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Just think about it - 200 000 tons, 6000 passengers, Carnival! Huh! I like to share with you an amazing video I found while reading some Carnival news today - the Carnival Pinnacle cruise ship video showing what the largest Carnival ship ever could look like! This is a great animation done by the Fincantieri shipbuilding designers, and the elevators are going horizontal!

last night CMV Marco Polo ship had an incident on its 2013 Norway cruise itinerary (near the Sortland port - the cruise ship ran aground north of Arctic Circle to suffer a minor hull damage. For now its 2013/2014 sailing schedule remains unchanged.

There's a major change in the itinerary of the Carnival cruise ship from Jacksonville FL to Bahamas Carnival Fascination - a Carnival ship will visit on its Bahamas cruise itinerary as one of its ports of call not other but the Royal Caribbean's private Little Stirrup Cay - yep, the COCOCAY ISLAND!!! The CCL Fascination ship itinerary change is only on the 5-day Bahamas itinerary (which offered calling on Nassau Bahamas and Key West Florida) but from March 11 through the whole 2013 and 2014 the Key West as call port will be replaced by Coco cay! What to expect next - Carnival merging with the Royal company?! This is the Carnival Fascination sailing schedule for 2013/2014 with all cruise dates of departure when the ship will sail to the RCCL's private island in the Bahamas.

according to the new guidelines, the amount of Royal Caribbean tips per day will be slightly changed - from the old $13,90 (suites)/$11,65 (the rest) to the new, respectively, $14,25/$12 pp pd. But this is not all - by the new tipping policy on RCCL ships tips will be charged automatically to your seapass account, plus there will be an option if you're not satisfied with the service of, say, your cabin steward or the wait service in the MDR you'll be allowed to reduce or even get back all your prepaid tips. That article also has this link for the guidelines of the Carnival cruise lines gratuities policy, but what I found interesting there is that they say tips are not extra money but real salaries for the hotel service staff on board all these huge ships - obviously many thousands of people do count on these prepaid gratuities. I don't know if this is quite true but could it really be that the hotel staff has a salary of under $100 PER MONTH?!?! And the real money for them are our tipping money?

The famous with its spending proclivity owner of RMS Queen Elizabeth 2 ship decided to sold her. This article is about the latest decision of Dubai World's Istithmar Investments to sell the QE2 cruise ship to the leading Southeast Asia investment holding Oceanic Group. The above link is the website I read about this for the first time today, but in it those guys also point out their info source - the Financial Times. So I also give you 2 more FTcom links to read about the process of changing their minds not to scrap one of the most iconic Transatlantic passenger liners of our times (it's from July 2012) http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/bbd04f54-c44b-11e1-850c-00144feabdc0.html

Yummy

good to know