Bahamas 2019 Intro

Background

They made us an Offer We Couldn’t Refuse. That’s how we ended up on a 4 night Bahamas cruise on Mariner of the Seas instead of going to Victoria, BC. So let’s rewind a bit…

In July 2018, as we prepared to ship Robert to his freshman year at Western Washington University in Bellingham, we started to think about what we wanted to do in April 2019 when Andrew went to the OTHER Washington as part of the 8th grade trip to DC/NY/Boston. Having a week in April for just the two of us to do something on our own couldn’t be missed. But what to do?

An initial idea was to see if we could find a short cruise – anywhere – that took off after Andrew left but didn’t keep us out of town following his return. Ideally, we’d be able to find something like a 2-4 day cruise out of San Francisco heading up to Vancouver, from where we’d then drive down to Bellingham to see Robert for a day before flying home from either Vancouver or Seattle. It turns out Princess has cruises exactly like that, but they didn’t start until May.

We did find a couple of random cruises that ALMOST worked, in that they left the day after Andrew flew out, but most of them arrived home the day AFTER he got back. The only cruise that seemed to work was the same 4 night Bahamas cruise on Enchantment of the Seas that we’d already been on in 2015. While that was certainly a viable option, it wasn’t novel enough to get us really excited so we turned to Plan B.

Plan B was to get Andrew off to DC, then fly up to Victoria for a couple of days, followed by a short seaplane trip over to Vancouver where we’d spend the day tooling around Stanley Park on rental bikes. From there, we’d rent a car and drive down to Bellingham to terrorize Robert, and then drive back to Vancouver for an afternoon at Capilano Suspension Bridge before finally flying back home.

This is still a trip we’d like to make…but then I made a couple of discoveries.

The first was that I had somehow overlooked the fact that Royal Caribbean actually had TWO ships doing the 4 night Bahamas itinerary. In addition to Enchantment out of Port Canaveral they were also running Mariner out of Miami. The fact that the ports were the same as our 2015 trip wasn’t a big issue. We really liked Coco Cay, and saw no reason to leave the ship in Nassau. We’d rather spend that day exploring the ship. We hadn’t been on a Voyager class ship yet, so the novelty factor was soaring again - cruising was back in the running.

The second discovery was the clincher. I realized that we could cash in various credit card and hotel points and pretty much take the entire vacation FOR FREE!! Ka-ching! Winner winner chicken dinner! I see people on Cruise Critic all the time talking about cashing in points, but this was the first time we’d ever done anything like this.

So this trip began to take shape at the end of July 2018, as we took advantage of a BOGO with OBC to book a hump cabin (another first) on Mariner (100% paid for with credit card points), booked first class seats to Miami (the bulk of which were paid for with the remaining credit card points, so we splurged to upgrade mostly to have the extra seat width, with the out of pocket costs still less than it would have cost us to pay for Economy seats), a pre-cruise night in Miami (100% paid for with my Hilton points), pre-booked Chops and a soft drink package for Eileen (100% paid for with the OBC that came with our reservation), and made plans to redeem our RCI credit card points to supply all the OBC we’d need once we boarded.

So, to recap:

Cruise, with awesome hump balcony: FREE
Airfare to Miami: FREE (with some $ out of pocket to get First Class on all legs)
Hotel in Miami: FREE
Chops: FREE
Royal Refreshment: FREE
All other onboard expenses: FREE

Our only anticipated out of pocket expenses were going to be meals while flying out and back, Lyft fare to/from airports on both ends of our trip plus Lyft to PortMiami, and a couple of bottles of wine we’d be picking up in Miami before boarding. In other words, a 4 night cruise was going to cost us just a couple of hundred dollars. THAT’S the Offer We Couldn’t Refuse. Torturing Robert at WWU was going to have to wait for another year. Sad for us, but welcome news for him!

So, with the promise of an outrageously inexpensive cruise beckoning, I traded in lots of points at the end of July 2018 and got us booked for an April 2019 trip. Eight months of anticipation ensued.

Sort of. We had so many activities going on in those eight months that, unlike our earlier cruises, we really didn’t get into “vacation mode” until about two weeks before departure. Royal tried their best; boy, how they tried! I was the email point of contact on our reservation and starting about 8 weeks pre-cruise I started getting almost daily emails flogging some kind of pre-cruise deal and trying to get me to purchase something using the online cruise planner. I don’t recall this level of marketing for our prior cruises. Perhaps it had to do with the fact that I didn’t complete online check-in right away, which I’d done previously?

A note about the RCCL Visa credit card points that we converted to OBC. I redeemed the points in early January 2019. They posted to our shipboard account 14 days before our cruise departed. This was a bit frustrating as there were some pre-cruise expenses (like the internet packages) that I would have preferred to pay using OBC and instead had to use cash. This wasn’t a huge issue, however, because I expected that our redeemed OBC was going to cover our cocktail expenses (and whatever we didn’t spend would get credited back to our credit card account at the end).