Puerto Rico's Governor announced plans to expand the cruise pier in Old San Juan to be able to handle cruise ships carrying 6,000 passengers.

The plan according to Alejandro Garcia Padilla will be able to accomodate Royal Caribbean's Quantum of the Seas, which will visit San Juan in December 2014, with nine more visits scheduled for 2015.

The new pier expansion will cost $8.7 million and will extend the pier by 182 feet as well as build a new baggage inspection office.

Quantum of the Seas will be 167,000 tons and carry at least 4,180 passengers when she begins sailings in November 2014.

It's here! This week's Royal Caribbean Blog Podcast episode is now available to listen to.

Episode 14 is now available for downloading and this week, we look at when to book a Royal Caribbean cruise.

In this episode, we compare the pros and cons of booking a Royal Caribbean cruise well in advance or waiting to the last minute.  Matt has come up with the good and bad for both options to let you decide which method will work best for you.  It's not an easy decision but there's benefits to going either way.

We also have a lot of great listener emails, tweets and Facebook messages to share this week!

Here’s the podcast page for Episode 14. And don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast via RSS or on iTunes!

Take a listen and as always, let us know what you think! Please rate and review the podcast on iTunes and leave your comments below!

Royal Caribbean announced today that its Quantum of the Seas godmother Kristin Chenoweth will be the center of attention onboard their parade float during Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade this year.

Chenoweth is a Broadway and television star and is well known for her ability to sing.  It's unclear yet what Chenoweth will be doing besides waving to the crowd.  Many expect her to perform a song as part of the festivities, although this remains to be seen.

Chenoweth will appear on the parade float that Royal Caribbean is calling, "A World at Sea" that depicts three “WOW” moments found only on Royal Caribbean, including the cruise line’s signature FlowRider surf simulator, thrilling zip line and iconic rock climbing wall.

The 87th Annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade airs nationwide on NBC-TV on Thursday, November 28, 2013 from 9 a.m. to noon in all time zones.

Royal Caribbean has selected AIMS Innovation to monitor its Microsoft BizTalk system, at the cruise line's Florida headquarters and aboard its cruise ships.  Royal Caribbean will use the AIMS for BizTalk multi-tenant solution to monitor and manage the large bursts of traffic and information downloads that occurs when its cruise ships come into port. From its Florida "mission control", Royal Caribbean can check the status of each ship's BizTalk Solution, no matter where it is in the world.

Max Schmidt, vice president of IT Infrastructure, Operations and Information Security for Royal Caribbean, commented on the new deal, "In order to deal with bursts of information across our system, we needed a more flexible, intuitive BizTalk monitoring solution that could help us anticipate problems and lead us quickly to the exact location of errors to fix them in a short timeframe.  We chose AIMS for BizTalk because it gives us an effective tool to quickly and accurately monitor our data without using extensive resources to manage it or paying for expensive software customization."

Royal Caribbean will benefit from the deal in the following ways

• Decreases the cruise line's monitoring time. IT administrators only need to log into one environment to automatically get information from all the ships. Plus, administrators don't need to determine the operational threshold for each system.

• Prevents downtime. AIMS for BizTalk sends early warning alerts before downtime occurs and pinpoints the problem's exact location versus making IT staff guess which warnings are real.

• Learns and adapts to systems' behavior. AIMS for BizTalk modifies alerts over time dynamically "self learning" traffic patterns to make alerts more accurate over time. The dynamic nature of AIMS is critical to Royal Caribbean due to the varying loads during boarding and disembarkation which is considerably higher than normal operations. Other products gave us constant false alerts making our previous monitoring solutions unusable.

• Can easily and quickly be installed by any IT staff member. It takes 5 minutes without special training through Microsoft Azure cloud or a local install.

Royal Caribbean is taking steps to make it clearer to guests that book their cruises how their booking discounts are being applied.

Travel Weekly has a post about Royal Caribbean's new "Pricing and Promotions" upgrade that allows travel agents and guests to easily see where promotions are applied.  In addition, this change will improve the ability to combine discounts and keep track of which amounts are applied.

Royal Caribbean instituted this new program to show guests how their discounts are being applied throughout the booking process, from start to finish.  The end goal is to make things more transparent.

