Latest news with #CelebrityInfinity
Miami Herald
19 hours ago
- Miami Herald
Celebrity Cruises airport journey shows why you need travel agents
Recently there is no question, when flying domestically or internationally, you may face unexpected delays, cancellations and even setbacks with your flights. The recent months have shown a steady increase in travel setbacks, some caused by the airlines but not all. The causes vary from mechanical issues, staff shortages, air traffic control problems, significant weather impacts to strikes in the airlines industry or transportation sector like we recently saw in Italy on June 20. Related: Carnival Cruise Line suddenly cancels sailing No matter what the cause, it is very frustrating sitting on the passenger side of things. When you absolutely have to be somewhere like a cruise and suddenly you're told you're not going to make it because of flight deviations, what do you do? There are only a few options but the faster you act on them the better. First, if at the airport, get an agent to help you navigate a remedy quickly as there are likely many others with the same problem. If you don't succeed first, get another agent or go to the front check-in counter and ratchet up your demand to get you another flight quickly. If you are not at the airport yet or if you live nearby, we recommend going there as the local agents can access your itinerary and get to work on a replacement flight or another airline. Dealing with agents over the phone when not at the airport is not favorable and you will likely be delayed even more. In some instances when flying late, there may not be flights, and a hotel stay becomes the next need. Most airlines will accommodate hotels if they have some involvement in the delay. Sign up for the Come Cruise With Me newsletter to save money on your next (or your first) cruise. Cruisers, if your heading out for a cruise and you are flying, you must leave space in between and try not to fly the same day. Usually leaving the day before is a good habit and spending the night somewhere close to your port of embarkation is recommended. If you must fly long distances involving one or two transfer connections or going international, then two days ahead is the safest way and just enjoy an extra day if you make it on time. But if you get delayed or canceled, there is room to reschedule or for the airlines to find another flight or airline to pick up the deviation. In some cases, we have had clients rent a car and get on the road to make their cruise, because it was so important to them and they were within the driving distance in that time frame they had left. Today and last night was a great example of how several cruisers heading to Greece from Miami for a 7-day Celebrity Cruise on Celebrity Infinity dealt with a bad set of situations. Related: Royal Caribbean crew member shows off tiny crew cabin The first thing that happened, they flew out of Miami yesterday and got stranded at Charlotte airport when their direct American Airlines flight canceled. They were able to get switched to a Delta flight but once on board last night, they developed mechanical issues while taxiing for takeoff, had to return to the gate and were grounded. With no flights or answers, they had to stay overnight in a Charlotte hotel. This morning came around and with no solutions or alternative flights available, they called their travel agent, Lisa Dennis from Postcard Travel Planning, who sprang into action. The cruisers who booked their trip were offered air accommodation through the cruise line by Lisa, in this case, Celebrity Cruise line. The advantage was, a better rate and assistance if a flight gets canceled, delayed or deviations occurred; they accepted and turned out to be their best decision. Once called,Dennis immediately gave the cruisers directions to work with the airlines at the airport and get on another flight or airline. While this was taking place, unbeknownst to Dennis, they became so frustrated with lack of support, they just wanted to cancel and go home, in turn would lose all their money and their Greek Isles cruise. Be the first to see the best deals on cruises, special sailings, and more. Sign up for the Come Cruise With Me newsletter. Dennis reached out to another agent, Amy Post, who recommended calling Celebrity Cruise lines emergency help number. Both Lisa and Amy came up with options and tried to ensure the cruisers would get it handled with a quick solution so they could make their cruise. After two hours and lots of calls, a representative from Celebrity found an answer. Since they had booked through Celebrity/Royal Caribbean cruise lines air department, they had a team of people behind them to solve the setbacks. Celebrity found them a direct flight on United