Welcome to the Royal Caribbean Blog podcast, a weekly look into the world of Royal Caribbean cruising.

I'm your host, Matt Hodgeberg, and this is episode number 341.

It's time again to open up the Royal Green blog inbox and answer as many of your cruise questions.

These are the emails that many of you listening have sent in, and I'll answer as many of them as I can, to help everybody out.

After all, if someone takes a time to

send an email with that question, odds are others are wondering about the same thing as well.

Here we go.

Last week, I brought to you a live review of the Cocoa Beach Club from the Cocoa Beach Club

at Perfect Day, Coco Key. I was so excited, so much happening, wanted to share it with you all, and you may have noticed in that episode, there was absolutely no listener questions in there.

So to make it up to you, this week's episode is all about answering listener questions.

So that way we can write what's wrong with the universe, have everything back at Equilibrium again, and of course, answer some Royal Caribbean questions as well. And you can always send me your emails by sending to Matt at Royal CaribbeanBlog.com. Our first email this week is from James McClemore. Hello, number one thing, 100% jealous that you're on a cruise and I'm watching snow hit the ground in Nova Scotia. My question is, my wife and I are sailing March 22nd in 2020,

and we're noticing already that snorkeling excursions are selling out.

We're hoping for a strolling excursion in St. Martin,

do you have any reliable third-party sites we can use?

This is our second Royal Caribbean Cruise.

Well, James takes the email, and a couple things I want to talk about.

Number one, taking a big picture here with James's question. When I come to short excursion, guys, I think we're really now at a point where if you wanted to do a short excursion, book it as early as you can. These things are selling out a lot faster than I feel like they've ever done before. Back in the day, and when I say back in the day, I'm talking about maybe at the beginning of the life of Royal Caribbean blog, I would always tell people, ah, short excursions are fine, just wait until we get on the ship, and heck, you even wait until we get into the port and book something. There's usually availability. These days, the more popular ones are selling out with more regularity. So if you want to do an excursion, don't wait, book it as early as you can.

That's really number one. Number two, to actually answer James' question. The website I would go to is a website called sure excursionnear.com. It's basically shore excursion with an extra ER at the end. Shore excursioner.com. I've bought from them in the past. Obviously, I've never taken any st. Excerion St. Martin, and just like any website, they're just a middleman for selling it, but I have a pretty good feel for what shore excursion here has to offer. That would be somewhere I would look. Also, shorthrips.com is another good resource for good third-party shore excursions. Our next email comes to us from Kristen Wright's quick question after listening to your three wishes episode about the internet. I was on Anthem of the season last spring and I was very impressed. I'm selling on Oasis in August and was just wondering if you've been on both ships this past year and how the VOOM internet compared ship to ship, thanks for all you do. Chris, good news, Oasis and Anthem's Internet is pretty much the same as for both vessels,

so you should have no issues whatsoever.

When it comes to Oasis or Quantum Class ships, there's really no issues with using the Internet

in terms of the speeds.

They should work pretty much identically to each other, so you should be good to go over there.

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