Combine a planned trip to view several Norwegian Cruise Line ships this fall, a big sale (including travel agent bonuses) and I found myself booking us a Mexican Riviera trip for November! The 15th-22nd, to be exact.
The Background
For most of this year I have been working on rebranding and actually building my travel agency. The new name (trademark applied for) is Cruise Made EASY (https://cruisemadeeasy.com), and I am an NCL Specialist.
As part of that effort, I have been working with my Norwegian Business Development Manager (BDM), Lynn, to setup a pair of trips, one to each coast, to do what are known as “ship inspections,” — industry speak for looking all through a ship, seeing the stateroom types and public areas. It’s something some advisors do to gain familiarity with the ships they will be booking people on.
I had planned to try and tour the Norwegian Bliss and Norwegian Jade back-to-back November 8th and 9th. It was very important to me to be able to do this escorted by a BDM, as that’s the key that unlocks being able to see staterooms and other non-public areas of the ship. I want to video all the stateroom categories, services, and so forth for my YouTube channel.
Well, the escorted tour for Bliss is November 2nd. My niece’s wedding is in Kansas City the first. So that wasn’t going to work. However, the escorted tour for the Jade is November 15th, and that’s just before she leaves on a Mexican Riviera sailing that’s actually one of the least-expensive ones of the season. AND it’s a double Latitude Rewards point trip, so we’ll get 14 points for the price of 7! Travel agent incentives that were too good to ignore were being offered for this one, too.
SO….here we are!
Thy have actually flipped the ports — Puerto Vallarta is first; Cabo San Lucas is last. That’s a good thing for us, because the first time we did this trip, we didn’t get to do what we’d planned in Puerto Vallarta because we were getting off the ship. The Mexican Riviera, though, was the four days of that entire trip that actually felt like a vacation. Now we’re ready to try some more things…but we’ll definitely be making room to visit the Sand Bar again.
Yes, I’ll be live-blogging it…or at least as best I can. A lot of work-related responsibilities have to track along on this trip, it will be only partly vacation.