As I intimated earlier, the situation in the Constellation Theater for the excursions was the worst we have ever experienced. Regent was using a relatively new system. Instead of letting you obtain coach tickets for your excursion (no matter which it was), one had to wait until their specific excursion was called. Then you were supposed to get in line and get your coach tickets and then return to your seats and wait some more. I think that Regent was using this procedure in an effort to avoid people going to the coaches prematurely.

A major problem was that when you arrived at the Theater, you had no idea which excursions had been already called, so you ended up getting in line even if you weren't supposed to yet. They needed a system to let people know the minute they entered the Theater where things were at--perhaps using an overhead projector. Apparently, they also needed to allow more time for staggering the excursions. The bottom line was that it took much longer than usual to finally get on your coach to begin your excursion. There were a couple of times that I think our coach didn't actually leave until about an hour after the time listed on our ticket for arrival at the Theater. This was no way to run a luxury line. People woke up early, rushed breakfast, only to waste a lot of time waiting around for the excursions to begin. (And this wasn't because of any clearance issues with the ship.)

I realize that the ship was full and that the excursions were popular, but the process was a disaster. This was too bad because as I've said, the excursions themselves were pretty high quality with many very good guides. And I will reiterate that the post-cruise to the Taj Mahal was handled extremely well, given that more than two-thirds of the ship went on it. (Of course, the fact that Ngaire had arranged our own bus and we had a fantastic guide contributed a lot to this outcome.)

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Eugene