Tag: vacation

Our New Adventure!

As I’ve alluded to in my last couple of posts, our trip to Ft Lauderdale wasn’t really a vacation. Throughout my daughter’s final year of high school, my wife and I had talked about her going back to work after the kid left for college, she just had no idea what she wanted to do. After returning from our Bermuda cruise, I was looking for ways to get more involved in the travel industry, and happened to come across CruiseOne’s franchise program. I brought it up to my wife, and she was sold right away. Having not been a fan of the franchise model in the past (especially after watching my dad’s experience in owning a 7-11 franchise while I was growing up) I was skeptical, so I spent the next couple of months doing a bunch of research on the company and reading anything I could on their franchise program.

The end result was that I found very little in the way of negative info, and came away pretty excited about the possibilities. My wife signed up for a prospective franchisee webcast, and away things went. Fast forward to October, and we were headed down for our new franchisee training and starting this new journey. I admit that prior to doing this I felt travel agents were a thing of the past, but as we learned, I couldn’t have been more wrong. The way the service is delivered is definitely changing, but I’ve come to see that the need is very much alive. Many people don’t really enjoy all the research and planning that goes in to it the way we do, and there are still plenty of deals to be had that aren’t visible when just searching a given agent’s site.

Since we got back home last month, she’s been hard at work with the business. She’s even booked a couple of trips, and has a few more she’s researching for different people. It’s fun to watch, as I can tell she enjoys it. She’ll be upstairs in her office all day focused on travel planning and making her way through the sea of training we now have access to, and eventually come downstairs for dinner all nice and relaxed, a feeling I rarely have when I leave work :). There’s still plenty to be done, especially on the marketing front, but that will come in time. One of the nice things about this setup is that it isn’t our primary source of income, which has multiple benefits:

  • If things are slow with the business, it doesn’t add to our stress levels
  • We’re able to take the time off to visit some of the places and ships we’re selling to our customers, so we get a chance to ensure what we’re selling is up to snuff
  • The commission isn’t the priority, ensuring that her customers are booked with the right cruise line / land tour / resort that matches their taste.
  • We control the number of clients she’s juggling at any one time to ensure that she’s not overloaded and has plenty of time to properly focus on those clients she does choose to take on.

This doesn’t mean anything changes with my blog, I’m still going to call it as I see it in my trip reviews. Transparency and honesty are hard to find in reviews these days for various reasons, and I have no intention of letting up with my opinions.

That said, I will take this one opportunity to pitch the business :). If anyone’s looking to take a cruise, land tour, or book a resort, feel free to contact Jen, she’d love to help you!

Jen Cron
888-416-3182
jcron@dreamvacations.com
http://www.wanderlistvacations.com
Facebook: WanderlistVaca 
Twitter: @wanderlistvaca
Instagram: @Wanderlistvaca

Just some of the things we can help plan/book:
and a whole lot more!
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Touring the Getaway

As mentioned, the Florida trip I’ve been writing about wasn’t for pleasure, we were down there in training for our CruiseOne franchise. I’ll cover that more in my next post, but back to the trip, the week ended with a tour of the Norwegian Getaway. We’d never done a ship tour like this before, so we weren’t sure what to expect, but I have to say that we really enjoyed it.

First, a ship tour gives you the high of getting on a cruise ship and the low of getting off all in the span of about 3 hours. It was surreal standing in the passenger boarding area waiting for our guide to come get us, and I admit to being jealous of all those who were about to get on and get out of town for a week. Here I was, standing there dressed in business casual, watching a whole bunch of people walking by in shorts and sandals. Made me want to book something right then and there.

