Doing a Cruise in Asia? Know these 10 PRO Tips Before you Set Sail! | Celebrity Solstice

Doing a Cruise in Asia? Know these 10 PRO Tips Before you Set Sail! | Celebrity Solstice

so I am now home for one week from my Asia cruise and super excited to share with you all 10 tips and pro tips that I learned while on my Asia [Music] cruise hey everybody it’s Brandon the weekend Cruiser where I go to weekend Cruise just about every weekend and I just returned from cruising around Asia with the Celebrity Solstice this was a 12 night cruise that left from Singapore going to Hong Kong a few stops in Thailand as well as Vietnam on the way there and I had such a good time so I’ve been you know kind of evaluating how to share with you all what my experience was and something that you might could learn and take away from it in the past I’ve done Port Recaps those don’t seem to do too good I think it’s way too much detail so I think what I’m going to do is just say hey here’s some really good best practices if you’re going over on an Asia cruise and things that you need to know about so that you have a better experience than what I had and I wanted to share that with you so let’s get into the 10 Pro tips that I have for your next Asia cruise first thing that I’ll say is make sure that you show up early so when you are coming to an Asia trip especially if you were in the US or Europe the time change is drastic I believe Singapore was 12 hours for me um and then Thailand and Vietnam were 13 hours ahead so it is topsy turvy like what is at noon is now at midnight so it is really difficult to adjust to that and you don’t want to do that on your cruise come to where your ship is going to be leaving from a few days earlier maybe go to a different place somewhere around in Asia where you can get used to the time change push yourself a little bit so by the time you get on the ship you can fully enjoy and you’re ready to go the second thing that I’ll say is it’s a 12 night sailing and what I mean by that is you can’t eat so much so I think I made it to night 10 and all of a sudden my body was like I’m done you cannot eat anymore stop eating we can’t do this so at night 10 I really cut back on how much I was eating because I just physically could not eat eat that much anymore I was cruising with one of my very good friends and he insist on going to the main dining room for every single meal and I wound up ordering like dessert every time I’d get an appetizer or two appetizers two Entre what have you was a hodge podge of stuff but having three set meals like that like I’m not I’m not used to that and so by Night 10 I was tapped out so make sure that you’re watching your food intake and you’re slowing yourself down a little bit for a longer cruise I know most of you probably don’t do weekends all the time like I’m used to three nice I can eat what I want and then I go back to a normal schedule this was like four cruises in a row for me and I just I blew my food diet way too quick the third thing that I’ll say is make sure you bring money in the local currencies specifically Thailand and Vietnam this is a place where it actually became a little problematic from time to time that we did not have local currency the ATMs are great if you can find an ATM you can use one of those me on the other hand I found about four different ATMs and all of them declined my card or my bank declined my card so if you are traveling abroad not that that’s a risk that you’re taking that’s normally how I like to get money is go to a local ATM and just take out what I need in this case it didn’t work and kind of left me high and dry luckily my friend’s cards worked so he was able to take money out and we were able to buy we wanted and do what we needed uh kind of after the fact we didn’t ever have it for Thailand we did finally wise up and get it for Vietnam but the main reason that I’ll say this is there bathrooms that will charge you in Asia and I’ve even seen this and other places that I’ve traveled to it is a nominal fee it is not much it was like five bot I think that’s tybot um it wasn’t much but you still needed to have the money in order to use the restroom facility and there was one moment where I needed to use the restroom facility and I didn’t have any money um so you can see how that might be problematic the fourth thing that I’ll say to do is we wish we came away from this wishing we would have spent more money I mean who goes on a trip to Asian was like we should have spent more money we did that we kind of took the cheaper easier option out in several of our large cities where we had overnight stays on the cruise ship the thing that we didn’t take into account is to get to the bigger cities so I’m thinking Bangkok Hanoi your ship is not going to dock there it’s kind of like the Venice situation where the ship is down at raena um it’s about the same distance so for us to get to Bangkok and get to Hanoi we had to spend two to three hours in the bus one way and then when we were done with that we would take the bus back 2 to 3 hours again to get back to the ship that was not a fun experience riding in a bus for 6 hours one day or even four hours in one day you feel like you miss a lot of time you’re just seeing the highway at that point we wish that we would have spent more money and stayed in the big cities now I’m not saying you necessarily need to do an Excursion where you know Royal Caribbean books you a hotel and does all that stuff and gives you things to do you can book a shuttle that’ll take you just to the big city and then you can book everything that you want to try to save some money but if I was to do it again I would absolutely if I had an overnight anywhere I would stay the night in that location to make sure that I got some of the culture and some of that experience the other thing that I’ll say with the excursions you know you’re on the bus for a long period of time is you also miss out on the authentic food of the city so when you’re doing an Excursion with the cruise line you’re going to take that bus and it’s going to go to a buffet where you’re going to eat with three or four other buses and it is a very I call it sterilized or santized kind of version of the food so I went to Thailand and did not get spicy food I’m still a little bit upset by this because all I had was the buffay options that were there like I couldn’t get true authentic food and I really missed that so that’ll lead me to my next one is if you are going here look at excursions outside of the cruise line booking through the cruise line is super easy and some people like knowing that you’ve got guaranteed return to the ship you’re going to miss out though when you are on a tour bus with 40 other other people it’s going to go a little bit slower you might not go exactly where you want to go you’re not going to get the same level of food that you can get by checking out something with a smaller group I personally use get your guide I should have done it here we took the easy way out and just booked everything through the cruise line um but going forward if we go over there we’re really going to look at third-party vendors to give us even better excursions number one we’ll do a lot more and we’ll