2026 B2B Day 3: Sea Day #1 (Cruise #1: 5N Mexican Riviera)

    Saturday, February 28, 2026 

Cruise Compass

We had a few new experiences today, taking in some events that we’d never witnessed on other cruises before. This is mostly because we spent time reading during some event that was BEFORE a trivia event we were actually targeting. 

Among the new stuff:

• We watched a morning dance workout class in the Music Hall while we caught up on our daily tablet games. There were probably 25-30 people participating as they were led through dance aerobics by one of the activity staffers.
• We (unintentionally) crashed a Top Tier event in two70 in mid-morning when we went to play The Crew. Actually, it is possible that we were invited to the event, which was celebrating mostly those attaining Pinnacle status, but we arrived at least 15 minutes into the event and no one at the entry batted an eyelash. We did NOT attempt to claim any of the free champagne that was being poured.
• The Top Tier event was followed by their somewhat mawkish Salute to Veterans (which included digging deep to also celebrate police and fire folks). The ship’s orchestra was there to play a medley of service tunes, Taps, and finally the national anthem. Finally, at the end of those events there was some sound testing in two70 that led to some REALLLY LOUD noises as we continued playing The Crew.

As far as trivia for the day, here’s how things went:

• Visual Trivia, Romance Movies: 8/20, pathetic
• Tri-bond Trivia: 15/18, 17 wins
• James Bond Trivia: 5/20, 12 wins, another very poor showing by us
• Sports Trivia: 6/20, 16 wins. The three women next to me were making healthy use of their drinks package but did know sports. At one point, in response to a baseball question, one of them said to her friend “all I know about those guys is that I dated one of them” and I realized that they fit that “type”, i.e. the Bull Durham team follower type.  
• Afternoon Trivia: 6/20, with 16 winning. The winner was referenced by the game host as “Mr. Blue Shirt” – we’d later hear him called “Wally”, as he also B2B’ed our cruises. Wally was clearly a serial solo cruiser who was VERY impressed with himself. He always played as a team of 1 and always loudly called out the answers he’d memorized. (Those that he wasn’t certain about didn’t earn the same level of volume.) Winning was clearly VERY important to Wally – and we’d meet another guy later in the cruise (Dan) who had a very similar MO.

On the food and drink front:

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• I tried one of Schooner’s special drinks: Toasted Marshmallow Old Fashioned; meh, while Eileen had a Pina Colada (also meh).
• For lunch (the only one I bothered taking notes for) I had the BBQ pork chops (good) with mashed potatoes and gravy (the expected meh) while E made herself a sandwich by picking apart their roasted chicken. We tried both the “mainstream” red velvet cake (yellow, too much whipped crème, not enough cake) and Coconut Custard Tart (awful – suffering from the same gelatinous issue that so many of the mass-produced desserts have).
• The poor MDR waitstaff: at dinner the waiters and assistant waiters are obligated to dance like monkeys and perform the Macarena around dessert time. Hate it! While we didn’t witness this any other night, on our final night onboard we heard them calling all waitstaff to prepare for their entertainment as we were leaving the MDR.)

After dinner we went over to the Music Hall and read while listening to the Family Majority Rules game. This is our second time at this game, after our time on Brilliance. It seems likely that the “winners” come out of teams with serial cruisers on them, as the questions (which are clearly standardized since it was the same ones we already heard) generated mostly the SAME majority answers as last time. We guessed that the answers that were mentioned by only 1-2 teams were newbie teams who were making honest responses, while the majority responses were mostly tams going “yeah, this was the majority answer the last 3 of 5 cruises…”

We attended the first of their two production shows this night. Sequins and Feathers involved a large cast of 6 singers, 12 dancers (6 men, 6 women) and 4 showgirls. Honestly, not certain I could tell the difference between female dancers and the showgirls. The last couple of cruises the male dancers didn’t seem as strong as the women, but we thought all the dancing was good this time. The singing was fine, with one of the men being particularly strong. Like all shows, lots of costume changes and what we THOUGHT were some tough quick changes…until we later saw Starwater, which has some horrifically tough changes. We were both happy to plan on re-watching this show on the 2nd leg of our B2B.

