Konagolfer - Good to read that you have made a pragmatic, albeit reluctant, decision on the flight to Sydney. The original Regent proposal certainly was odd. We have found that using the deviation provides us far better routing options. Further, as we are not comfortable using any routing that gets us to the departure port on departure day, we have always taken the option of deviating.

I would suggest that the contracts for routes vary considerably and are not necessarily weighted towards AA. In our case, flying out of and back into Vancouver, the Regent contracts were with Star Alliance carriers and gave us excellent non-stops to Sydney and back from Auckland on Air Canada and Air New Zealand, respectively. Great connections and loads of nice United miles!!

All of us on T-Devil (aka Dingo) hope that you will be pleasantly surprised to not perceive a "decline" in service on the ship. We did not perceive such on our Panama Canal cruise on Navigator this past May. One hopes that Ngaire will bring not only her famous good weather juju along on this cruise, but her good service juju as well.

Cheers, Fred