Once our guide arrived and all of our people made it through security, we headed for the gangway. We were boarding shortly after the previous guests had disembarked, and right before new passengers started getting on board. With this in mind, they hustled us up pretty fast to The Haven, one of the areas I was interested in the most.  We needed to get through the show cabins and off those floors fast, as those guests board first, and they obviously don’t want us trapsing through guest rooms as those guests are arriving. Now, my interest in seeing this area is because I’m somewhat skeptical of the “ship within a ship” concept that The Haven presents, especially as more lines move to similar models. I can see the pluses (no chair hogs, a quieter pool area) but I’m also not really the kind of guest that this model fits. I like being out and active and participating in the on board activities, so I’m not really sure I’d spend much time in this area, outside of when we’re in our room. I could very well be making poor assumptions about The Haven, so maybe it’s something you have to experience first hand. In any case, I admit to being impressed with the rooms we saw. The one thing that really intrigued me were the forward balconies, which provide an awesome view. It would seem you’d potentially get a ton of wind out there on some days, making the balcony less useful, but that’s only based on my experience on the forward outside areas on some Carnival ships. If anyone’s stayed in one of NCLs forward balconies and can comment, feel free to add your input. Anyway, here are a few shots from the rooms we saw on the Haven floors:

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Moving on, after we finished in The Haven, we moved on to touring regular cabins. For the most part, they were pretty standard fare, with the exception of the spa cabins. Interesting location for the tub 🙂

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Another set of cabins that stood out were the solo cabins, in an area aptly named the Studio. Solo cabins are somewhat rare on contemporary lines, so offering up a cabin where single cruisers only pay a single rate is a plus. Yes, the cabin’s noticeably smaller, but still, you’re not paying up to 200% of a single fare to cruise alone. The Studio also comes with access to a private lounge area, and frankly, the decor of the area is pretty well done, imo. I managed to get a shot of one of the rooms while we were in there:

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After we finished our cabin tour, it was time for lunch. The Getaway has plenty of food options, and the one set up for our group that day was Taste. I think I’ve mentioned this before, but we’ve only been on NCL one other time, and were far from impressed with the MDR food. We were part of a large group on that sailing, and no one in the group liked it, especially the foodie. The specialty restaurants were good on that trip, but having to pay for decent food left a bad taste in our mouth (pun intended 😉 ). This was the other part of the tour I was really interested in, as I wanted to see first-hand just how much the food has changed. In short: I was pleasantly surprised. We had a full menu, 3 courses. I had the chicken nachos as my appetizer, meatball sub as my meal, and the peanut butter cup cheesecake for dessert. All delicious, except the fries. They were okay, but tasted like they’d been grabbed off the pool grill.

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After lunch, we had an hour left to tour the ship on our own, all while guests who had boarded were also walking around, which gave us a sense of how crowded a ship this size might be. Things we found:

  • The ship is very family friendly, which didn’t come as much of a surprise. We chatted with the staff in the kids clubs, who all seemed like they were very good at what they did.
  • The spa staff was just as friendly, and not just to us, but to all of the actual guests they were talking to. This was a big departure from the experience we had with the spa staff on our last cruise on Celebrity, who weren’t friendly at all.
  • The ship is lloooonnngggg. We walked one floor of cabins from end to end, and frankly, it felt like we’d never get to the end.
  • Outside of the previous bullet, the ship never felt “too big” like I was afraid a ship that can hold 4000 passengers would. We walked around the buffet after the vast majority of boarding had taken place, but people seemed to be flowing pretty well. This held true in most other areas as well.
  • The decor is well done compared to other ships in class. Didn’t come off as the normal, classic cruise ship gaudy.
  • The staff, including our guide, were all super friendly. Yes, I get that wearing our guest badges gave them indication that we were likely in the travel business, and they may have stepped up their game, but I’d like to think they were being genuine, and seeing the way they interacted with the regular guests, I’m leaning towards that.

Honestly, after touring the Getaway, we’d be interested in trying it on an actual cruise. I realize that 3 hours on-board really isn’t enough to pass true judgement, but it was enough time to get me interested in trying NCL again after swearing them off 8 years ago. It was also enough time to make me miss being on a cruise 🙂

Here are a few more pics from our tour. Sorry some of these are blurry, we were constantly on the move, and I was doing my best not to get in the way of any their actual guests.