Now, let me insert some general comments on other things I was tracking on a daily basis:

• Internet speed: With only one exception, we remained connected to Starlink via a Los Angeles-based ISP. Down/up speed tests showed 8Mbps down/3Mbps up speeds, in general.
• Wireless quality: Wireless generally got worse the deeper into the cabin I got. At the bed it was fine, at the couch next to the balcony it was sometimes spotty. It seemed like we both got auto-disconnected overnight every day. We’d have to reconnect every morning.
• Weather: I used the Windy app for forecasting, which wasn’t necessarily the best choice. Doing it on my tablet rather than phone was tough because I didn’t have location services on the tablet, so had to click on the map and compare the long/lat with that shown on the TV to ensure I was in the proper location.

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2026 B2B Day 2: Boarding Quantum of the Seas and Sailing Away (Cruise #1: 5N Mexican Riviera)

Friday, February 27, 2026

Cruise Compass

The day started earlier than we would have hoped as E was awake at 430A with a massive coughing attack, the result of a cold she caught just after we got back from our Bodega trip the prior week. Perfect timing! Although mine might be better – I might be getting the cold on boarding day. We'll see.

Breakfast at Hampton was better than last time, but that's damning with faint praise, at best. Anyway, with that ordeal over we killed an hour in our room until checking out and calling a Lyft. Our driver arrived in about 60 seconds and we were on our way to the port. The driver was …umm…aggressive in his driving and I think he managed to shave about 3 minutes off our projected 34 minute trip. We arrived at the port, where both Quantum and Navigator were docked at 1025A and were checked in by 1030A. Unfortunately, they weren't boarding the ship yet and we had to sit and wait in the terminal until finally walking onboard around 1055A.

Waiting at the LGB cruise terminal to board

So, ironically, if we’d arrived at our “official” boarding time we likely wouldn’t have had to wait at all.

We immediately made a beeline for our muster station to take care of things and then stopped quickly at Boleros to make a reservation for the Starwater production show that takes place at two70.  I had been trying to get online with our Voom account first, but kept failing because – it turned out – I had booked it under E's name rather than mine but kept trying to login as dstein.  D'oh!  Took me a visit to the Voom help team around 215P to resolve this.

We walked around the two main social decks (4 and 5), checking out the various bars and restaurants, until heading up to WJ for lunch at 1130A.  After that we cruised the pool deck (it was a hot 92 degrees outside so we had no desire to stay outside) and then chilled at two70 until the staterooms opened at 1P.  I found our bags down the hall so we were unpacked and relaxing by 130P in our room.  I messed around a bit trying to get HDMI source switching working on our TV so I could use Samsung DEX, but when I disconnected the network cable (necessary to allow the remote's source button to work, according to posters on CruiseCritic – which it did) I confused the TV.  It took a bit of doing to restore normal service, at which point I decided to abandon my attempts and the rest of vacation was spent recording stuff on the tablet via Blutooth keyboard.  Oh well!  (Early into the 2^nd leg I noticed that the “Live TV” menu node had an “HDMI 1” selection along with all the other channels, so I probably could have leveraged this – but I didn’t want to mess around with it by that time.) 

Around 2P room service knocked on the door and delivered a plate of chocolate-covered strawberries, a gift courtesy of our travel agent (Kim Royer).  That was a nice surprise – although another $50 in OBC would have been more welcome! :-)

Our shared response to what we've seen of the ship so far is “Meh".  There's no “wow factor".  It is not as sterile as Freedom was, but there's no question that we're in love with the Centrum of Radiance class ships, which is lacking here.  We also note that several of the specialty restaurants are “open air" and include some tables directly neighboring the public walking paths, next to all the passing passengers.  We do like the look of two70, and we think it likely that this is where we'll go when we want to play The Crew (which we brought again).  Schooner Bar, in particular, seems particularly soulless compared to other ships. 

Another thing that's immediately obvious is that the “completed" onboard schedule was anything BUT complete.  In the last 24 hours so much has changed that much of my meticulous pre-planning was largely for naught.  Some changes are simply that they've changed performers – but I think others might be a bit more fundamental like moving time slots.

I don't recall when we first met our stateroom attendant (John) on Brilliance, but we finally met Joseph as we were leaving that stateroom at 330P to go get our sail away drinks.  We grabbed a Hand-Crafted Marg (D) and Cozumel (E) from Bolero's, which is just below us on deck 4.  We're a hump cabin one door removed from the elevator lobby, so access to other decks is SUPER easy!  While we both liked the concept of also adding a snack to our drinks, the reality was that we didn't actually want food at this time, so we returned to our balcony with drinks (only) in hand.  One very nice thing: unlike Brilliance, the orange juice in use is back to the quality we expect.  Drinks that include OJ are back in play, baby!

