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 28.

It seems like there's always something new or changing at Royal Caribbean these days, hence the purpose of this blog.

And so this week, I wanted to look at a few recent changes and discuss my thoughts about it.

In fact, I've invited my friend Michael Poole back to the podcast talk about these changes. So here we go.

Royal Caribbean changes a lot with new amenities, restaurants, and choices for their guests

to consider. Likewise, policies and rules get updated periodically, along with Royal Caribbean

being in the national spotlight for good and bad reasons. So on this episode, I've invited friend, part-time blogger, and full-time book a new cruise

enabler, Michael Poole, back to Royal Caribbean Blog Podcast to discuss some of these recent changes

with me. Welcome back, Michael.

Hey, guys, I'm excited to be back, and it's good to talk to you all, and I look forward to talking about the roundtable discussions.

Absolutely. I thought we could kind of discuss something about this, because, you know, Michael and you and I have discussed some of the stuff off the air.

You know, like, if something come up, you know, we'll trade text messages when we met up in New York a couple weeks ago, a couple months ago actually now, we were kind of like talking shops. So we thought, you know what, let's have an opportunity to share with our listeners kind of, you know,

go back and forth discussing our thoughts on some new things that are new to Roe Caribbean.

And I thought it would be fun to kind of share our insight with the audience.

Yeah, I'm excited to talk about things are always changing the cruising industry. So I'm excited

to kind of share some new things that are happening in the cruise industry for 2014. Absolutely. So I think we're going to have to start with the big news

of last week. We would be remiss if we ignored it, and that's, of course, the unfortunate incident

of Explorer. This is you've probably heard about this. Over 600 people got sick with norovirus.

And, you know, it's something that happens in the cruise industry. You know, it's one of those things that happens.

You know what I mean?

What I wanted to know, Michael, was what are your thoughts on how Royal Caribbean

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