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Another Trip to Florida, Part 2

The bulk of last week’s trip to Florida was spent in Ft Lauderdale. This wasn’t a pleasure trip, however, as mentioned in my last post, since we were down there for training on the business my wife is starting. After years of travelling, we finally decided to jump in to the industry and do something we’re both passionate about, so we bought a new CruiseOne franchise. I’m not leaving my job, so it’ll mostly be my wife running things with the business, but more on that in a later post :).

We spent the week staying at the Sheraton Suites Fort Lauderdale at Cypress Creek, along with the rest of the new franchisees. Prior to going down, my wife had looked up reviews, and was surprised to find so many negative ones for an SPG property. Now that we’ve spent a week there, I can see why.

Let’s start with the positive:

  • Decent breakfast buffet: Some reviews on this place knock the buffet, but I found it to be perfectly in line with other hotel breakfasts. The food was kept pretty warm each day, and while I’d have preferred a bigger change in choices each day, everything I had was fine as far as taste goes. The wait staff was very friendly as well.
  • Good sized room: We had a two room suite up on the 5th floor in a quiet corner of the hotel, and it served us just fine. The sofa in the living room was a pullout, making it easy for us to set up a bed for our daughter when she drove over to see us on Friday.

Not sure I really have anything else positive to say, so let’s move on to the not-so-positive:

  • The WiFi: Wow. Worst WiFi I’ve had in any hotel I’ve ever stayed in. There were three options when connecting, and not wanting to pay extra, I stuck with the free “up to 1.5Mbps” option. Can’t say it was ever close to that speed. During peak hours, connectivity came and went, and when you were connected, speed was super slow, to the point that sites were timing out loading, making it impossible to do any work. I got fed up and tethered through my cell phone most of the time. Didn’t matter which device we used (iPad, Windows or Mac laptops, cell phones), the WiFi performance was horrible unless you were on in the middle of the night. The front desk basically shrugged that one off when I asked one morning. I’ve stayed in larger SPG properties where the free WiFi worked just fine, so this was obviously a case of not having enough capacity to cover the hotel. The signal itself was strong, there just wasn’t any bandwidth, and I’m not going to pay for a higher tier just because they’re trying to force me in to it by limiting the free connectivity.
  • Front desk staff: I only interacted with them a couple of times, but wasn’t really impressed either time, as they really didn’t seem to be happy with their jobs. The main issue we had is that we’d stopped down early in the week to ask about the pet policy, as our daughter wanted to bring her cat with her to come see us. The girl we talked to was very friendly, said it was a $25/day cleaning fee, and even chatted with us about the cat for a couple of minutes (we made it clear it was a cat we were asking for). On Friday morning before we headed to training, we stopped at the front desk to leave a key and let them know a pet would be joining us later in the day, and the lady we talked to this time (not friendly) said cats were not allowed. That would have been good information to have a couple of days earlier when we specifically asked, but at least our daughter hadn’t left St Pete yet, so we had time to stop her from bringing the cat.
  • General hotel issues:
    • One of the elevators near our room smelled like vomit all of Friday. The actual vomit was gone, but that smell hung around all day. Either close the elevator until the smell gone, or clean it right the first time.
    • Pillows were way to soft, and the mattress was way too hard. Both are subjective, but neither lived up to my past SPG experiences.
    • Weirdest balcony I’ve ever had in a hotel. I wish I’d taken a pic, but it was a shared balcony with two other rooms. Not all of them are set up like this, most are solo balconies, but with ours, we easily could have wakled over and peered in to rooms next to us, or vice-versa. Never had an issue with it, but still, not a setup we really liked. It also acted as a water collector, as any rain resulted in about an inch of standing water out there.
    • AC really struggled to keep up. We had it set to 62 the whole week, and it never got close (seemed to stay around 71ish), and never shut off.