Airlines out of Atlanta tomorrow, rented a car for them to drive over and put them up in a hotel for the night before leaving direct to Athens Greece in the morning. This story is not unique and can happen as we faced this three time in the past few weeks including a group of 8 traveling to Italy for another Celebrity Cruise. Their situation was similar with canceled flights and was handled similarly once Amy was able to get Celebrity Cruise representatives involved and they both came up with a plan. The plan got the group to Italy by 10 a.m. the day of their cruise, it all worked out and they got on their cruise. All three of the deviations were handled and two of them by Celebrity Cruise line and the two agents working simultaneously to resolve the situation. Remedies are not complicated. They just take planning. Related: JetBlue cancels all flights to major US airport, offers customer refunds First start by using a great travel agent. They will always fight for you and provide comfort and solutions when a crisis occurs. When booking a cruise or trip leave extra time on the front and back end. If booking a cruise, and it is long distance or international, use contracted air through the cruise lines as they help reschedule, provide lodging and/or will in some instances, fly you to the next port of call if the ship has already left. If not offered or available, leave extra space/time between your trip to your cruise. We recommend, if within a driving distance of 6-8 hours or more, leave the day before. When flying a great distance, leave on an early direct flight the day before, that will leave all day to recover if there are delays or cancellations. If you have multiple transfers or on an international flight, leave two days, and recommend sometimes internationally three days, just to account for the unexpected deviations domestically and abroad. Dennis Post is co-owner of Postcard Travel Planning, The Arena Group's travel agent partner. (The Arena Group will earn a commission if you book a cruise.) Make a free appointment with Come Cruise With Me's Travel Agent Partner, Postcard Travel, or email Amy Post at amypost@ or call or text her at 386-383-2472. Copyright 2025 The Arena Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Forbes
a day ago
- Business
- Forbes
How To Make Manufacturing Jobs Great Again
My 19-year-old nephew Evan Craig has always had a big personality. He's voluble and super-charming. So I always thought he'd be successful in business. This summer, after completing his first year at ASU (#1 in innovation, he's fond of reminding me), he took a job with a fraternity brother selling pest control services door-to-door in a suburb of L.A. Then he took a break for a planned vacation with the whole family: a cruise of the Greek Islands on the Celebrity Infinity. But in a vivid illustration of how you can take the boy out of pest control but you can't take pest control out of the boy, he made his way to the ship's bridge and tried to sell pest control services to the captain. It went something like this: Evan: Captain Christos, my name is Evan and I'm with a local hybrid service called White Knight. I don't know if you speak regularly with other Captains of the Celebrity fleet, but I'm already taking care of Captain Tasos of Celebrity Edge and Captain Theo on Celebrity Millennium. Captain Christos: What? Evan: So they've been seeing a lot of ants in staterooms, mosquitoes by the pool deck, and spiders on the bridge. The first thing we're doing for them is knocking those guys down then leaving a product up there so they don't come back. Next thing I'm doing is down here at the base. You see these cracks and crevices? Those are highways for the ants and earwigs to crawl into the wall voids and nest and breed. I'm sealing those off with a 3x3 foot power spray. Captain Christos was impressed, although not enough to entrust his floating resort to Evan's 'local hybrid service.' But all is not lost. Evan's already convinced a host of Southern California homeowners to entrust him with their pest control needs and is on his way to making tens of thousands of dollars this summer. Which got me thinking: how is it that an charismatic 19-year-old can make this kind of money selling services when he'd only make a fraction of that amount if he'd taken a job actually making something? It's easy to understand why the Trump Administration is prioritizing manufacturing. Thousands of small communities whose economies once revolved around plants have deteriorated to depression, drugs, and dollar stores. Occam's Razor suggests restoring the plants as the straightest line to making these towns great again. This is the logic behind President Trump's 'Liberation Day' tariffs on all imported goods, propelling dozens