Sunsets over the water, casino night, excellent entertainment and amazing excursions. These are just a few of the things people think about when they imagine their next cruise.
With the cruise ship industry growing steadily you can now access, Alaska, South America, the Caribbean, Europe, New Zealand and even Antarctica by cruise ship. Anywhere you want to go, there is a cruise ship that will take you there. So as cruise lines add more and more destinations they’re also making some changes to the way things are done onboard.
Recently, Norwegian Cruise Lines, Princess, Holland and Royal Caribbean enacted “flexible dining” as a part of the cruise ship experience. This means that instead of rushing to the dining table and missing the sunset at sea, if you picked ‘Your Time Dining’ while booking, you can eat dinner anytime between 5:45 and 9:30. This new flexible schedule is a big departure from classic cruise ship etiquette which had pre-arranged dinner dining times and assigned seating. Now, if you’re enjoying the Northern Lights on a warm summer night on a cruise into Alaska you don’t have to skip out just to get to dinner on time.
Carnival will allow cruise ship members to pick ‘Your Time Dining’ along with early dinner or late dinner with assigned seats at the time of booking, a new feature that will be available for customers fleetwide by 2010. This has parents excited at the prospect of traveling with kids and the convenience of doing dinner when they so choose. It will certainly be a nice reprieve on cruises to Cabo San Lucas and other tropical locations, where a big part of vacationing is eating at gorgeous beachside diners and restaurants when you disembark. It is simply another way in which travel is becoming more user-friendly. Who wants to be worry about the time while they’re on a South African cruise anyway?
