Paying our bill at the end of the cruise was easy. We were able to check the accuracy of our bill by logging into our account on the television. You can also use a machine located near guest services. Since everything was charged to the credit card on our room, it was automatically processed and an invoice was left in our room.
Around the 5th day was when the automatic gratuities showed up. As mentioned before, this can be adjusted to whatever you like. To adjust the gratuities or any other discrepancies, you need to visit guest relations. It’s best NOT to leave this until the last day.
Travel tip: when booking your cruise, look for offers that include an onboard credit. We each received a credit of $140, which made a big difference. The Canadian dollar tanked prior to our cruise, so it was nice to have this extra credit in $US currency.
On the final night of the Caribbean cruise we had the option to check our bags for casual disembarkation. Before going to bed we packed our luggage and left it outside our room. We were given tags with a number on it. This number was used to find our bags at the cruise ship terminal. This process lightened our load considerably and made the disembarkation process less congested for everyone.
If you have an early flight to catch, you keep your bags with you and get off the ship early in the morning, before the casual passengers. It’s a fairly straight forward process.
In the morning, we went to breakfast and then checked out of our room by 8:30 AM. We then relocated to a section on the main promenade and waited for our number to be called. We were number 16, so our number was not called until about 11:00 AM.
We expected that by waiting around until 11:00 AM we would have eliminated a lot of the congestion. This was not the case, as the above photo illustrates. We waited in line to get off the boat. We waited in line to get our luggage. We waited in line to clear customs and immigration.
Had we known that the lines were unavoidable, we would not have sat around for 2 hours waiting to disembark. It wasn’t the end of the world, but it did take much longer than we expected – so be prepared to wait.