When do you get to do your casual 9pm check in?? This week too, right?
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I think Monday? I get confused with the countdown clock but it says 37 days (and change) today.
Haha well with only 30 days in September the “check in date” is the same date as the first day of your cruise.
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But is that midnight after the date of your cruise or the midnight that starts the date of your cruise? 
For you that would be 9pm the day before your cruise starts 
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Of course it doesn’t help that we have to travel on the actual day before so my calendar is blocked starting the 12th…
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Ok so that’s next Monday. 
One week from today!
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DCL uses the headshot to affiliate your face with your key card. So when you scan in to board, for example, the CM can verify your face.
And this conversation has caused me to note my check-in date on my calendar, which is midnight, Sept. 24. Time to start gathering the things. It’s esp complicate b/c I booked three rooms with extended family, and my nuclear family is spread across the three rooms.
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Ok, I think I am ready! Here are all of my documents. For reference, I could very easily “resize document” in the native Windows photo viewer. No need to play games with WhatsApp.
ETA: I’m relying on Google to fill in the majority of the demographic data in the “for speed” category.
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Good luck! The toughest part for me is going to be doing two cabins. Trying to decide whether to do one on phone and the other on the desktop, or divvy it up with DW, or just go sequential. Let me know what you end up doing (and how it goest)!
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My current plan is to do my cabin first, followed by my parents, all on the desktop. It’s a slightly different situation than you but I figure if they have to wait an extra 30-60 minutes to board they will be fine. But fingers crossed we are all in an early one. Don’t forget I’m earthworm status.
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Me too! Solidarity. But it all starts with one.
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First time I didn’t think about what to do but ended up starting each one on the phone and finishing each one on the desktop (but that was also due to a very horrible, awful, bad, 4 hour experience of trying & trying over & over to get the site to cooperate and so I was trying anything that could get an internet connection- this was before tiered check-in though so all levels were trying at the same day, same time and I’m SO glad they tiered now because that didn’t happen for the 2nd time).
The second time I had both a desktop & phone ready and I found it fairly easy to do one stateroom on the desktop and then click along on the phone just a question or so behind (FWIW the desktop check-in button showed up almost a full minute before the phone one did so another reason I was happy to have both up and ready to go).
If DW is game, having 2 people who know the information to put in is definitely going to be faster. I might for the 3rd cruise allow DH to do one of the rooms since I’ve now done it twice and he watched me do this most recent check-in and that might be enough for him to be helpful and since I’ve done it twice now, I won’t get too flustered if he has a question for me while I’m trying to get my stateroom in as quick as I can too (I am not a great multi-tasker if one of the things requires speaking/responding while I’m doing the other thing).
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Be prepared for both the desktop version and the app. Sometimes one will crash, but the other will work.
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Ok, success! I have 12:15pm for my family and 12:30 for my parents. Is noon the first boarding group?
I had an incognito browser and it went very smoothly. Two gotchas, my parents passports were vertical and the OCR did not work on their names/DOB, etc. So I had to manually enter that. It was not difficult. Second, I was expecting the “check-in” button to be much bigger or be an actual button. I am pretty sure I refreshed the page a few extra times at midnight and didn’t see “check in” appear right away.
I skipped everything non-essential and did cash for the payment. It is quite nice that they let you check all the people to cover everyone at once. I also hit driving but that’s the truth. Very helpful that it just let’s you click a box for “home address” as your post-cruise destination. I’m going back through now to update kids clubs and stuff.
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For the record if I waited until 9:30am it looks like I would have only lost an hour of ship time as 1:15 is still available. Earlier times might even have been open at like 6am. So I will probably weigh that in the future against staying up until midnight…
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Great job on your first time around! We got 12:30-12:45 for both staterooms our very first go. I’m not sure if it’s the same for all ports, but both times we’ve gone out of Miami the earliest time reported in the Facebook groups for boarding has been 11:30-11:45am. This 2nd time we got 11:45am-12 noon PAT (but actually got to port at 12:40 so we wasted an hour of our own time -some of us slept in & weren’t up & at 'em to be out the door from Oralando at 7-7:30am as planned).
We’re night owls here in my house and have the advantage of being in MT (not Phoenix though so we follow Daylight Savings) so 10pm is nothing, but if it messed with my bedtime a bunch and it was easier to be up earlier (which for me is not at all), then the times at 5-6am really aren’t too trivially different than at midnight. So definitely something worth weighing.
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Thanks! We are going out of Manhattan and were planning to stay in Connecticut the night before so I actually think this timing will work out well so we can split the drive between Thursday night and Friday morning.
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Smart to break up the drive. Orlando to Miami is probably pushing it on doing the full drive that morning, but we’re so used to 10-11 hours to Disneyland that it seems silly to do a whole transition for shortening a 3-4 hours drive. Also, we’ve done parks before both trips & I didn’t want to have to spend that last park day morning loading up to move somewhere and then have to do a 3-4 drive at the end of park time, and especially since we had days again in Orlando after the cruise with another hotel, doing it the way we did cut out one less transition to manage.
Our next cruise is on the Wish out of Port Canaveral and I would be lying if I said DH & I aren’t excited that Port Canaveral is much closer to Orlando. But we’re also still definitely open to cruising from Miami again & on the right ship/itinerary, we’d probably continue to add park days before and/or after.
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Update: they arrived today! Just in time for the 30-day checkin tonight! This was on the earlier end of when I thought we’d get them. Hooray! I have copies uploaded and stored on my phone and ready to go for checkin tonight.
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