The J3 Junior Suite on Quantum is different.  The most obvious thing is that there are two bathrooms, one on either side of the front door.  One holds toilet + sink, while the other has glassed-in shower, separate tub, and another sink.  There's a large closet with a ton of hangers and a 6-drawer dresser under the TV.  Finally, there's a storage closet (with one large shelf – which I think is probably supposed to be two shelves) with room safe on my side of the bed.  There's not a lot of “small drawer" storage, however, nor is there any “high" storage, so we had to find alternate places for stuff we're used to placing in the “missing" spaces.  Décor is modern, and we have a full glass wall for the balcony – both a full sliding door as well as flanking rounded full-height windows.  Lots of floor space.  The two seat couch is rock hard, however.  We'll survive.

Our J3 Junior Suite as seen from the door (and before we started messing it up)

As seen from standing in front of the balcony door.  The reflective panel on my side of the bed turns on when you turn on the shower room light.  Seems kinda dumb.

The shower room.  There's a full-size showere with rainfall shower head plus handheld shower on the right.

The toilet room across from the shower room. Strange use of space and felt like "form over function" to us.

We also have a doorbell. Which some kid has already used to play Doorbell Ditch. Oh, joy! We assume this is spring break for a lot of families because we've seen a lot of kids onboard already.

At 330P the CD (Tami) came on announcing (we think) that we were finally at All Aboard – and maybe saying that everyone had completed muster drill?  Anyway, she must have called for everyone to cheer because we could hear some shouts through our cabin door.  Being a low-priority announcement it didn't play in the cabin.  That's been reserved for earlier announcements to check into muster stations plus the captain's announcement that they were just about to sound the VERY loud emergency signal, as per regulations.

As is our usual, we spent the sail away on our balcony, enjoying our drinks.  Around 445P we went back down to Boleros where I got another drink (a Hemingway Daiquiri, which was not worth repeating) and we settled in to listen to our first live music, this courtesy of the Diamond Duo, a couple playing violin and guitar.  They were OK, but not “appointment listening”, so we didn’t seek them out later.

The Diamond Duo in action.  She often sounded like she was out of tune.  Made us appreciate the Violin/Piano twins from Brilliance.  Also, as usual, after a few first day photos this was basically the last significant photo I took until we were onshore.

I realized with a bit of horror that I had NOT pre-booked our MTD timeslot for our desired 645P timeslot. Not sure how I let that one get away from me! So at 630P we headed down to the MDR to stand in the “MTD w/o Reservations” line which, surprisingly, was already moving at a nice pace. (We’d later determine that Quantum officially has a 630P seating, so they’d begun processing the line 10-15 minutes prior to our arrival.) In fact, we ended up getting seated right about 645P anyway. Unlike Navigator, MTD seemed really well organized on Quantum. I didn't see folks confused as to where to go, nor did I see anyone trying to jump the line because of some inflated sense of self-importance.

We ended up getting seated in the American Icon Grille portion of the MDR (as opposed to Silk, also on Deck 4).  As we sat down, we were greeted by our table neighbors, Travis (construction project manager from Los Angeles) and Adria (travel agent from San Diego) who were, as far as we could tell, romantically linked despite the geographical separation.  Travis, in particular, was very outgoing, and never met a food he wouldn't eat.  His typical dinner was three (and once, four) appetizers followed by an entrée and then 1-2 desserts!  Plus usually at least one cocktail, one wine, iced tea, and water.  We enjoyed interactions with them.  Our table was served by Veronica (South Africa) and Kadek (Bali).  She was nowhere near as familiar with us as Keyshellie had been on Brilliance (which is totally OK with us – we really do not want to be best friends with our servers).  Upon exiting the first dinner I set us up to retain the same timeslot and section.  It turns out that Veronica might NOT be in the same section next cruise, so we might have a new team in a few days.  We'll see.  This was our first indication that servers move around each cruise.

Post-dinner we went and sat in the Music Hall overlooking the stage while the folks below played “Rock the Room”.  The room is divided into two teams and the host starts giving factoids about the song to be named before playing it.  Someone from each team rushes to a team chair in the center of the room, with the first arrival given the first opportunity to name the song.  It was a pretty dominant performance by one side over the other.  One of the few people on the losing side who seemed like they knew what was going on was using a walker, so even when he knew an answer he basically couldn’t get there in time.  (It was also the most feminine looking man – we both thought he was a middle-aged woman.)  The best contestant on the losing side was the younger dad who absolutely FLEW into the chair ahead of the other side when he realized – after 1 note – that it was “Let it Go” or, as he put it “from my daughter’s favorite movie”.