of countries into frantic negotiations and – eight weeks later – a federal court injunction blocking them for the time being. Undaunted, the President's principal trade adviser, Peter Navarro, continues to claim Trump's tariffs will 'fill up all of the half-empty factories.' While these measures to revive manufacturing have gone well beyond prior Administrations (and perhaps beyond the pale), the impulse hasn't changed. As the Progressive Policy Institute's Will Marshall noted in The Hill, 'our two oldest presidents… both [of whom] But as Matt Stewart, CEO of supply chain and procurement tech services provider RiseNow, pointed out in The Hill, manufacturing isn't what it used to be. (Disclosure: RiseNow is an Achieve Partners portfolio company.) Automation has made manufacturing so efficient that it's shrunk as a percentage of GDP and workforce pretty much everywhere, even China and India; over the past decade China lost 20M manufacturing jobs. In America, fewer than 1 in 25 workers can be found on a factory floor. Further stymying manufacturing's renaissance is that plant work isn't just dirty and physically demanding – albeit less than in prior generations – but also relatively low-paying with limited career prospects. Back in the '50s, the great thing about manufacturing jobs was that they paid relatively well without requiring education or training. Even high school dropouts could get a job on the line. Manufacturing was a welcoming, friction-free path to the middle class. But seven decades on, neither condition appears to be true. First, the manufacturing wage premium has disappeared. A recent Federal Reserve paper found that over the past thirty years factory workers have experienced a relative wage decline and now earn less than comparable non-manufacturing workers. That's average wage, including those who've been on the job for decades. An Indeed scan of entry-level wages for manufacturing positions like production worker or line worker shows $14-20 per hour (variations by region per cost of living) or the same range as frontline service jobs. In cautious government-ese, Fed researchers conclude that 'the conventional wisdom that manufacturing jobs are 'good jobs' is less true than it used to be.' Second, fewer manufacturing positions are open to all. Many now involve managing advanced machines and automated systems. Manufacturing job descriptions increasingly demand degrees, certifications, and prior experience. As a result, The Economist concludes that the most similar work to the open manufacturing jobs of the 1970s isn't found in factories, but rather security jobs like TSA agents and mall cops. To which I'd add door-to-door pest control sales. These factors explain why the number of open, unfilled manufacturing jobs is approaching 500K – a number likely to get worse before it gets better given the new Administration's equal fervor for workplace raids and deportations. And why a recent Progressive Policy Institute poll found only 13% of parents picking manufacturing as the sector with the best career opportunities for their children vs. 44% selecting higher income communications/digital economy roles. While most of America's manufacturing woes are a result of competition from China's low-wage, government-subsidized factories, part of the problem is a talent gap. Does anyone here want these jobs? A few years ago I was at one of countless think-tank-convened meetings on America's talent gap. Across the table, a tech executive convincingly argued that one insurmountable barrier to reshoring semiconductor and integrated circuit board fabrication is the inability to compete for advanced degree graduates in computer science or engineering with software and tech services companies, which regularly pay a multiple more. Whereas a hardware company might offer a new Ph.D $150K or $200K to start, a software company (with much higher gross margins) can win the day with a $500K package including performance pay and equity. While China and Taiwan have similar challenges – one industry observer recently told the South China Morning Post that few engineering graduates want to devote themselves to semiconductors ('students are quite realistic… the job is too hard and not that well paid') – relatively fewer software and tech services companies in those markets = less competition. But as Evan knows, in America services + software reign supreme. Which makes it difficult for chip manufacturing to compete. Or manufacturers of anything that can be shipped across borders. I searched Indeed for advanced manufacturing 'engineer' jobs and found base salaries of $90-150K i.e., a proposition which similarly qualified candidates for tech services and software jobs would find less compelling than a pest control pitch. Protectionism