Yesterday I started this post to detail a huge problem we ran into with our flights on Sunday/Monday. But it all got figured out and we are ready to go…to the Galapagos. So let’s concentrate on the positive because we are all packed and ready to go!
To be honest, first we are going to South Florida to visit with our good buddy Mike and to meet his new girlfriend, Cathy. We will spend three nights with them and then Mike (who is an INCREDIBLE friend) will drive us to the airport at horrible-o’clock in the morning so we can catch our new flight to Quito via Panama City, Panama on Copa Air. (I promise to come back and detail the problems we have had with the cruise line about our air in a future post).
I am just doing this post so you can remember to come back here on a regular basis from July 3 through July 11. I will be doing my best to post a report everyday with photos so that those of you who have never been to the Galapagos can follow along with us.
I am also going to try something new—video. So that’s why you can see my face above this post. Not sure if it will work, but I am going to do my best. Kathleen gave me a GoPro for Christmas 2019 when we thought we would be doing this trip last summer and I will be taking it with me for lots of short video clips. I am especially hoping to capture some great underwater stuff while we are snorkeling.
Lastly, if you have friends who can’t travel right now that you might think would be interested, drop them our URL (www.redmondtravel.com) and tell them to sign up so they get notifications when I post. In the meantime, wish us luck!
The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page. —Saint Augustine
This happened today on our Cruise Critic Roll Call for our February Celebrity Reflection cruise to Mardi Gras in New Orleans. It was a question from one of our fellow cruisers about what happens if…
This was our fellow cruisers original question:
“I’m sure some of very well cruised folks here can help with a couple of questions. We fly in the day before the cruise from London and I can’t help but worry that we might have a delayed flight. If we missed the ship (heaven forbid) would Celebrity help us with a flight to New Orleans if we are not booked cruise air? I don’t mean financially, just practically. The other query is on lost luggage.
Last time we flew into Miami we arrived, bags didn’t. Fortunately we were not cruising and the bags were delivered a few days later to our hotel. So, if history repeats itself and we sail off into the sunset and our bags are still flying the Atlantic, will it be Celebrity or British Air (BA) who have to get the bags to the ship. Ok, so I’m being a drama queen but I do like a plan B in place.”
I was on this like jam on bread. This is my kind of thing. Helping people who travel. So I thought I would share this with everyone even though I know that some of my readers who are on the cruise with us (you know who you are) have already read it. Below is my response. If you cruise or fly and are worried about this kind of thing, pay heed.
My response
Since you didn’t book air with Celebrity (cruisers call Celebrity X—it’s on the side of their ships and dates back to their Greek heritage), you are going to be on your own getting to New Orleans. X won’t book your flight, or assist with transfers. But if you do contact them if you are late, they will assist you with where to go in New Orleans to board the ship and how to do it. As to your bags, if they don’t arrive in time, it is BA’s responsibility to get them to you in New Orleans, not Celebrity’s.
You already did the smart thing by coming in a day early. That said, I do understand about the luggage as BA probably has few flights to MIA so it won’t show up until the next day unlike if you were flying from NYC or Chicago where the airline might have a flight to Miami or FLL every few hours. The best thing you can do to avoid lost luggage is to get to the airport EARLY! Otherwise there is very little you can do other than go carry-on only which I have NEVER understood how anyone can do, especially on a cruise. (One extra pair of shoes for me takes up almost an entire carry-on.😂 ) One suggestion would be to pack three days of clothing in your carry-ons so if your luggage is delayed, you have some clothing. Also, if you are each bringing one checked bag, don’t forget to cross pack so that if one bag is delayed you both have something to wear. And of course, NEVER pack anything you HAVE-TO-HAVE (prescriptions, etc) in your checked bag.
We will keep our fingers crossed for you. Hope this helps.
The REST of the story
I should add that later they (and others) responded (we had quite the discussion) and it turns out the couple who asked the original question can’t affect their bags by getting to the airport earlier as they are flying into Heathrow (LHR) from a regional airport. It also came to light that they only have one hour and thirty-five minutes to change planes.
If you have ever been to Heathrow you know that is VERY problematic. I won’t change planes at LHR with less than three full hours. If you have never flown through LHR (we have a bunch of times) there are five terminals and domestic and intra-Europe flights usually come in at Terminals 1 through 4 while international flights leave out of Terminal 5. Transiting from one terminal to the other means going out of security, riding a bus and then going back through security. When we flew from Seattle to Edinburgh last May, it took us almost 90 minutes to go from our Terminal 5 arrival gate to our Terminal 3 departure gate for our flight from LHR to Edinburgh. And that was a very smooth transition at a pretty good time of day.
Of course all this comes back around to why you need a good travel agent. A good, well-traveled agent knows these kinds of things. Especially if you are a new traveler or someone who doesn’t travel that much. Plus, this applies to any travel, not just those of us who cruise.
I hate flying, airports and the whole rigmarole – queuing up, security and lost luggage.—Johnny Vegas
Two days ago I wrote all about Cruise Critic and why if you cruise, you should be on Cruise Critic and on the roll call for your particular cruise. Today is the follow up and it’s all about shore excursions. If you aren’t a cruiser, a shore excursion is what you do when you arrive in a port of call on your cruise. You have a number of choices. Of course you can stay on the ship. (We often do that when we go to Alaska because we have been there six times and have pretty much done all the shore excursions we want to do.) Or you can arrange a private tour or you can take a cruise line shore excursion. When we go to a new port we have never visited before, we ALWAYS do some kind of tour to see as much of the port and area around it as we possibly can in one (or if we are lucky) two days.
