Winter Break 2024. Prologue. What is Automatic Revalidation, Anyway?

Welcome to a special pre-vacation edition of the Kaplan Family Follies.

You may ask what warrants such a special edition? You may be thinking ‘they didn’t even finish posting Disney World from November, why are they wasting their time on an extra post?’ All valid inquiries. I have no answer. Here we go!

For our loyal readers, you will know that last Yeshiva Week we had a lovely cruise on Celebrity Beyond. After returning, we decided we must do another cruise, only this time something bigger and more kid-friendly. We didn’t want to be with 1000 of our closest friends and family, so we called Tzvi’s uncle (our travel agent) and said “put us on the ship without the kosher package.” (For those who don’t know, there are multiple ships that sail during the week in January when all Jewish schools have vacation, that offer special kosher dining packages, and the ships are filled with religious Jews.). That’s how we ended up booked on Royal Caribbean’s Harmony of the Seas out of Galveston, Texas. We decided we would fly into Houston the Thursday before and spend the weekend there before getting on the ship on Sunday. My parents decided to join us, and Sherry opted to book as well. We had to book Delta flights because the JetBlue flight times weren’t great. While we aren’t thrilled about that because we have zero Delta status, we’ll survive. We were all very excited.

Fast Forward to November 2023. And so it begins.

1. Inbar’s Visa.

As we were compiling documents and checking in for the cruise on the Royal Caribbean app, it occurred to us that Inbar is a 2nd year Au Pair, which means she is limited in where she can travel. She is currently on an expired J-1 visa; she’s allowed to stay in the U.S. and continue working, but if she leaves then she loses her J-1 status and gets kicked out of the au pair program. The only exception is Mexico, Canada and “Adjacent Caribbean Islands.”  That was great news, since our cruise stops in Mexico and the Caribbean Island of Roatan, right?  Wrong.  Roatan is an island in Honduras and is specifically not on the list of Adjacent Caribbean Islands. Obviously this was bad news. Tzvi spoke to the au pair agency multiple times, but it wasn’t looking good.

Can’t she just stay on the ship, you ask? No, that’s not how it works.

But wait, Israeli’s don’t need visas to come in and out of the U.S., right?  Right, but if she enters the U.S. on anything other than her expired J-1, she’ll be kicked out of the program and won’t be allowed to work.

This is how we came up with the Mexico plan.  Inbar couldn’t go to Honduras, but she could go to Mexico, so we decided she would spend the weekend with us in Houston, then fly home on Sunday, then fly to Mexico on Wednesday where a car service would pick her up at the airport and drive her for four hours down to Puerto Costa Maya, where she would stay overnight in a hotel before getting on the ship on Thursday morning, all while hoping to avoid being kidnapped by a cartel.  Sure, she’d miss half the cruise, but her booking isn’t refundable, so anything is better than nothing. If it sounds like a crazy plan, that’s because it is.

It may have been crazy, but it was a good plan, at least until Royal Caribbean informed us that she cannot join the ship late because there is no one to process new passengers in Mexico.

So where did that leave us? Basically, after Tzvi’s fifth phone call with the au pair agency, they said the decision is up to the discretion of the people checking you into the ship, and in their experience, au pairs usually have trouble getting on the ship, because that’s usually when they check your passport.  They said that if she makes it on the ship, then she should be fine. So we can get there and have someone who is nice and clueless, or we could have a stickler that says “well, I see an expired J-1 and this ship goes to Honduras.“ Either way it’s paid for, so we’ll try! I’m not so hopeful, but what can you do.

TLDR:  we may not have Inbar with us on our cruise vacation.

2. Babi died.

A little more than a month ago Babi (my grandmother) died. My father has been planning for this for years. It feels like Babi has gotten sick before almost every vacation, and several times he has expected to have to cancel. Well, sadly, it finally happened, and now he can’t go on the cruise because he has to stay home and daven. (For those who don’t know, Jews say the “mourner’s kaddish” (a prayer) for their parents for 11 months following death.  Kaddish needs to be said three times a day with a “minyan” of 10 men.) Also, I guess he didn’t feel right about going on a cruise vacation while still in the first thirty days of mourning (I guess that’s valid). I proposed a girls’ trip (Tzvi included), but my mom didn’t go for it. So, Lisa and Sheldon were out.

3. The Kaplans.

I really thought Sherry would come, but alas, she cannot. And there isn’t much more to say than that.

4. If that wasn’t enough, cancellations.

The Friday morning before the cruise I opened my phone to 47 emails from Royal Caribbean saying every single thing we had booked on the ship was cancelled. Shore excursions, shows, dining reservations, all of it. Tzvi had spent hours pre-booking every second of this cruise, planning every meal and show, and now it was all gone.  I had to call Royal Caribbean, which took a while. First someone told us that the ship changed the order of the ports of call and therefore that cancelled everything. Obviously we knew that was wrong because there’s no way it would cancel everything, and because the ports didn’t change. Finally we got in touch with someone who was able to tell me he didn’t know why it happened. He said he was customer support and that he would look into it and call me back. It was refreshing to hear that because he actually seemed to know what he was talking about. Eventually he called back and said that even though everything was booked under Stephanie’s account, for some reason Sherry was the primary person on each reservation, so when she cancelled her cruise, every reservation cancelled as well. He apologized and told us what while he couldn’t rebook us, he would give us a $75 credit per person. It was so frustrating. We managed to rebook our dinning reservations and shore excursions, but we couldn’t book any of the shows because it was all “sold out.” When we get on the ship new spots will open up, but obviously its ideal to have things booked in advance. We’ll survive. But still frustrating.

What’s next?