Peggy, just like in the past, you can only book restaurant reservations 28 days in advance of your cruise. Only excursions are available 120 days out.

I just booked excursions for us and my parents, with no (apparent) problems, for our June 3 cruise. The Regent web site didn't show any sign of being slow or overloaded with people trying to use it.

The only thing I found a little odd is that the checkout page where you pay for excursions isn't pre-populated with any data -- you have to type your name and address in addition to the credit card information, even though they clearly have the address on file. Not a big deal by any means; it just struck me as less refined than most e-commerce/online buying web sites. Add to that the PDF-only Guest information form, the separate login to the SSS page, and it just seems to lack the polish one would have hoped for after months of development. I'd hope improvements in some of these areas are planned for the future, after they concentrated on getting the basic booking engine operational.

My one complaint with booking the online excursions today was the policy limiting people to advance booking only one excursion per day in port. On this first trip to Alaska, we very much wanted to do a whale watch and a helicopter flight to a glacier, and the best place to do both of those is Juneau -- but although the times readily permits both, I had to choose one. Since both of these have limited capacity, I'm assuming the one I didn't choose will be sold out by the time we board the ship three months from now; I hope I'm wrong. I might see limiting people to one free excursion per day for advance booking, but when we're choosing excursions we have to pay for, it would be better if they let people choose more than one. Oh well, I 'm resigned to the fact that this policy isn't likely to change anytime soon; maybe they'll modify it in time for the free excursions on 2010 cruises.

-- Eric