One of the worst aspects of any cruise vacation is the fact that you actually have to pay your final bill! (Just kidding). If you’ve never cruised with Royal Caribbean before, I wanted to share exactly what that final Guest Account Summary will look like once you receive it. This final statement is from our Ovation of the Seas cruise that we took to Alaska. It was waiting for us the morning of disembarkation. You can also go to Guest Services at any point on the cruise to get a printed version of it (for charges up to that point).
One difference between the Disney Cruise Line final bill and the Royal Caribbean one has to do with excursions. On Royal Caribbean, anything booked before the cruise such as excursions, dining, and drink packages are paid for when they are booked. That lightens the final bill quite a bit.
On the first page of this bill are my charges followed by two of Nancy’s (which continued onto the next page). As you can see, I had a number of charges from various bars around the ship. They don’t differentiate the charges for the beverages from the gratuities that we added (in addition to the automatic 18% gratuity that is added). I also had the gratuities that we added at the specialty dining places, but not the charges for the meal itself. We paid for those up front by purchasing a four night specialty dining package. Some of the other charges for the specialty dining were from alcoholic beverages that we purchased in those restaurants. There were also charges for some shopping that we did while on board. There are a lot of shops on Ovation of the Seas.
We each had a charge for the Royal IQ App that we added while onboard that was supposed to give us messaging for the duration of the cruise. I thought it was for messages within the Royal IQ App. Once we purchased it, we discovered that we could message each other with the iMessage App on our iPhones, so we decided to just use that. The messages always got delivered and we didn’t miss any notifications. Even if it cost us each $7.95 to be able to use iMessage, it was well worth the money. It is possible that iMessage would have worked without that charge, but we didn’t test that out before we purchased the Royal IQ App onboard.
We had two credits that were placed on our account. One was from our travel agent, Michelle McKnight (michelle@touringplans.com). I have no idea where the other $150 credit came from. I don’t remember booking the room with any sort of credit associated to it, but it got re-priced to a lower price several times before we actually sailed, so one of those re-bookings could have attached a credit to our room. The final payment for the room went on a Visa card that we added at check-in to settle our final charges.
The second page of this bill continues Nancy’s charges (although likely these included my drinks as well that she put onto her card). It appears that she paid for the additional beverages and gratuities at Chops Grille when we went there. The Fish and Ships charged under communication was actually a deep fried candy bar, I have no idea why it ended up in that category (it was really good). The last two sets of charges were for our kids, who didn’t purchase very much using their cards even though they had full charging privileges.
The last page of our bill was just random notifications and small print.
You can also obtain a running version of this in the Royal IQ App.
The app also allows you to enter your email address so you can get your final onboard account balance (and all transactions) sent to you after you have left the ship.
I hope this helped explain one of the saddest aspects of cruising!
If you have enjoyed this article, please be sure to check out our Disney Cruise Line information page or our Royal Caribbean Cruise Line Information page, which has useful hints in addition to our cruise trip reports!