We ended the night at the Theater, where Cruise Director Tami (Tami Salto) from Brazil did the normal “who here is from Canada, etc?” survey and the “You're not here to sleep, you're here to PARTY!” speech before introducing the comic, JR McCollum, who was actually pretty good.  A guy a couple of rows behind us certainly thought so, because he was laughing at EVERYTHING like he'd never heard a joke in his life before.

 

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2026 B2B Day 1: San Jose to Long Beach

Thursday, February 26, 2026

NOTE: Each day of our trip will include the expected plan (timeline) for the day next to the actual timeline followed.  I had what I THOUGHT was the final schedule for the first leg of the cruise a couple of days before we flew to LGB, but it turns out that it kept changing up until we boarded.  Nevertheless, I did have time to pre-plan a timeline based on the information I had, and as such the Plan vs Actual for leg 1 is pretty complete.  Since the schedule for the second leg didn’t get finalized until we were onboard during leg 1 I didn’t have the same opportunity to pre-plan the second leg.  As a result, there’s less chance to compare a plan vs actual on the second leg.   I also noted too late that the dates heading each column are wrong.  “Wed 2/26/25” should be “Thu 2/26/26”, and so on for each successive date.

I had planned to book us into the Best Western Plus Hotel at the Convention Center as this would provide us with nicer restaurant choices than our prior choice of the Homewood Suites at Long Beach Airport.  Unfortunately, when I finally got around to making a booking in late December 2025 the BW was, rather surprisingly, fully booked.  I kept trying over about 10 days to see if I could get in but finally had to give up and find a different place.  None of the other downtown places (with space) appealed.  Several were too expensive ($300+ for a night) or too sketchy.  So ultimately, I fell back to the Hilton properties again.  This time, I decided to try to lower cost (but higher rated) Hampton Inn at Long Beach Airport.  This is the building-mate to Homewood Suites, so the location still allows us to tap into the big shopping center in the area near the airport.  Last time, I’d picked the Homewood because they, in theory, had a better breakfast than Hampton – but we failed to realize that the Homewood breakfast was behind a pass-carded door and ended up eating on the Hampton side anyway.  It was poor – but we saved about $75 or so by taking the Hampton.

The night before we left for LGB I got a message from Hilton inviting us to perform check-in and get an eKey to the room via my phone.  It took a bit of doing as I discovered that the Hilton app needed to be excluded from passing through the NordVPN tunnel in order to connect to my account, but once I white-listed the app in the NordVPN app things worked just fine. 

We also packed the night before our flight so we didn’t have to scramble in the morning.  We each took a full-sized suitcase and had no issues packing everything we wanted.  We both use some of the lessons learned from our TA on Brilliance six months previously, tweaking our clothing lists.  That meant that all we had to do before leaving the house around 1020A was to put our suitcases into the car and put our tablets into the backpack, which also held the Folder  ‘o Fun and our cable bag.  We headed to Spring Park by SJC and were in the terminal by around 11A (expecting to board starting around 1225P).  Waze was INCREDIBLY insistent that we take various strange routes to the airport.  Once we got onto 87 and it wanted us to exit at Curtner – which we did – we realized that there was an accident just ahead of us that had 87 at a standstill.  So we ended up taking a bunch of back streets into downtown before getting back onto 87 at Julian.  We arrived at Spring Park about 10 minutes later than expected, but that still gave us time to go buy deli sandwiches to serve as our pre-boarding lunch.

Our flight was 100% full, but since the only things we carried on were E’s purse and the travel backpack we had no worries about boarding.  The flight is a very quick 56 minutes from takeoff to landing, so in almost no time we were in Long Beach and picking up our luggage.  Once outside, in the supposed pickup area for the hotel shuttle, I tried calling the hotel for pickup.  Unfortunately, I got into Hold Hell and after trying twice (and wasting 15 minutes) we finally just requested a Lyft, which arrived within just a couple of minutes and we were finally at the hotel by about 245P.

The Hampton room was – perhaps – a bit smaller than the Homewood Suite room, but we find it just fine for our needs and if we ever need to book one of these places again we’ll just go with the cheapest option.  The more centrally located Best Western is still a place we should try, however. 

