Wednesday March 6, 2025 through Thursday March 14, 2025
The germination of this trip began in very late March 2024, in the midst of planning our Aug/Sep 2025 Transatlantic on Brilliance of the Seas. By then I was back in the “let’s go on a cruise” mindset and I was starting to look at what our pathway to Diamond C&A status might be. In March 2024 we had 33 C&A points, enough for Platinum. Our next milestones would be 50 for Emerald – which qualified us for a paltry 2 bottles of free water each – and, finally, 80 for Diamond, where the real benefits would kick in. In particular, I had my eye on the “4 free drinks per day” that Diamonds get!
I began to wonder whether there was a reasonably cost-effective way to cruise sometime earlier in 2025 to generate some additional C&A points before our TA. There was no way we were going to get to Diamond before our 2025 TA, but perhaps I could find a way to collect 47 more points before a potential second TA in 2027? In other words, what would be the pathway in 2025 and 2026 that would get us to at least 80 C&A points?
One obvious way was to look into a cruise where we could generate double points via The Suite Life. However, to do this I didn’t want to break the bank, so I wanted to find a less-expensive cruise where the suite pricing wasn’t outrageous. I managed to find a cruise out of LA (further reducing expenses since flights are cheap compared to heading to the East Coast) that had suite pricing in the range of balcony prices on other sailings so pursued that. I’m jealous of Floridia-based cruisers who can drive to any of 4 ports pretty much at the drop of a hat and avoid all the airfare us West Coast cruisers have to deal with for most routes. Of course, living in San Jose we still choose to jump on a plane to get to Long Beach rather than make the 7-8 hour drive – but this is all still significantly less expensive than flying to Florida! I hope that Royal will commit more ships to the West Coast sometime soon so we’d have more options. (In fact, they are doing just that for 2025-2026. Quantum is going to be joining Navigator and running a series of YAAWWWN three and four day cruises with the occasional 6 day schedule thrown in. We’ll see if taking advantage of this new ship somehow fits into our planning for 2026 or not.)
Anyway, that’s how we found ourselves on Navigator of the Seas in March 2025 heading to the so-called Mexican Riviera. Honestly, when I booked the cruise – which I had done before March 2024 was over – I paid absolutely zero attention to the ports, since I knew we really didn’t care about WHERE we were going. We just wanted to be on board a ship where we could entertain ourselves. Whether we went ashore or not was a secondary concern as far as we were concerned. In fact, we were going to have stops in Cabo San Lucas, Mazatlán, and Puerto Vallarta, along with three full sea days.
Just as I’d done for the TA, I booked this cruise via Costco. I managed to get a J3 Junior Suite – in fact, a 9th deck HUMP cabin – for a really good price. For this one we got $400 back from Costco, so we’ve managed to get $900 in store credit between the two cruises, which is a really nice deal! As this sailing still had a lot of unsold cabins we were able to get Early dining (unlike the TA, where the only remaining choice was MTD). Later, coincidentally, I found a cabin walkthough video for our exact stateroom which revealed it to be a slightly oversize J3 with both a couch and a lounge chair. Sweet! At the time I booked I somehow overlooked that this was a connecting cabin – so we’ll see what impact the potential noise from next door impacts us. The walkthrough video seemed to intentionally avoid talking about the connecting door.
Sometime later, I learned something less sweet. When I was working on my data-scraping program I wanted to find a decent source for data. Someone on CC pointed me to CruisePlum, which turned out to be a great find. One of the things the CruisePlum site offers is graphing of cabin pricing. Upon reviewing those graphs, it because obvious that RCCL changes their prices very predictably: they raise prices EVERY Friday and Saturday before returning them to a lower Sunday-Thursday pricing. Up, down, up down, up down – week after week (until they decide to raise the whole baseline price, and then start the weekly bump cycle over again). As it happens, not knowing this behavior I had booked our cruise on a Friday night – so ended up paying about $250 more than I would have by buying on Sunday-Thursday. Lesson learned.
Right after I’d booked this cruise I finally heard back from Kim Royer, who I’d emailed at Avoya a couple of weeks earlier hoping to get some TA quotes from her. For whatever reason she was slow to reply to my original email. However, she did reply to the TA request with a “good to hear from you” and a quote on a TA cabin which she’d placed a courtesy hold on for me. Her price was $100 MORE than Costco’s, and she was only offering $100 total OBC. I thanked her and told her I’d be in touch if/when we were considering 2026 cruises – which I will follow up on. However, this made me VERY happy with our Costco deals. The only worry is that, if problems arise, I don’t have high hopes about getting much help from Costco, whereas I’m certain Kim would fight on our behalf. (If I’d had a TA to work with I’m sure I could have rebooked our cabin at the “normal” weekly price instead of the Friday/Saturday artificially increased price and saved about $250 – but c’est la vie!
