Following on from the previous post - Princess did get in touch with us, and we have cabins on the 26 June cruise.
Adam in particular got a fairly good deal from them. Cruising solo is never cheap - on Princess you basically pay the price for two people if you want a cabin to yourself (and most other cruise lines are the same). But he got a balcony cabin next to ours for a price that's noticeably lower than the prices they're offering on their website.
As I'm writing this, it's 84 days until the cruise is due to leave. And although it's looking far more promising than the 17 (!!) previous cruise bookings that I have had cancelled due to COVID-19, there are still issues to be sorted.
Main one is that the State governments need to come to an agreement with the cruise lines about onboard protocols. I don't think this will be a huge issue - most of the mainstream cruise lines have been operating out of the USA for almost a year now under ever-evolving COVID-19 protocols, and I'd imagine that the State governments here aren't going to come up with anything more onerous than the USA CDC guidelines were when cruising restarted there. I'd expect that they'll want all passengers and crew to be fully vaccinated (and actually the Australian Government announcement when they lifted the ban said that will be mandatory at the Federal level anyway), they might want us to take a test before boarding, they'll probably want us to wear masks when we board and leave the ship and maybe in crowded areas onboard. I can live with all of this.
