TRAVEL THERE: ON BOARD BEVERAGE PACKAGES
Hi there! I hope your holiday were wonderful. We were discussing wi-fi packages on the Celebrity Edge before the break and now we are moving on to beverages.
Whining About Wine Packages
My husband and I are not big drinkers. We enjoy wine and beer, particularly with dinner, and we think a Tex-Mex meal is incomplete without a margarita, but that’s about it. Here’s our problem. Paying for drinks individually on a cruise ship can get very pricey, but trying to drink enough to justify a beverage plan can turn the whole trip into a bacchanal.
Even though we are not big drinkers, a nice dinner without wine is pretty sad. Unfortunately, wine seems to be the biggest challenge on a cruise ship. They’ve got great deals if you drink cocktails, but bottles of wine are a different story. At home, we’ve learned which bargain wines suit us and the tab for each bottle hovers between $8-12. Out and about, we drink wine by the glass and each glass is about the same price as a bottle at home, but the quality ends up being a step above our usual bargains. Bottles of wine on a cruise are very, very much more than we’d buy at home or at a restaurant and you might get a glass for $15 or so, but the chances of getting something good for that price are iffy. Hence our love for river cruising!
I looked at the beverage options for Celeberity Cruises online and we discussed them for days. I finally had to ask for help. They had something called Wine by the Bottle, which let you have a package price for bottles, but they didn’t have a wine list there and the pricing was confusing. We got on the phone with a Celebrity rep and they cleared it up. The price of the package was based on how many bottle you wanted, but you’d have to wait until you were on the boat to choose the actual bottles. Still, we opted to go with that.
Theoretically, the bottles were supposed to follow you around to the various restaurants and bars. If you wanted a glass from a bottle you opened somewhere else on the boat, you just told them your name and the last place you drank from the bottle. Or you could just order a new bottle from the Wine by the Bottle wine list. It actually worked quite well. In fact, we assumed we’d just have to have one bottle going at a time, but once on board we discovered Bill could get his red and I could get my white and we’d make them last over a couple of days.
No Soda Package
When cruising I usually get a soda package. I may not be a big alcohol drinker, but I need my caffeine and I don’t drink coffee. On board, water, tea, coffee and several juices are always available to you. You have to find a buffet or snack bar, but those are usually spread all over the place. Sodas they treat like liquid gold. Each rather small glass costs more than a Big Gulp back home and you also get hit with a gratuity every time.
The soda package makes that more affordable. You pay one price per day for all the sodas you want to drink, but there’s one catch for me. I am a devoted Diet Dr Pepper drinker and that’s just not available on a cruise. While I will drink other sodas in a bind, they have to be diet and my least favorite is Diet Coke. Celebrity proudly serves Coke products. Coke Zero is OK, but no one could tell me whether that was available at all. What’s more the soda comes out of a fountain machine and so far I have not found anyone on a cruise ship that can actually get it mixed right.
Bottom line, when I get the soda package, I pay a hefty price to get unlimited soda refills, but the soda is never the flavor I prefer to drink. I come home with a cool thermal tumbler, but how many of those do you need. This time I decided to go caffeine-less. If I started having caffeine withdrawal, I reasoned, I could drink iced-tea. As it turned out I was fine.
So with everything having to do with the cruise and the vow ceremony squared away, it was time to start packing.
jane sadek 