We will be cruising on the Oceania Nautica next year and will have a PH suite. I understand it comes with a butler and certain amenities (whatever that means) The consensus was that if you liked the cabin sizes of the Mariner you better book one of the PH suites on the Nautica (which we did)

Questions: Do you pay for every item in the refrig (assuming we have one) such as, bottled water, juices, soft drinks? If the answer is yes, then I guess you pay for all of these when ordered anywhere else aboard ship. What does the butler do for us? I understand he makes all of the "preferential reservations", etc. - that part I like!


Having only cruised with Regent (RSSC) and Crystal this will be a new cruising experience for us.
The itin is fabulous and the price was right.

Any comments would be appreciated.

We recently had a PH on the Regatta, (I did post a review on this) and thus had a Butler. Yes you will pay for anything you take out of the refridge. The good news is that you can take whatever you want onboard, and what we did was tell our Butler that we were going to remove the items from the refridge, and we all agreed on a place to put them, thus if we did use, say a bottle of water, then we would know - we also kept track of whatever we used and told him every day or two, and there was no problem. We put our own stuff in the refridg and our Butler had no issues - if he had a question, he just asked us.

Yes it is "pay as you go" for anything from non alcoholic drinks to sodas to water - but if you know that going in then you can compensate by buying and bringing your own things as you go for your cabin - you cannot consume those in the public rooms, except for wine which you can bring to the dining room and they charge you a corkage fee, last I heard it was $20. per bottle - but hey if you are bringing an expensive bottle of wine onboard, then that might be ok. We actually found some reasonable priced wines and generally ordered wine each night, if we didn't finish it, they would keep it for us and it didn't matter where you were, bar or any of the restaurants, they would find and bring you your bottle of wine - so we definitely didn't leave any undrunk!!

Our Butler was great, and he set up a cocktail party for us one night with appetizers which we discussed in advance, made sure we had plenty of glasses and ice and such. He also, one night merged our 2 person "sharing" reservation in Toscana, with two other couples that we wanted to eat with, into a 6 person "only" reservation and that was not easy, as the alternative restaurants were full every single night. So, since you have a PH, you get to make two reservations in each restaurant thru your Butler, unless you want to go do them yourselves, and my advice is do it - you can always cancel, and if you are lucky you can merge with other couples that you might meet. Unless you have cabin numbers, then you can only make reservations for 2, and you will end up sharing unless you specify a table for two.

Hope that helped - we enjoyed our Oceania cruise and hope you will too. Like I said, you can read my review on the Cruise Review board.

We always have a PH and I ask the butler to take everything out of the fridge at the beginning of the trip..we dont use anything in there anyway so it works out much better for us..
We love the size of the PH it works for us..
Looking forward to our Back 2 Back Nov 3 to 25th
Jan

We were just upgraded to a PH1 yesterday on Nautica. How much is the butler around? Is he also your room steward? Is he only assigned to our cabin or do we share?

Thanks

He comes in routinely twice a day, in the morning to refresh the ice, glasses, mini bar etc, and again in the afternoon if you've ordered appetizers (you have to fill out a form each day that you want them)and to refresh the ice again. No he is not your room steward, there will be a seperate room stewardess/steward and assistant. He has more than one cabin, usually 15 or 20, can't remember.
If you want him or something from him at other times, you just call the extension and he will respond quickly by either phone or show up at the door, if he is off for some reason, another Butler will respond.
Congratulations on getting upgraded, I'm surprised as usually the PH's sell out quickly - hope you enjoy your cabin - we sure did.

Congratulations on your upgrade..
You will love the Penthouse and the ship!!
Jan