I think that’s about it. I’ve stayed in a few SPG properties over the past decade for work, with the last one being the Sheraton Manhattan, and this one certainly didn’t live up to my expectations based on those past stays. Certainly wasn’t any better than some of the lower tier hotels I used to stay in regularly for work (Country Inn and Suites, for example) either. The Holiday Inn I mentioned in my last post beat this Sheraton without question.

My next post will cover the places we ate during the week. With breakfast and lunch provided for us, we got to explore the area for dinner, and had some great food along the way. Following that, I’ll get more in to our new venture, starting with the tour we got to do of the Norwegian Getaway this past Saturday in Miami!

 

Another Trip to Florida, Part 1

Even with our daughter away at college, the past couple of months have been incredibly busy. My wife and I are starting a new business, and the prep work (combined with my existing job) has kept me otherwise occupied. We’re actually down in Florida for the final training on it as I type, but I’ll hold off on posting any info on just what it is that we’re doing until after the week is over and we return home.

This trip requires us to be in Fort Lauderdale for 6 days of training that started on Monday. We decided to leave early Saturday morning and stop in St Pete for a day to see our daughter. With everything else going on, we didn’t get around to booking a hotel until a couple of days before we left, and thanks to Hotwire’s Hot Rates, ended up getting a pretty good deal on the Holiday Inn Harbourside in Indian Rocks Beach. For those afraid of booking a hotel you can’t see until you pay (Hotwire Hot Deals, Priceline, etc), there’s a good site you can use to narrow down the possibilities – betterbidding.com (no, I’m not affiliated in any way). Through the local information in the Hotwire forum, I was able to determine what hotel it was before we bought the deal.

Upon checking in, they upgraded us to a suite at no additional cost, which was a bit of a surprise considering I’ve never had that happen when using a Hotwire or Priceline fare. When we saw where the room was, I admit I was concerned. We were in 143, which was a first floor suite near the outdoor bar. We were on the waterfront side, so not right next to the music, but close enough. Fortunately it wasn’t an issue. The band shuts down by 10pm, so even on a Saturday night it was never a bother. It also gave us (well, me) a great spot to watch the sunrise the next morning:

St Pete Sunrise

 

Anyway, on Saturday night, we took her and a couple of her friends out to dinner, and let her pick the place. She absolutely loves a good Japanese steakhouse, and chose Tsunami in St Petersburg. We’d made reservations for the hibachi side, so when we got there were seated pretty quick. The meal was very good, definitely one of the better Japanese steakhouses we’ve been to, and we had a great chef. Can’t say the same for the group at the table next to us, as they had all kinds of issues (improperly cooked chicken, people not getting what they ordered, etc). We were glad we got the chef we did, as he got everything right from the start, and all items were cooked to perfection. I always get filet mignon at places like this, and was very happy with the quality of the meat. We’d definitely stop again.

Sunday was spent mostly at a local beach on Treasure Island. The weather was great, water was warm, and the beach wasn’t busy at all. We hung out in the water most of the time, until a whole lot of small fish started swimming past us trying to escape the ever-growing flock of birds trying to eat them. At that point it was almost time for us to go, so we hopped out and watched the birds dive-bombing the fish for a bit, then packed up our stuff and headed back to our daughter’s dorm. The plan at that point was to pick up her best friend (who she’s been in school with since 3rd grade) and grab some dinner before my wife and I headed across the state for our week of training.

For dinner, we’d decided on Tijuana Flats, which is sort of a guilty pleasure for us due to the cookie dough flautas. The food’s pretty good for a chain, too, but it’s really the desserts that make the place. Her friend had never been there before, and fell in love with the desserts, too. Probably a bad idea to take him there when we did, as he had a flag football game not long after, and frankly I can’t even imagine the sugar crash that must have hit him during that game. Sorry 😉

After dinner, we dropped the kids back at school, said our goodbyes, and headed out. I always hate leaving her, but she’s been busting her butt so far this semester, and shown that she was ready for the challenge and to live on her own. I couldn’t be more proud :).