The other day someone on our current Ireland/Iceland cruise roll call posted about shore excursions. This is what they said:
We are new to sailing cruise line X and I see that everyone is booking excursions through other sources besides cruise line X. Are there issues with the excursions that cruise line X offers? The cruise line X excursions look so much more adventurous than most of these sightseeing trips, which is why I’m asking.
This was my answer to this person’s post:
We stopped doing cruise line tours after our fourth cruise for the following reasons:
First, when you take a ship-sponsored tour you only get to tour as fast as the slowest person on your 55 passenger bus. Many times we would be done with the attraction and be ready to get back on the bus when the last person had just gotten off.
Second, There is no room for any spontaneity on a ship’s tour. They must stick to their schedule. When we are on a private tour with just our group and we see an interesting place, we can just ask the guide to stop. If we go someplace that is on the schedule and it turns out to be boring, we can just ask to leave. When you are on that 55 passenger bus, you go where they want and when they want and there is no chance to change anything.
Third, one of the biggest complaints that experienced cruisers have about cruise line shore excursions is that they often include shopping stops that no one on the bus wants to make. They are stopping for the shopping because the store, factory or attraction they have added to your tour is paying them to do so. I can’t even imagine a private tour guide that we have hired stopping anyplace that we didn’t want to stop.
Lastly, the cruise line shore excursions are very often more expensive than the private ones we book. As a travel agent we have a number of shore tour options that are outside the ones from the ship. Many of these are tours with local guides that take you in small groups to see just what you want to see at much less cost than going on the ship’s tour.
So how do we tour? We do it privately. The pic at the top of this post is from an amazing private tour we had in Bangkok a few years ago that was planned completely by a close friend. Only eight of us in a van touring all over Thailand. More about private shore excursions later this week.
This entire post is just to let you know about Cruise Critic before I write about something that came up on our current Cruise Critic roll call. I realized that some of you may not know what a Cruise Critic roll call is.
If you are a reader who doesn’t cruise, then you may not know what Cruise Critic is so I need to explain how important it is that if you cruise, you find out about it. If you take a cruise and don’t go and find the Cruise Critic website then you are NUTS! It will change your entire cruise. It is an amazing website that houses just about every piece of info on cruising that you can imagine but beyond that it also has forums about every aspect of cruising and Roll Calls for every cruise that sails. Cruise Critic is where you can go to meet the people who you will be cruising with before you cruise with them.
Why do this? Well for us it will show you the main reason we cruise. Up until we joined the agency, we both worked in places that are not conducive to socializing. Our neighborhood where we live has a lot of turnover so other than our immediate next door neighbors, we don’t have a lot of close friends here either. It is because of these two things we don’t have a lot of friends at home that we socialize with. We do have family and our best buddy Bob (about a hundred miles away) but that’s it for us.
We cruise to meet people. To socialize. Cruise Critic helps us do that. It lets us meet a lot of great people (like just about every close friend we have) before we cruised with them and many of them have become life-long friends. We have friends from all over the world that we have met through Cruise Critic. It’s how we met other great friends who have come to see us and we have visited them. On our next European trip we are staying with our British friends…who we met on a Cruise Critic roll call for our Baltic cruise back in June of 2013. I guess it makes sense that we find our friends through Cruise Critic since we found each other online as well.
I can’t say enough about how valuable we have found Cruise Critic. I should mention that you can also meet people on your Cruise Critic roll call that you can share private shore excursions with and we highly recommend this. See my next post for more about this topic in greater detail.
The main part of the Cruise Critic website that we use are the conversation boards where people who love cruising trade info. There are conversation boards for just about every cruise topic, destination and cruise line. There is hardly anything that has to do with cruising that you can’t find out about. If you are a regular reader you know that I often do quick research to find out things for clients. Like which veranda isn’t really a veranda or which bathroom is widely hated by everyone who sails on a particular ship. If you have a question that you can’t find an answer for, just post it and someone will come to your rescue.
The other part of Cruise Critic that we use most of the time is the roll calls. For most every cruise that is going to sail, there is usually a “roll call.” That’s a conversation board about just that cruise. It is a place to plan excursions with others going on your cruise, trade cruising advice and just get to know the people you are going to be sailing with for a week or two.
Some roll calls are fairly dead. Hardly anyone posts. There is no activity whatsoever. This is especially true for Alaska cruises because these are often the first cruise many people take and they haven’t discovered Cruise Critic and roll calls yet. Also, some cruise lines are famous for having better roll calls than others. Because we often sail Celebrity, we are lucky enough to have some awesome roll calls. But when we have sailed other lines, not so much. Length of the cruise can make a difference as well. Shorter cruises have less active roll calls.
Others roll calls are huge and take over your life. In 2016 we did a British Isles cruise that had more than 5,000 posts by the time we sailed. We planned a bunch of activities including a sail-away get together for 200, a pre-cruise dinner for 50 the night before we sailed, buses to the Edinburgh Military Tattoo for 156 roll call members and lunch on the last sea day for more than 100. See what I mean by taking over your life. That particular roll call is one of the reasons I realized that I should pursue a “funtirement” job in travel.
So now you know all about Cruise Critic and the roll calls. So my next post will make a little more sense. It’s coming soon.
This happened today on our 
This entire post is just to let you know about Cruise Critic before I write about something that came up on our current Cruise Critic roll call. I realized that some of you may not know what a Cruise Critic roll call is.