Our room at Hampton Inn Long Beach Airport

For dinner we once again made the very short walk over to The Hangar LBX, where I tried a sampling of onigiri from Tenori while E tried out street tacos from La Taqueria Brand.  We were both really happy with our choices and would gladly eat at each of them again.  Once back at the hotel we grabbed a couple of snack bags of cookies from their little store and headed back to our room for the night.

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2026 Mexican Riviera B2B on Quantum of the Seas: Planning

Geez. 

When I get “the bug” I really get “the bug”. 

In this case, it is the “cruising bug”.  Back in early 2024 I suddenly decided I was ready to cruise again, so I proposed to Eileen that we finally put our long-discussed Transatlantic cruise back on our schedule.  In 2019 we’d planned to take that cruise in 2023, after Andrew went off to college.  However, when Covid hit in 2020 that put a kibosh on our desires to begin cruise planning in 2021, which would have been the time to start planning/booking for 2023.  So the TA got delayed until “the future”.

The future finally arrived early in 2024, when we decided that we were comfortable once again with considering booking a cruise.  Eileen was agreeable to getting back onboard so I found myself, in February 2024, booking a September 15N 2025 TA on Brilliance OTS, sailing out of Southampton and taking a northern route via Scotland, Iceland, Greenland, Nova Scotia, and Boston.  We were “late” to book, by my definition!

Having made that plunge, the “cruising bug” was quickly incubated and thriving.  I then started thinking about what a path to achieving Diamond status with Royal might look like…and that saw me scheduling ANOTHER cruise, this one a 7N Mexican Riveria on Navigator of the Seas (out of Los Angeles, which meant no cross-country flights), quickly thereafter.  I booked it about two weeks later, for a March 2025 cruise.  Yes, I put together a travel plan with less than a full year of planning.  (It was EASY to do so, since I’m getting REALLY efficient with my planning process these days.  It was HARD to accept being so “late” to reserve a stateroom.)

Of course, once I started thinking about getting to Diamond status I couldn’t stop there.  In March 2024 I was already thinking ahead to 2026 and thinking about what THOSE cruises might look like.  I proposed a strawman to Eileen of taking a random back-to-back (B2B) cruise on some random Oasis-class ship sometime around March 2026 and then following THAT up with (perhaps) a Panama canal cruise later – which probably meant August or September 2026.  If we did this, we’d achieve Diamond status by the end of 2026 and be positioned to take another TA (or perhaps a TP) in 2027.

Well, you can’t just stop at “thinking about it.”  So that’s how I found myself, in early April 2024, planning and ultimately booking a third and fourth cruise, this time a B2B on Harmony of the Seas out of Galveston, doing the same itinerary two weeks in a row in March 2026.  So, for those following along, we went from “we’re not ready to cruise yet” to “we have FOUR cruises booked in the next 2 years” in about a 6 week window.  Phew!

Why Oasis-class again?  There’s such tremendous variety onboard these ships that I definitely wanted to sail one of these vessels again.  Combined with our intent to do this as a B2B it seemed like a good idea to give ourselves a LOT of onboard options so we didn’t feel like the ship was getting stale during the second leg. 

Why Harmony?  That was actually just a side-effect of deciding to cruise out of Galveston.  I was reminded during my early research that getting from SJC to the various Florida cruise ports (whether Tampa, Miami, Orlando, or Port Canaveral) is a slog.  The biggest problem is that the airlines fly horrible planes with narrow, cramped seats.  Once you get to Florida there’s a ton of infrastructure to get you to a cruise port pretty painlessly, but the flights are just torture.

I therefore started to research other ports hosting Oasis-class ships, and that led me to Galveston.  I realized that getting to/from Houston was not only really simple from SJC, but we could also take Southwest (much cheaper than other airlines) and also fly on their nicer planes that had 18” wide seats – something that, in the rare cases it was available on Florida-bound flights, would have required us to pay for Premium Economy.  Once I realized that Southwest flew into Houston Hobby rather than Houston Bush and that Hobby was much closer to the port at Galveston I was even happier.  So the idea of “fly cheaper, fly faster, and fly more comfortably” was EXTREMELY attractive.

