Day 1 of Quantum of the Seas (Royal Carribean) Cruise to nowhere

The day started well as I was quite sleepy and tired, thus I slept in instead of doing my morning workouts. I finished packing well ahead of time and after P came home, we had a quick lunch (of maggie mee) and headed to marina bay cruise centre. It's the first time we arrived there, although we saw the huge cruise ships when we stayed garden view in MBS before. There were not many cars on the road heading to the cruise centre and when we arrived and unloaded our sole luggage, we saw a few other families arriving with us. I think overall just three or four groups of people and there were a lot of staff standing around. 

Purple for Star Class (like the royalty)

Once we identified ourselves as Star Class passengers, there was a staff holding a purple placard ushering us to all the different counters. It felt like VIP treatment immediately, but things could not sped up much as there's the mandatory ART that we have to take before boarding and the results took at least 30min. The uncomfortable part about taking the test was not the test itself but waiting in the makeshift area out of a carpark and the weather was rather hot and stuffy this afternoon. Even for Star Class passengers, there wasn't a more comfortable area but just cordoned off and nearest to the boarding area for priority boarding so we can board anytime as soon as we received the SMS. Well, I cant complain much as the staff serving us and waiting around are stuck there the whole day, it kind of reminded me of the election duty I had performed many years ago. As for the test, it's quite similar to the swab test but less invasive as the swab stick only went to the lower part of the nose for swabbing.

Other two groups of Star Class passengers waiting for us

The rest of the passengers grouped according to their check-in time

Of course, one of the perks of being Star Class passengers is that we can check in anytime, even if we did not managed to get the earliest time slot of 2pm. I've been looking out for the booking of time slots since months ago but we only managed to choup the 3pm timeslot. Nevertheless, we arrived at about 1.30pm to take the ART since we can board at anytime. We were not the first few to board as our results only came in slightly later at 2++, the staff kept checking on us to see if we had received the SMS as we were the only ones left at the Star Class area. I peeked at the list of Star Class passengers on the staff's hand and I think there are about 9-10 groups. While waiting for ART, we saw a family of six and it was a couple with 4 young gals (1-10 years old). Yeah, there was quite a few families with children so I guess we cant enjoy a holiday totally without the kids but when we spoke to the staff, the capacity for the cruise is about 500+ compared to the full capacity of 5000. Even though they are allowed to operate at 25%, I think many people decided not to go ahead with their trips. 

Complimentary Moet champagne sent to the room

Generous fruits and canapes were ready

Refillable minibar

Lots of Evian bottled water for us

Our room dining area

Masks, tracelets, Hand Sanitizers and lots of menus

Very comfy living room area 

Stairs leading to our loft bedroom

Very comfy bed but pillows too soft

After clearing the immigrations and showing many staff our passports many times, we were finally on board at 2.40pm and we met our Royal Genie once we got onboard. There were many crew and staff members lining up to welcome the guests at the entrance but we were already well taken care of by our Royal Genie Peng Yu dressed in her purple work suit. It was hard to tell the difference of being on board and on land as the cruise just looked like a big shopping mall. Being virgin cruisers, we were overloaded with information and excited to get to our suite so Peng Yu brought us up immediately. The deck we arrived on was on level 5 and there were two lobby areas with rows of elevators to get us to other parts of the ship. 

Our room was on deck 10 and Peng Yu briefed us the necessities after we finally got there, it was a long walk as our room is right at the aft at all the loft suites area. After she gave us lots of information, she left us to settle down in the room. We excitedly explored around and took pictures, it felt bigger than our home so there was still plenty of space to look at. After reading milelion blog, I thought it would be better for us to handle the luggage on our own, but they assured us that the luggage would be brought to our room almost immediately. It was a good idea as we had to go around to take the ART and wait for the results so being luggage free was really better. 

More gratitude and blessings from me and for me, we are going for the star!

So I was on my way to my parents place yesterday, checked my email and saw an email from Royal Carribean sales team, they are offering us an upgrade to the Grand Loft suite, we'll just need to top up $400 ($200 per pax/ $50 per pax per night). Although there's only one bedroom, it's a loft and it's Star Class with royal genie! I wouldnt say it's a no brainer upgrade as it's already a lot of money spent on this holiday, it's still reasonable compared to what we would spend if we were going to Japan but still, there's the restrictions on food and no dining out so we cant take full advantage of the unlimited food and beverage privilege. However, I got tempted after I did a quick check and saw how grand and luxury the room looked. We will also get complimentary iFLY and VOOM so the actual cost to top up from our original balcony stateroom to this Grand Loft is still few hundreds per pax. 

The previous upgrade we managed to secure to the Grand Suite was already a huge huge room, so I checked with P and see if he is keen. He is in a really good mood lately as he finally managed to get an offer at his 'dream job' so he even offered to pay for the upgrade. We decided to go for it as this is really once a lifetime experience, never in our dreams I had imagined we'll get to be on Star Class on our very first cruise experience. 

I was negative! 

After P got home from work, we went to Swissotel Stamford hotel (where we got married!) to get our swab tests done. I've heard lots of horror stories about how bad it is and people left with teary eyes after getting poked etc. To my relief, I only felt that it was ticklish, like someone used a cotton bud to dig my nose so it was pretty alright, and my virgin swab test went really well. I did not feel the long swab sticks getting too far back into my nose at all, thankfully the lady was really skilful. The whole place where we took the swab test was really quiet, there were many staff standing around and it seemed that we were the only passengers they were serving so the whole process was really quick. In fact, we walked through Raffles City to take the train home and the whole mall was just scattered with some people here and there. About seven hours later, we got the notifications on the app that the test results came back negative and we were all cleared to go. 

My regular manicurist did this nice design for me