When I checked our list of bookings at RCCL’s website I noted that it was possible to book both E’s soft drink package as well as VOOM internet right away. I wasn’t expecting to find those available yet as we’re still almost a year out. I took advantage of what (I assume) will likely be the best pricing that will be offered by signing her up for her drink package as well as a single-person, 2 device internet plan. The pricing on the internet is strange – I could have gotten each of us a single device plan, but that was significantly more expensive than getting one of us a two-device plan. We’ll login as the same person on two devices (and if we login on a 3rd device it will kick off the oldest previously-logged-in device), but this is fine. Upon discovering that I could make these purchases in early April 2024 I also checked on our Aug/Sep 2025 TA and discovered I could lock in similar pricing for that cruise, too, so I did so. Right around this time a new site for tracking cruise add-on packages debuted and I added all of our scheduled cruises into it to relieve myself from having to track price changes.
Looked into whether to fly into LAX or Long Beach (LGB) and determined that LGB was a better choice. Not only closer to the cruise port, located in San Pedro, but also a MUCH less busy airport. Seems to only handle about 45 or so flights per day – including a few direct from SJC. The original thought was to fly in the morning of the cruise and grab a Lyft from the airport to the port, but the most likely flight wouldn’t have us arriving in LGB until late morning and a) I wanted to board earlier, if possible, and b) there’s always the potential for flight delays causing more stress than we’d like. So decided that the best plan would be to fly into LGB late Thursday afternoon (our cruise boards on Friday) and spend the night in a hotel in/around LGB.
So WHERE in/around LGB? Did the normal survey of places as well as consulting CruiseCritic. CC folks basically all focus on one of the two hotels that are within about a mile of the port – and which carry a ridiculously high room rate of up to $500/night. I settled on the much less expensive Homewood Suites Long Beach Airport. That’s a dual-purpose Hilton property, housing Hampton Inn on one side and Homewood Suites on the other. Homewood rooms looked slightly nicer, and Homewood is reputed to have one of the better breakfasts among hotels, so went that route. They also offer a “call for pickup” free shuttle from LGB, so we’ll only need to grab a ride on Friday morning for the roughly 25 minute drive to the port. There’s a BUNCH of places to eat within a 12 minute walk, including something a lot like Boulder’s Avanti (i.e. a pavilion of food places) within just a couple of blocks of the hotel. The preliminary thinking was to try Georgia’s, a soul food restaurant at the Long Beach LBX, a short 7 minute walk from the hotel. Directly across the street is is Handel’s Homemade Ice Cream for a possible dessert. And, topping it off, the walk back to the hotel would pass directly by Whole Foods, allowing us to potentially dip inside to grab a couple of bottles of wine to bring onboard with us.
If the hotel reservation hadn’t been non-refundable, I probably would have cancelled and moved us over to Best Western Plus Hotel at the Convention Center, both to get us around better restaurants as well as reduce our drive to the cruise terminal in the morning. I also think it would have been cheaper – and losing the free airport shuttle would have been totally OK. I’ll probably put us at Best Western when we return in February 2026 for our Quantum B2B cruises.
I also spent time in late March and early April 2024 extending the vacation spreadsheet template. I added automated lookup of airline seat info so the Transportation tab would now highlight which flight legs were on “comfy” airplanes. I also built a new “B2B Finder” spreadsheet that can take Royal’s slate of sailings and automatically highlight back-to-back and side-to-side candidates. It will even flag when the two sailings are “interesting”, meaning that they sail different routes. This tool will help when considering 2026 cruises – as another way to generate C&A points would be strategic booking of B2Bs.
So, back to C&A. Since this cruise is going to generate double points, we’ll get 14 points for this 7-day cruise. Combine that with the 15 points we’ll get from the T&A we’ll be at 62 points – just 18 shy of Diamond level. Therefore, the tentative goal for 2026 is to gather at least 18 points so that, by the time of a potential 2027 TA, we’ll be Diamond BEFORE the TA. There are a lot of potential ways to get 18 nights in a year, but ideally we’ll do it in 2 cruises, or a single B2B. We’ll see how things go!
Among things to look forward to on this sailing is that Navigator has a specialty restaurant we haven’t seen on other ships yet: a place called “Hooked Seafood”. Hoping we’re able to grab a lunch reservation there on one of our sea days. Pricing is too high for dinner! The ship also has a place called “El Loco Fresh” that appears to offer free B/L/D – so this might be another novelty for us to try. As the weeks progressed pre-cruise I noted that I could get us a 3-night specialty dining package for $122 each, or roughly $41 per dinner. That seemed like enough of a bargain that I decided to snap it up so we could sample some combo of Chops, Jamie’s, and/or Hooked.
