You are listening to this is Cruise Radio Rewind. Real reviews from real cruisers.

This episode of Cruise Radio Rewind is all about you, tackling your listener questions. We'll jump right to it with staff writer Richard Sims. Hey, Richard.

Hey, Doug, thanks for having me. This question comes from Belinda. Is it better to choose early or late boarding? You know, Belinda, that kind of boils down to a couple of different things. One is, it can depend on what kind of cruiser you are. There are some people who really want to get on that ship, ASAP, get their drink on, get their first meal, you know, really have some time to settle in, maybe explore the ship before the mustard drill.

It can also depend on the ship you're doing and what's on it that you might need to get on early for.

For example, if I'm getting on the Norwegian gem, it's sort of a smaller ship.

It doesn't have anything that I necessarily need to rush on board for. So I might do a later embarkation. But if I'm going on like the Norwegian Encore or one of the ship that has the vibes beach club, I probably am going to want to get on as soon as possible because they sell out of that. So I need to get on the ship, get to guest services, and get my

precious, precious vibe beach club purchased. So find out if there's anything that, like,

you really need to do, you know, immediately. In that case, you might want to get on. It also can

depend on how you feel about crowds. A lot of times, if you get there early in the morning, everybody else has the same idea. And so you might wind up waiting in lines. You might wind up sitting around waiting to get on the ship and then, you know, they're calling all the numbers. Whereas if you get there, say, two o'clock in the afternoon, let's say they're embarking up until four o'clock and you get there around two, you're probably going to be able to just waltz right through. You know, you won't have any security lines and you'll just get on the ship and go. You won't have any waiting around. So it's sort of, you know, it really, there's a couple of different factors that go into deciding the best time. It's also important to note, and this is sort of new for some cruise lines.

More and more cruise lines are asking you to select an embarkation time.

And like, for example, if you, let's say you choose 1230 as your embarkation time and you get there at 10 a.m.,

they might actually hold you to it and put you over in a little like no no square and make you sit there and wait until it's your time to embark. So check and see if when you're when you're doing the online check-in, some people don't even notice it. It might like assign them a time and they don't even realize that oh yeah, I'm not supposed to be here for two more hours. So keep an eye on that.

And if there is a specific time you want, you know, try and get that time. And if you don't get it, you can try and call and see if they can, you know, change your embarkation time. But I find that that's a little bit difficult in my limited experiences with that. Yeah. And on top of that, it seems like these days the cruise lines are being a little stricter on when you can actually

board because everything experiences with that. Yeah, and on top of that, it seems like these days the cruise lines are being

a little stricter on when you can actually board because everything is trying to be streamlined,

right, with technology and everything. So yeah, you could get there two hours early, but they might

say, hey, wait here until your zone is called. And it makes sense. I mean, you know, it sort of is

along the lines of what they do at Disney World with FastPass. If they can keep you coming back, if they can make sure they know when you're going to be there, they have a better idea of how to process people. I mean, they're processing on a ship. They're processing anywhere from, you know, two to six thousand people during the course of the day. And the better handle they can have on what the

traffic flow is going to be, the easier they can make it on everyone. Staff writer Richard Sims,

as always, thank you, my friend. Glad to be here. To help feel the next set of questions is

Sherry Laskin with cruismaven.com. Hey, Sherry. Hello, Doug. All right, Sherry, this first question

comes from Jason.

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