be able to see more but we can you know experience it in a smaller group going with a large group people just isn’t a thing and I’m still upset about the food situation the sixth thing I’ll mention is download the grab app gr a this is the Uber alternative in Asia so I think it’s actually owned by um Uber so if you log into Uber it’ll say download the grab app make sure that you do download this before you get over there or even when you’re there get it all set up so that if you do want to go somewhere you’re able to do that so if you don’t want to do an Excursion for instance if you say Brandon I don’t to use a third party I kind of just want to do my own thing there are some really nice areas by the port but you’re still going to have to take an Uber or in this case a grab to get you there so make sure that you download it it’s actually really easy to use I used it in several locations while we were there but there were a lot of other people that did this make sure that you are not doing the grab bike they do have little vesas that will come pick you up with their motorbike version and you can ride you know one person on each one and you can do it that way but I’m not sure if that’s the safest option or the option that I would want if you’re venturous it is cheaper option to have a grab come pick you up not sure that I recommend that though the seven thing I’ll say is make sure that you wear long pants and cover your shoulders every single day so many of the excursions will be going to Temples there are a ton of amazing and beautiful temples over in Thailand Vietnam all over the place even some of the royal places that you’re going to be going to or some of the government facilities will require you to cover your shoulders and your knees to pay resp respect to that situation or to that location so some of the tours I noticed did not say you need to have something for your shoulders and something to cover your legs and you wound up still needing it chances are you will be going somewhere that you need to cover your shoulders and your legs so make sure that you have something whether you have a throw on with you some pants that you brought with you uh make sure you can change on the bus or whatever tour you’re on for your Excursion they will be selling elephant pants these are little pants that you can buy um for very cheap outside of most of these establishments if you bring shorts and you forget to bring anything to cover up even saw one woman who had her knees covered but ever so barely with a pair of like halfway pants I don’t even know what those are called I mean she was told that she needed to wear something a little bit longer so just go prepared this leads me into my next one and thinking about being prepared when you go to Vietnam Thailand even Singapore and Hong Kong to a certain degree the weather’s going to be really unpredictable here you don’t know what you’re going to get it’s probably going to be hot it’s probably going to be humid and guess what it’s probably going to rain at some point because it’s it’s not a tropical forest there’s another term that they use for it but it’s very dense and the weather can shift we luckily only had one or two days of rain while we were there but just because you go on vacation does not mean you’re going to have amazing weather AKA I’m in Ocean key right now with MSE and it’s raining outside so just because you’re on vacation plan for rain plan for different kinds of weather it might be cool in the morning and then warm in the afternoon so bring an umbrella bring a poncho I had just a small little um car umbrella and that worked perfect for me and I could fold it up and take it back on the bus so that we could go back the night thing that I’ll talk about is in h which I think is how you say that or the Imperial City specifically is where we went in h and we had a wonderful time there but we were rushed we wish that we would have more time there we didn’t really enjoy the trip as much as we could have it is beautiful it’s massive and by the way it’s being restored more and more every single day so if you’re going there in the future it’s going to be even more pretty as they finish different sections here but I highly recommend you doing a third-party Excursion specifically to this location or even doing it on your own so that you can take it all in one of the hard lessons that I learned here as well is don’t wait for the last restroom for your trip before you use the restroom had a horrible experience so they wanted us to go into this theater was the last stop that we could go into um to use the restroom and there was a policy to into the theater you had to take your shoes off to show respect that’s another thing you’re going to have to do in a lot of temples so make sure you’ve got good shoes good socks that you can slip on and off quickly so I took my shoes off went in went to the restroom and very quickly went huh I’m getting ready to walk into a men’s restroom with my socks on and I had a I had a panic moment but I looked in other people were wearing their socks and so I went in I B bit the bullet but my socks were wet the entire rest of the day and by the way I showed respect to take my shoes off coming out of there I trapped all of that back through that theater and I was kind of schemed out by it I can’t believe I’m sharing this with you all on um YouTube but here we are so the 10th thing that I’ll share is make sure that you do my time dining if you are going on an Asia cruise or select dining whatever that cruise line is calling their flexible dining policy make sure that’s the one that you are booking because your excursions are going to come back at all sorts of times and they’re not linked to anything and so they’re definitely not linked to a dinner time so make sure that you have the flexibility to come back and go straight to dinner there’s even one time where our Excursion ran like 2 hours late so even if we would have made a reservation we would have completely missed that we barely got there by time the restaurant closed so best practice have my time dining don’t worry about one of the fixed seatings that you have to make if you like the main dining room the main dining room by the way on Celebrity was absolutely fantastic I would highly recommend it especially compared to the buffet the buffet was good but their main dining room was amazing all right everybody I hope you enjoyed these 10 tips that I learned or some tricks of the trade that I picked up while I was on my 12 night Asia cruise on Celebrity Solstice this is Brandon the weekend Cruiser hoping to see you on a weekend Cruise or longer sailing soon

In December 2023, I went on my very first Asia Cruise with Celebrity Cruises on the Celebrity Solstice! Even as an experienced cruiser there were things on this cruise that I needed to learn or just didn’t know! Will Walk you through my Pro Tips to ensure you have a great experience for your Asia Cruise!

Asia cruise ports we visited:
Singapore (embarkation)
Ko Samui Thailand
Laem Chabang (Bangkok), Thailand
Ho Chi Minh City (Phu My), Vietnam
Nha Trang, Vietnam
Chan May, Vietnam
Halong Bay (Hanoi), Vietnam
Hong Kong

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