The ship – like its same-class sister ship Mariner – has an escape room, too. Hopefully it is a different story than that of the Mariner, as I’m hoping we can book it at some point. Sadly, I found out later that Navigator, Independence, and Mariner have the same escape room. Someone on CC asked the question and there was a link to RCCL’s marketing info. Harmony and Symphony share a room, while Oasis, Spectrum, and Icon each have unique rooms, for a total of five different rooms across eight different ships. We’ll find out when we get there, but I think there’s a REALLY high probability that the escape room is actually gone. They have certainly replaced it on some (all?) of the Quantum-class ships. They seem to instead be substituting puzzle-based events where multiple teams compete to solve different kinds of logic puzzle. E and I had previously done that on Mariner.
I did find a couple of prior Cruise Compasses for this ship and route and looks like we will have no trouble getting our fill of trivia!
As part of the normal “let’s watch videos to learn about stuff” I found a series of videos shot in 2023 about Oasis class ships that covered all the complimentary breakfast, brunch, lunch, and dinner options in MDR, Windjammer, Promenade Café, and ALL other venues offering non-specialty dining. It was really just an extensive video catalog of all the foods available (often with details about which day you’d find a particular item) – but this was our first exposure to the breadth of options outside of the MDR (for dinner) as well as non-Windjammer options for breakfast, brunch, and lunch. We’ll have to wait and see how much of the variety we saw in the videos is actually available on the smaller Navigator and (even smaller) Brilliance.
More videos I obsessively watched were a few on the layout of the San Pedro cruise port. Always nice to see how you get in and around the cruise terminal, and eventually made a reasonably important discovery, which is that San Pedro is a pretty small terminal. Most notably, it has very little waiting room space for passengers who have checked in but not yet boarded. As such, it sounds like this terminal is a bit more strict on enforcing your embarkation time while the large Florida terminals really just pay lip service to embarkation times. At San Pedro, you can generally get into line to enter the terminal to perform check-in (at most) 30 minutes ahead of your scheduled boarding time. If you show up earlier you’ll likely be kept waiting outside – possibly in the hot sun or pouring rain - in a different line before being allowed to enter the line that actually goes inside the terminal building. On the other hand, once inside the building it sounds like security, check-in, and boarding are handled very efficiently (as has been the case with these processes on all of the cruises we’ve taken so far). On CC I’m seeing that folks are often onboard within 15-20 minutes of arrival – at least when using their scheduled check-in time.
I initially got excited about the possible benefits of Suite Life, which included things like boarding access within +/- 1 hour of your scheduled time, access to the Suite Lounge on Deck 14, which includes free food and drinks from 5P-8P nightly, and breakfast in Chops from 8A-930A daily! Alas, those benefits only apply to Grand Suite and up, so us peons in Junior Suites have to mix with the rest of the great unwashed. Sigh…
Of course, pre-planning isn’t complete if I don’t find the webcams for San Pedro, Cabo San Lucas, Mazatlan, and Puerto Vallarta. The latter two never actually seemed to be working but I never found better options so kept these around. In the weeks and months leading up to a cruise I enjoy the random sightings of ships in port while I’m updating myself on latest CC postings.
Another issue tackled during trip prep: how best to deal with Royal’s hard-as-rocks stateroom mattresses. We’ve tried to ignore this problem on our other cruises, but now that we’re five years older we’re that much less resilient when it comes to ignoring discomforts. So I want to be prepared this time. Research suggests that you can SOMETIMES get your stateroom attendant to put some additional comforter layer(s) under the bedsheet – but SOMETIMES they’ll run out of layers before you can get your request fulfilled. Don’t want to be bitten by this.
Many people – no doubt, mostly are those who drive to the port rather than fly – bring big foam mattress toppers with them. Many of them ALSO treat those as disposable items and leave them on the ship at the end of the cruise. I don’t really want to lug around 20 pounds of topper, however, nor potentially have to hack it up to make it fit (which some do), nor abandon it wastefully at the end. Instead, I found out that many people recommended getting two “Klymit Static V Luxe Sleeping Pad” from Amazon (https://tinyurl.com/mv3pvenm). They are reasonably light-weight – about 2.25 pounds each – and pack down to an 8” x 4.5” bag, so quite packable. The combined 60” width isn’t full mattress width, unfortunately – we’ll have about 6” per side without padding, while the length will also be 6” short, although this is unlikely to be a big issue. But this seems like a good choice for something we can easily pack and then reuse on other cruises. (It is actually possible that the JS mattresses on Navigator are OK – at least one CC poster who likes soft beds specifically called them out as being the best, most comfortable they’ve ever had on multiple Royal cruise. I suspect, however, that our mattresses on our Brilliance TA will likely be rock hard, so even if we don’t end up using this on Navigator we’ll still find use for them.)
