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!