Greek Islands Cruise Itinerary
Happy New Year Everyone,
Hope you all had a good time during the holidays with friends and family. This is the first email to update everyone on the upcoming cruise.
Out of the 24 from the last cruise, JuliuCruises and Annie Stone will not attend due to family commitment, and neither will Mija and Long. Instead, we will be joined by Ellen/Patrick Ho from Chicago, Jeanne/Dan Tang from Dallas, Suzana/Foo Kwan and Ginny/Anselm Leung from the Bay Area and last but not least Chris So (from L.A., I believe) and his daughters Amy and Marianne. Chris Chee Kong So was our classmate from Pui Ching, whom I have not seen since graduation. It will be interesting to catch up on the past fifty some years of our lives.
Flo had an accident before Christmas and broke her kneecap. So she may be slow to respond to your inquiries for a while. She did confirm that we are getting two free 'berths'. As it has been past practice we'll split the rebate equally among the participants. I have never figured out how the value of a free berth is calculated but it is definitely not the price of your fare. I believe there are four people who are not (as yet) getting the prepaid gratuities and beverage card because of the timing of the booking but Flo said that she will be working on it.
For information on the cruise, I suggest using the VacationsToGo.com web site. You have to sign up to access the web site but it is much easier to navigate than the HollandAmerica web site. The sailing number is #12562. Under the various tabs Itinerary, Ship, Photos, etc. you can quickly access pertinent information about the cruise and the ship. This ship has a capacity of 2650 guests, or 2/3 of the capacity of the last ship we were on, which was a bit too big for my taste. The ship was built in 2016 and is fairly new. Don't be alarmed by the low prices that VacationsToGo advertises. A couple classmates have done some exhaustive research comparing prices and came to the conclusion that we are paying a fair (maybe not rock-bottom) price. As you can probably guess, rock-bottom prices carry various caveats.
For the flights, I personally like to use www.google.com/flights. The advantage of this site over others is that it sends you alerts when the price changes and your can watch the trend of the price movements and decide when to act. We plan on flying to Rome two or three days prior to the cruise and spending some time in Rome. If you want to join me please let me know. We can hire a guide for a day (or maybe a day and a half) and spend the rest of the time exploring on our own.
I am attaching two Excel charts: one for the arrival/departure information and one to get a feel on the excursion preference. You can forward the information to me as it becomes available. At this point, what I am most interested in is how many people will be joining the Greece excursions. I am hoping to use only one operator for all the Greek Islands because it simplifies the coordination and probably gives us better bargaining power. The rest of the excursions can wait a bit. A word on the Naples excursion. A few of us have been to Pompeii and the Amalfi Coast on a cruise a few years back and may not want to do it a second time. There are other less visited attractions around Naples so one possibility is to split into two groups.
These are some random thoughts to get the conversation going. Let me know what you think and any questions that you may have for the group. Dan, if you have suggestions please jump right in.
Paul, aka Lefty
