 277 people are sick as of a day ago. 277 out of more than (counting crew) 8,000 (quoting ABC Evening News). And it makes headlines. Now let’s take any 8,000 random humans. My guess is that there are pretty close to that many of them sick at any given time. But because this happens on a cruise ship, we make a big deal about it.

Yes, Royal Caribbean did choose to cut the cruise short by one day so they can completely disinfect the ship. We have seen them do that and they do an awesome job. And yes, the  people on the cruise will be disappointed. But Royal is refunding them for their entire cruise and they can take their next vacation pretty much free. And for all but 277 of those 5,000+ guests, they got a pretty decent vacation to start with and they get another one for free later on. Do you think if any of those folks had been on a land-based vacation at a hotel and they got the flu, that the hotel would have given them a free week’s stay? I doubt it.

So the next time you see a news report that there is a norovirus outbreak on a cruise ship, just remember this message—It’s the flu. Brought to you by this guy who loves to cruise.