I did eventually come to understand the tradeoffs to Galveston, however.  The airports are both much farther away from the ports, and they simply don’t have the transportation infrastructure found at Florida ports that makes getting from airport to cruise port so easy.  Once you arrive at the airport you must SOMEHOW get to Galveston – and while there are options, none come cheaply.  Basically, I determined that the best approach would be to arrive as early in the afternoon as possible on the day pre-cruise and then take Lyft to Galveston (about 45-50 minutes away), stay overnight somewhere, then Lyft over to the terminal the next morning.  Upon return, the best approach seemed to be to have pre-scheduled shuttle service back to Hobby for a late (2P or later) flight.  Lyft TO a Galveston hotel seemed reasonable (and the most cost-effective, as the commercial shuttle wanted an extra $50 to deliver you somewhere besides the cruise terminal), but Lyft FROM the port seemed fraught with complications – due to surge pricing, it can be VERY expensive, VERY hard to find, and VERY unreliable.  Folks who had pre-booked a Lyft return reported that they’d been left hanging once their driver realized he could pick up a last-minute fare at 2-3x what they’d prebooked for.  That’s why I focused on commercial shuttle service for return service.

The other thing I noted was that, unlike most other ports where I’d have no concerns over scheduling a return flight as early as 11A, Galveston seemed to be a riskier port when it came to early flights.  Yes, if you self-debark at 7A or even 8A and have a shuttle scheduled you should have no trouble making an 11A flight out.  Unfortunately, the Galveston area is well-known for heavy fog and ships are often prevented from returning to port at their scheduled time due to weather so, while under “perfect” conditions an 11A fight should be no big deal, all it would take would be one fog bank to mess things up.  So the return flight will be unnaturally late in the day for us, meaning more time spent sitting at a tiny airport doing nothing.  Oh well.

Related to that, I had hoped I could find a Royal-sponsored shore excursion that would allow us to debark at the end of the cruise and get taken to Johnson Space Center to tour and then get dropped off at Hobby Airport, giving us an interesting “time filler” activity while waiting for an afternoon departure.  In fact, Royal DOES have just such a thing…but it only goes to IAH Bush Intercontinental and therefore doesn’t work for Hobby-ists.  Sigh.  I DID find a 3^rd party tour that would do exactly what we wanted – but I did NOT think it was worth $650(!!) for the two of us.

Another unexpected tidbit from pre-cruise research on CC: apparently, if you want to self-debark at Galveston you MUST have a free hand if you want to use the escalator.  Otherwise, you’ll be forced to queue up a LONG time for the elevators at the terminal.  I doubt this will impact us since we’ll likely each have a full-size suitcase plus one backpack, so should be able to meet the “one free hand” rule.  If we can’t meet it, we’ll probably have to use traditional disembark protocol and have them take our luggage off the ship so we can pick it up inside the terminal.  We’ll see.

Looking at where we might stay pre-cruise, I did the normal “let’s look at Google” process.  On CruiseCritic, everyone LOVES Harbor House and/or The Tremont House which are, of course, the two port hotels that are within walking distance of the “original” cruise terminals.  In 2023, however, Royal opened up a brand-spanking-new terminal about ½ a mile away from the original terminals, so paying the premium prices for Harbor or Tremont doesn’t buy us as much convenience as it would if we were on a different cruise line.  I therefore cast my eyes to other places, and eventually settled on Manor House B&B, in an area I’d characterize as “downtown-adjacent”.  It was only about a 10-minute walk from the same places we might eat if staying in the heart of “downtown” and, if push came to shove, only a 15-minute walk to the cruise terminal (although I expected us to Lyft over in the morning).  The B&B was MUCH more quaint and opulent than either of the popular hotels, had a nice breakfast spread in the morning, and cost about 25% less than the hotels, to boot!

I did the same exercise looking for possible dinner options that would be within walking distance of where we’d be staying and assembled a list of 15 or so likely choices.  One of the menus that I looked at REALLY impressed me, and I was gratified to see that, when I looked at TripAdvisor, that particular place was rated 1 out of 158 restaurants in Galveston!  And it was quite reasonably priced, which was another plus.  So I earmarked “Little Daddy’s Gumbo Bar” quickly as my number one choice for dinner.