When it came time to make final payment for the cruise (due in late November 2024) I went to Costco’s travel site and tried to make my final payment, but every attempt was rejected with a generic “there’s a problem….try later or call us”. Fortunately, I had started the process about a week before the payment was due so had a few days to “try again” before I finally called them on a Monday morning. Costco agent realized that this was a “known” problem with Royal and, unable to complete my transaction manually, had to call Royal while I waited online to work things out. On Royal’s side there’s apparently a refund of $216.93 due to me for a recent package rebooking (from 10 days ago, so SHOULD have been more than enough time for Royal to process the refund, although definitely not reflected in my CC statement) and that’s the cause of the problem. So while (correctly) Costco says I owe $X, Royal says I currently owe $X-$216.93 and the transaction is failing. All because Royal has failed to process my refund in a timely manner. (In truth, Royal posted the refund within 24 hours of my transaction, but it appears that it normally takes 10-14 days before the refund posts on my side.)
So there was 35 minutes lost to what should have been a touchless 2-minute transaction. Grrr. And the outcome was still unknown. Basically, Royal submitted the refund on 11/9/24 and it apparently takes 10-14 business days for the refund to credit back to me. (It is 11/18/24 as I write this.) So I’m supposed to plan to call Costco by no later than 11/23/24 (the final payment due date) either to:
a) Complete the payment with them because I have definitely seen a credit to my Wells Fargo credit card, or
b) Notify them I’m still waiting on the refund so they can extend my payment deadline.
I initially tried to pay off the cruise on a Monday (and went through the above with Costco on that day). I kept monitoring my WFB credit card and finally saw a large credit post on Thursday morning, so I immediately called Costco back and within a few minutes was able to get the final payment handled and received back the confirmation email from Costco showing we’d paid off the cruise, with two days to spare before the deadline. Whew! Coincidentally, that very same morning royalcaribbeanblog.com posted about this very same “nightmare issue” that travelers were facing. Thankfully we got our issue resolved without all the horrible outcomes described in the article, but talk about frustration!
Prompted by a calendar alert I’d set, at midnight 45 days before the cruise I got us checked in. Initially I’d planned to do this on the PC where I could do quick copy/paste operations, but I saw a message that I thought meant the site was down, so I instead had to use the app and manually key in passport and credit card numbers. Unexpectedly, I was able to start the login process about 5 minutes BEFORE midnight, so either I miscalculated the first day of check-in OR the process opened a few minutes early. Whatever the reason, although I was done with the first part of check-in by no later than 12:03A (or so – I forgot to look) the first available check-in time as 1130A-noon…so we’ll plan to arrive no later than 11A on boarding day with the assumption that we’ll be able to get into line. (Later, I decided that the website was indicating that the Cruise Planner was closed, but it is quite possible that there was a Check-In link that I missed. I noticed an “Edit Check-in” link on the website after I completed the app-based check-in that I probably missed the first time around.)
Now, back to pricing for a moment. Add-on package pricing changed throughout the months pre-cruise, but the obvious trend is that things are NEVER going to get cheaper. The best price is always earlier rather than later. Actually, the rule seems to be that price will debut at $X, then there will be a sale where $X will be discounted, followed by a return to $X but that’s a “fake” sale. So if you sign up early enough you can catch the first (and ONLY) true sales price, after which things just keep going up and up. Here’s an illustration, using the pricing on a 2-device internet package:
Intro price Mar 2024: $19.99/day ($217 for 2 devices): Effective price: 15.50/dev/day
First (fake) sale: $17.99/day ($217 for 2 devices): Effective price: 15.50/dev/day
REAL Sale Nov 2024: $16.99/day ($189 for 2 devices); Effective price: 13.42/dev/day
Post Nov 2024: $17.99 to $20.99/day
Royal is even sneakier with dining packages. It seems like earlier prices tend to INCLUDE pre-paid gratuities. Then stuff goes on “sale” at a lower price…but they conveniently fail to tell you that this new price does NOT include gratuities. The final price does tend to equal the original, but it is possible you’ll end up paying $1-3 MORE if you rebook at the “lower” price and then add gratuities.
Somewhere around a week prior to the cruise the ship-board activities and menus started getting posted to the app, so it was possible to get a preview of things we might want to do each day of the week.
