Jack Hamilton wrote:

On Fri, 02 Jan 2009 12:58:21 -0600, "Tom M." wrote:

RCL delivers luggage tags on the last day. NCL forces you to go down to
the desk for your tags.

On the Sun in October, there was a reason for that - we got to choose
our own debarcation time, which we did by picking up labels for that
time. I thought there was an option to have the tags of your choice
delivered to your room, but I might be mistaken.

If you didn't go pick up your tags, they would have had to deliver at
least four of every tag to every room, or they would have had to ask
for everyone's preferred departure time and then distribute tags
accordingly.

The former would be inefficient and confusing, and given the problems
cruise lines seem to have with paperwork, I wouldn't want to try the
latter.

I've always liked NCL de-barcation better than RCI - as a matter of
fact that was the worst thing about RCI IMO. They not only had no
coherent explanation of what the various colors meant, or the schedule
for them (you had to wait for your color and number to be called with
no way to keep track of how much longer you might have to wait), but
they kicked us out of the room at 8 am. NCL let us stay there until
we were called. HAL let us stay there and had a color schedule on the
TV so that we knew in advance what time we'd be getting off.



I much prefer NCL's way to the other method I've seen, which is for
the cruise line to assign a time at random without asking what I want.
RCL excursion desk is staffed all day, NCL 6-9 PM.

I think the hours vary by cruise or by ship, but excursion staff is
certainly not there all the time, and that's not good.

HAL was staffed at different hours. I don't remember RCI being there
all the time but I don't think I had much occasion to deal with them.
The NCL excursion desks have had hours in addition to 6-9 pm, and I've
walked up as they were getting ready to close and booked a tour for
that afternoon without any complaint on their part.