Finally, I once again reached out to Kim Royer (the travel agent who handled our Alaska cruise, among others) to have her do some work on looking for a 2D cabin (Oceanview Balcony, Midship, sleeps 2) on B2B Harmony where we could keep the same cabin both sailings.  I gave passing thought to asking for a 2B cabin (Oceanview Large Balcony, Midship, sleeps 2) but decided to be a bit frugal given that we were B2B two cruises here.  The whole point of sailing on Harmony is that the ship itself has so much variety, so I don’t feel like we need the premium balcony in addition to everything else.  A standard-sized balcony should be fine, even taking into account our prolonged stay.    I also queried her about the scope of her offering, to see if she was able to possibly help with transportation and lodging – at least for Galveston.

Kim came through with B2B bookings in our cabin of choice (a 2D balcony midship cabin) at a price that was ABOUT the same price as going through Costco.  She achieved her discounts via a combo of group rates, C&A discounts, and $50/cabin OBC.  Costco got there mostly by simply offering store credit. 

So, caught up?  Well, don’t get too comfy, because….<record scratch>….it all changed!

In late October 2024 I started thinking once again about that path to Diamond and noticed that Royal was putting a new ship into Los Angeles starting in 2025.  Quantum OTS was going to start sailing out of the port alongside Navigator.  And I also noticed another thing: we could potentially do an 11 day B2B (a 5N and 6N combo of sailings) on Quantum in a Junior Suite….for about the same price as the 14 day B2B on Harmony in a balcony…and generate 22 Crown and Anchor points instead of 14…which would get us to Diamond status at the end of the cruise!   So while our average cost per day would go up, we’d still be saving money because we wouldn’t need ANOTHER cruise to get to Diamond status. This sounded like a GREAT IDEA, so I ran with it.  There were also several attractions to the convenience and ultimately reduced time and cost of sailing out of LA vs Galveston.  (In fact, the cost for the B2B Quantum cruises turned out to be roughly $2K less than the projected costs for Harmony, so a huge win all around!)

My initial plan had been to update my B2BFinder spreadsheet with new sailing data to help my analysis.  Sadly, it turns out that my Python web scraper wouldn’t work anymore because CruisePlum had started using CloudFlare Captcha to prevent (easy) scraping.  However, about 60 minutes into my research into workarounds I realized that CruisePlum had added some fancy new search features which included their own spin on a B2B/S2S finder, so there turned out to be no reason for me to try to make by stuff work any longer.  My stuff was better, because I could do a lot more analysis at one time than using CP’s stuff, but it’s not a huge problem.

Anyway, I started jotting down different pairings of Feb/Mar 2026 options and doing tests bookings on Costco’s site so I could find available staterooms as well as price out options.  Interestingly, of the 6 different B2B options available in that time frame, the pricing varied roughly $600 between the lowest and highest prices, despite being the same itineraries. 

I also had time to check out a handful of video walkthroughs of various J4 midship cabins on Quantum-class ships and determine bed orientation.  I wanted to optimize to put me closer to the bathroom, which also meant that E’s side would be easier to navigate around as it wouldn’t be pressed up against the wall.  For possible future reference, the preferred J4’s on decks 7,9, and 10 are:

o   7236,7240,7638,7642

o   9238,9636

o   10236,10638

Sadly, the location of the US-style bedside outlet is always on E’s side, while the cabin telephone is always on my side.  This means that the best solution for charging my tablet at night means running a long USB cable behind the pillows back to E’s nightstand.  There are several outlets available along the desk wall, but only the single outlet on the bed wall.  Based on all those findings, I fired off an email to Kim Royer with options and waited to see what she could do. 

Among the innovations of Quantum-class, these are things we might want to experience:

• ·       North Star and iFly
• ·         two70 – including the café, the bar, and the performance space with its high-tech show; and the Music Hall.  Cafe270 is very much like Park Café – home of sandwiches, pitas, wraps, Kummelwick, custom salads and custom wraps.
• ·         Bionic Bar
• ·         Wonderland (specialty), Solarium Bistro, and Dog House dining
• ·         Bumper cars and (perhaps) laser tag
• ·         Unique production shows (probably kinda “blah”, but we’ll see) – and, perhaps, another backstage tour
• ·         Escape room (which is not a true escape room – it is hosted in Fuel Disco and you form teams and complete puzzles.  Probably like the thing we did on our April 2019 Mariner cruise)
• ·         Ship-specific sculpture on track deck

Anyway, Kim came back with B2B reservations keeping us in cabin 7240 on both legs and we locked those down.  In the process of moving, our refundable Harmony reservations became non-refundable Quantum bookings instead. 