is taking a sledgehammer to America's manufacturing problem. Indiscriminate or so-called reciprocal tariffs have the potential to resuscitate factories, but with inflation and knock-on effects that make the benefits for protected sectors and workers seem as tiny as Evan's ants and spiders. A more surgical approach is to begin with the talent gap. Do you know who's willing to work in a factory for $20 an hour? 20-something career launchers whose only alternative is similarly remunerative frontline service jobs with little to no career progression beyond the store. In contrast, manufacturers have a wider range of professional positions on site or nearby (e.g., finance, HR, QA). So instead of overturning the economic order to rebuild Factorytown, why not start by making the manufacturing sector into a career launching pad? Here how Evan might sell it: If you buy this, you probably agree that $20/hr plant jobs could be attractive options for 18-20-year-olds currently navigating between the Scylla and Charybdis of College or Chipotle – or College + Pest Control or Chipotle. (But seriously, if you do buy this, send me your home address so I can forward the lead to Evan.) Contrary to conventional wisdom, manufacturing jobs aren't good jobs. But they can be good entry-level jobs. America has a large labor pool more than willing to work for reasonable wages as long as the jobs are easy to get out of school and offer a secure pathway to something better. That labor pool is floundering like never before and the level of investment required to tap it to bolster American manufacturing is a fraction of the cost of Trump's sledgehammer tariffs. By closing the talent gap we can address youth unemployment and underemployment while simultaneously providing a more competitive labor pool for American manufacturers. If we can reduce hiring friction and establish career pathways out of entry-level manufacturing positions, hundreds of thousands of 18-20-year-olds will enter the sector, learn to show up on time ready to work, and gain valuable experience. And if manufacturing becomes a popular path for career launch, we could see: I'm not saying that the way to compete with China's lower wages is via child labor. I'm not saying that because 18-20-year-olds aren't children. Our armed forces certainly don't think so. I am saying 18-20-year-olds can be more than college students and burrito makers. They can be America's most able-bodied, energetic workers. And if we invest in the requisite hiring, earn-and-learn, and career pathway infrastructure, everyone wins by employing career launchers to make stuff in addition to employing them to sell pest control services to homeowners and cruise ship captains. Once we've closed manufacturing's talent gap, we should consider surgical trade barriers for strategic sectors or sectors where it's impossible to compete due to unfair foreign subsidies. But there may be no need for broad-based tariffs. In fact, if we address the talent problem first, the primary negative knock-on effect of making manufacturing great again is likely to be on colleges and universities already in need of various local hybrid services.
The Independent
29-01-2025
- The Independent
8 hidden gem cruise ports that you shouldn't skip
Complaints about overtourism and a desire to visit unique destinations are helping cruise passengers fall in love with lesser-known and unexpected ports of call. The cities and coastal resorts that passengers and cruise ships spend time in have become more important amid backlash from locals and environmental concerns. In some cases, cruise ships have had to change their choice of dock due to restrictions. Venice has banned large cruise ships, while Amsterdam is limiting ship visits ahead of an outright ban by 2035. The Mayor of Nice has also proposed banning larger vessels. To ensure passengers can still reach popular places, some ports are used as drop-off points to then travel to major cities where the main excursions take place. Examples include docking in Rotterdam to reach Amsterdam or Cadiz for Seville. But many cruise passengers are also finding hidden gems in the port where the ship docks rather than travelling further afield. These locations can be more convenient as they are often walking distance from the ship, saving you money on taxis and meaning you avoid queues for shuttle buses. Cruise brands are also recognising that passengers want unique experiences and may enjoy quieter locations on their itinerary rather than the typical holiday hotspots. Here are the overlooked cruise ports that could be worth staying in rather than travelling through. Nafplio Mykonos and Santorini may capture the attention of passengers on a Greek island cruise, but it could be worth visiting Nafplio if it