As we get further along in the week, I’ll post more on the places we’ve eaten here, along with the hotel we’re in. After we get home, I’ll cover what exactly we were doing down here, as it directly pertains to the theme of my blog, and represents a new and exciting chapter in our lives.

More to come!

 

Packing for a Cruise

One thing we’ve gotten pretty efficient at over the years is packing. My wife and I maintain separate packing lists with quite a bit of overlap, which is probably somewhat inefficient, but it helps us ensure we don’t forget anything major. I also tend to go over mine two or three times *after* I pack to be sure I didn’t miss anything :). I figured I’d post our combined list in the event it helps anyone looking for cruise packing tips. Have something on your list that’s not on mine? Add it in the comments!

Electronics:

  • Camera gear: I take my Nikon DSLR, lenses and chargers in case I really need them, but the gear doesn’t leave the bag much after getting my Nokia Lumia 1020 last year.
  • Cell phone and charger. The phone stays in airplane mode, but as hinted above, the camera in it is outstanding 🙂
  • GorillaPod and Lumia 1020 camera grip
  • GoPro gear: Including charger, memory cards, dive housing, floaty back door and anti-fog inserts. The inserts are essential in places with high humidity, and you should have extra inserts to swap out during the trip
  • Power strips: We’ve been taking two of these Belkin travel strips with us the past few cruises. They work really well and we never have issues with them being pulled from the luggage
  • 2 pairs of sunglasses: I always take a backup pair in case something happens to my primary pair
  • Laptop & charger: Note that I only take this if I really need it for some reason, as I hate lugging the additional weight (photo backup is about the only reason)
  • iPad & charger: In addition, I always load up a couple of books in the Kindle app to read during any downtime on sea days
  • Load up some music on my phone to listen to while reading, or during morning runs (yea, right :))
  • Waterproof camera case as a backup in the event the GoPro has issues (this came from experience). I’ve got an older version of this AquaPac, which holds any of our phones

Clothes:

  • Pants
  • Shorts
  • T-shirts
  • Undershirts
  • Dinner shirts
  • Socks / underwear
  • Bathing suits (usually two or three)
  • Pajamas
  • A light jacket or hoodie for cool nights

Shoes:

  • Sandals (usually two pairs)
  • One pair tennis shoes
  • Water sandals, which come in handy for any excursions where you may get wet or muddy (ATV/dune buggy tours, for example)
  • Dinner shoes

Random Stuff:

  • PASSPORTS!!!
  • Toiletries
  • Snorkeling gear. We generally drive to ports, so I don’t have to worry about fitting this in to checked luggage
  • Door organizer to hold all kinds of random items. Ours looks something like this
  • Medication, including any aspirin, ibuprofen, allergy pills, etc
  • Ponchos, just in case it’s raining while you’re in port somewhere
  • Downy wrinkle releaser
  • Zip lock bags. Good for packing wet bathing suits in for the flight or ride home. Also useful for storing snacks to take off o the ship (where allowed)
  • Extra hangers – Some lines will provide them if asked if you don’t want to carry your own
  • Sunscreen

  • Hot/Cold cup with a lid. That way you don’t have to keep refilling up their little cups with water, lemonade, juice, and coffee or ice tea

  • Post-it notes – good for leaving quick notes in the room for family members

  • Cash for on-shore purchases / tipping (including small bills)

  • Nightlight

  • Highlighter so you can highlight the interesting things to do in the ship’s dailies.

  • Duct tape- Many uses for this from fixing a broken suitcase to taping the drawers closed when there is bad weather.
  • Towel clips similar to these Boca clips
  • Old used gift card in case the in-room safe is card-controlled.
  • Waterproof money/card/ID holder similar to this for beach or rainy port days
  • Lanyard for those who find it easier to carry your ship ID card around your neck
  • Hat or visor

I think that about covers it, but if I find that I left anything off, I’ll add it later! Oh, and if this seems like overkill, it may very well be, but it works for us. We did take t0o many clothes this past trip somehow. My wife ended up with almost half a suitcase of stuff she didn’t wear 🙂