At this point I mostly ignored our new booking because I was busy working on both our Navigator (March 2025) and Brilliance (Aug/Sep 2025) cruise plans.  I did notice that our Harmony cruises persisted in showing up in the cruise planner but, other than sending Kim a query in Feb 2025 I mostly ignored this, assuming it would work itself out.  In May 2025, I learned of a new Royal cruisefare tracking website that looked like it had the potential to replace the long-defunct Cruisefish site I used to use.  I registered for that and immediately got the sense that our Quantum prices might have dropped, so I used that as an excuse to reach out to Kim again to check – and also to once again mention that our Harmony bookings were still showing up.

Kim got back to me within a few hours with good news.  First, while our first leg had gone UP in price about $81, our 2^nd leg had dropped about $210, so she was in the process of rebooking our 2^nd leg.  Nice!  She was also following up on the Harmony confusion.  Turns out that, while our Harmony bookings were showing up as canceled in her systems, Royal had never released the cabins back into their pool correctly.  Something to do with the original booking having been part of a larger group booking or something like that.  Anyway, by the time Kim’s response arrived in my inbox the two long-canceled bookings had FINALLY dropped off my Cruise Planner page on Royal’s site.  Phew!

Now, while it was GREAT to get a price reduction, there is a part of me that wonders whether we missed out on earlier and potentially better pricing since we first booked in November 2024.  Kim was all over executing on my request to recheck prices – but I THOUGHT one of the value-adds that a travel agent was supposed to bring along was watching out for drops on our behalf.  I FINALLY have a tool that allows us to track and advocate for ourselves, which I’ll do.  But, once again, I can’t help but feel we’d have been better served by booking through Costco and getting Costco store credit vs booking through another TA and getting a paltry $50 OBC. 

I again ignored the Quantum trip and began to get excited about our upcoming trans-Atlantic Brilliance in Aug/Sep 2025.  This turned out to be a fantastic cruise, which I wrote up elsewhere.  The major take-away of the TA, however, was the knowledge that E and I could VERY happily entertain ourselves on a longer cruise, so we had absolutely zero misgivings about signing on for an 11-night B2B.  Some preliminary review of Quantum Cruise Compasses yielded the info that Quantum basically has 3 major entertainment venues: Theater, two70, and the Music Hall, so we’re likely to find many ways to keep ourselves occupied.  It is possible that two70 will be our home base (rather than the much more industrial Schooner Bar) this time around.  We’ll see.

I also purchased specialty restaurant reservations across both cruises, one time each at Wonderland (during the 1^st leg) and then Jamie’s and Chops (both during the 2^nd leg).  I passed on booking Izumi as Quantum doesn’t have the teppanyaki option, so it would have been no different than our Brilliance experience which E hadn’t much enjoyed.  I did track prices and ended up rebooking twice as prices dropped.  Overall, between refreshment package, internet, and restaurants I was able to save about $120 by paying attention to price drops.  (I could have saved another $7 by rebooking Wonderland, but I ran out of enthusiasm about this and let the more expensive reservation ride without change.)

Check-in for the first cruise opened up at midnight on January 13, 2026, so I stayed up to take care of the process.  The link didn’t go live until 12:05A and it took me about 3 minutes to get both of us checked in via the web.  I haven’t yet tried an app-based login.  Supposedly it offers faster check-in because (I think) you don’t have to pre-enter things like street addresses and passport info before you select your boarding time.  But I’m OK with web-based entry over phone-based any day.  The earliest boarding time we were offered was 11:00A, so I took that.  Of course, we’re likely to ignore that and show up at the terminal around 10:30A to get onboard as soon as possible.  I later used the app to check-in to the 2^nd leg, since there was no time pressure on me.  It turns out to be true – you can go straight to selecting boarding time before you worry about entering other details.

One of the last pre-cruise planning activities was to refer to the app-based Daily Planner for both our cruises about 4 days before our flight down to Long Beach.  At this time both appeared to be fully populated with menus and activities (although the headliners and music entertainment didn’t show up fully until 48 hours pre-sailing, so I had to defer that planning until the last minute).  I jotted down times of “interesting” sounding activities, including things like shows, trivia, games, and music, and started to piece them together in ways that tried to optimize our variety onboard. 

I also looked at MDR menus and planned my choices.  I really like doing this because I can make a diverse selection of options without fear of being forced to duplicate choices.  It also makes me feel confident about making new choices.  And, finally, I checked the individual bar menus to get some ideas about new cocktails to try!

 

 

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