is on your cruise itinerary. Sitting on the Greek mainland, the picturesque Venetian fortress town offers a quieter alternative to Athens. It has its own historic townhouses now converted into top boutique hotels and unique Greek dishes such as Gkiosa, an elder ewe or goat meat slow-baked in a stone wood stove. You can visit Nafplio during a Celebrity Cruises Best of Greece sailing aboard Celebrity Infinity. Prices for a departure from Athens on 17 March start from £489 per person. Sitting on Spain's often-overlooked northern coast, Asturias offers green landscapes in the Iberian peninsula and plenty of quieter beaches compared with more popular areas of Spain. Cruises cover the Asturias province on stops in Gijon where excursions include the Baroque Revillagigedo Palace and the statue of King Pelayo, founder of the Kingdom of Asturias – or just drinking the local cider. Trieste Sitting on the north east coast of Italy, Trieste has become a popular location for large cruise ships since many vessels have been banned from its neighbour Venice. Known as 'little Vienna on the sea', the port offers its own canals and is known as the coffee capital of Italy, making it a great place to get your caffeine fix. MSC Cruises visits Trieste on Mediterranean sailings. Excursions include the Castle of Miramare, residence of Maximilian of Hapsburg and Charlotte of Belgium. A seven-night sailing aboard MSC Fantasia embarks and disembarks in Trieste, prices start from £1,299 for a 16 June 2025 departure. Disko Island Disko Island in Greenland ranks among travel company Intrepid's top Not Hot destinations. Nearby Canada and Iceland get all the attention for snow-capped mountains but Disko Island, or Qeqertarsuaq in Greenlandic, offers its own unique fjords, valleys and basalt mountains to enjoy with fewer crowds. Its icebergs are some of the largest in the northern hemisphere and can be best-witnessed with expedition ships such as Hurtigruten. Hurtigruten has a 13-day The Icy Giants of Disko Bay voyage. Prices start from £8,652 per person, departing 21 June from Reykjavík. Cadiz The south west coastal city of Cadiz has traditionally been seen as a cruise drop-off point for excursions to Seville, but it offers plenty for cruise passengers in port. History buffs will love its Roman ruins and the narrow streets of its old towns where you can eat tapas and climb the Baroque watchtower Torre Tavira. There is even a quaint puppet museum that you can enjoy en-route to the city's many beaches. You can visit Cadiz with Princess Cruises. It has an eight-day European Explorer sailing from Barcelona to Southampton, departing on 10 July aboard Majestic Princess. Prices start from £949 per person. Zadar The Croatian coastal city of Zadar is a lesser-known cruise destination but is quieter than the the more popular Dubrovnik and Split, making it a great way to spend a day off the ship. Sailing on smaller ships can be advantageous as they can fit into the city's old port at the centre of the city, giving cruise passengers direct access to its ancient Roman streets and isolated coves. Alternatively, the city centre is just a 12-minute shuttle bus from Zadar's main cruise terminal. Popular excursions include hiking through the Paklenica National Park where you can witness breathtaking canyons, caves, cliffs and natural works of art known locally as skrape. Luxury small ship brand Azamara visits Zadar and can get you right to the centre of town. It has a 10-night Croatia Intensive Voyage departing from Athens on 12 July, with prices starting from £2,139 per person. Bilbao Barcelona may be the gem of the north of Spain but with locals complaining about overtourism on La Rambla, a potentially more welcoming option along the coast is Bilbao. While Barcelona has its unique architecture and Catalan culture, Bilbao brings its own unique flavour as a cruise stop as the largest city in the Basque country. It has its own Guggenheim Museum, stunning views from the 251-metre high Mount Artxanda and a Winston Churchill-themed pub. Stadium tours are also available to the Estadio de San Mamés to learn about the city's successful football club Athletic Bilbao. Royal Caribbean visits Bilbao during its Northern Spain cruise aboard Independence of the Seas. A week-long roundtrip from Southampton departing on 4 October starts from £749 per person. Rotterdam Amsterdam is in the process of phasing out cruise ships to reduce overtourism. Many ships now stop in Rotterdam instead and passengers may still be able to take an excursion to the Dutch capital. But it is also worth exploring Rotterdam itself. Ships dock right in the centre, and this is a walkable city where you can enjoy the Blaak cube houses and the old harbour. Money geeks can even visit the museum of tax.