“In the past people would just call us and say ‘I’m over 55, what’s your rate for seniors?’” noted Diana Block, vice president of revenue management for Royal Caribbean International. "We might say, 'it’s $1,099.' They couldn’t see the value; that in the general marketplace it was $1,299 and that we were giving them a $200 discount.”

Royal Caribbean's Allure of the Seas, the largest cruise ship in the world, has been quietly dealing with propulsion issues that is limiting the ship's top speed.

Cruise Critic first reported that over the last three weeks, the ship has had, "a significant reduction in the ship's speed".  The result of which has been less time at each port of call the ship makes.

Royal Caribbean spokeswoman Cynthia Martinez described the situation as, "Allure of the Seas currently has a small restriction on her top speed. All equipment is fully operational, and there is no impact on the maneuverability of the ship or on the safety of our guests and crew." 

The impact on guests has been less time at each port and in some cases cancelled shore excursions due to not having enough time to complete it.

It's not clear what exact issue is causing the slower ship speed, but it has not been a big enough problem to cancel any sailings or affect the onboard guest experience.

Royal Caribbean's Mariner of the Seas will host the world’s first cruise-based, all-champions Latin dance competition on January 16, 2014.

Cruise and Ferry reports that the dance competiton will onclude contestants such as Thailand’s World Youth Latin champions Koupey Sahaifa and Sutatip Bunwila, Amateur Latin champions Johnston Lim and Nicole Tan from Malaysia and Japan Open champions Artyom Kilmenov and Giula Nuzio from Italy, among other top competitors in the ‘Battle of the Giants’ Latin Dance Championship.

Passengers onboard Mariner of the Seas will be able to vote for winners at the "Come Dancing on Mariner of the Seas" event. 

The latin dance competition is open to all guests on Mariner of the Seas and will also feature champions’ previews and dance workshops, including technique tips for Cha Cha, Rumba and Rock ‘n’ Roll.

Mariner of the Seas will be calling at Port Klang in Kuala Lumpur and Langkawi during the four-night roundtrip from Singapore.

It's Friday and hopefully your post-Halloween candy hangover wont interefere with enjoying some great photos our readers sent in from their Royal Caribbean cruise vacations.  In fact, every week we ask our readers to send us their best Royal Caribbean photos to share with everyone!

First photo this week belongs to Jill Snyder who is excited for her March 2014 Royal Caribbean cruise so decided to make this Crown and Anchor jack-o-lantern.  Cool!

This photo was sent us by Kevin Damghani of Brilliance of the Seas in Boston with the sun rising.  Beautiful shot!

I really like the composition of this photo from Ross and Pam of their Radiance of the Seas cruise to Bora Bora with the mountain in the background.  I'm sure most guests were off the ship exploring, but this is a heck of a view from the pool.

Speaking of pool photos, here's one from Victor of the H2O Zone on Oasis of the Seas.  I'm not sure about everyone reading this, but I could go for a day with this view right about now.

If we didn't include your photo this week, then that means you need to send it in to us for use on a future Friday Photos post.  We want to see your favorite Royal Caribbean cruise photos and you can use this form to send them to us.

Royal Caribbean revealed yesterday the design for its new parade float that will be a part of the 87th Annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York.

Royal Caribbean is calling its float "A World at Sea" and was designed by the creative artists of the Macy’s Parade Studio and will bring the cruise vacation experience to midtown Manhattan and beyond via three distinct postcard scenes which take place onboard a Royal Caribbean ship. The rotating scenes depict three “WOW” moments found only on Royal Caribbean, including the cruise line’s signature FlowRider surf simulator, thrilling zip line and iconic rock climbing wall.

The float will also be a big advertisement for Quantum of the Seas, the brand new cruise shop that will have its inaugural cruise in November 2014.  Royal caribbean is promising a "special, surprise performance" along with the float.

The 87th Annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade airs nationwide on NBC-TV on Thursday, November 28, 2013 from 9 a.m. to noon in all time zones.

Just because you're on a Royal Caribbean cruise doesn't mean holiday traditions stop. Today is Halloween and over the years, Royal Caribbean takes some time to celebrate onboard and encourages its guests to do so as well.  

Here are a few fun photos of Halloween celebrations onboard Royal Caribbean ships.

Photo by SA_Steve

Photo by SA_Steve

Photo by Jim McCluskey

Photo by Iglu Cruise

Photo by Tuba Akgün