Cruise Critic, Roll Call, Meet & Greet

As followers to my blogs know, I am an active member of Cruise Critic and a major part of any cruise I take includes chatting with fellow cruisers and "meeting" online, new cruise friends who will be aboard my ship.

A Meet and Greet is an event put together by one of the cruisers where a time, date and place are determined and then everyone who has been chatting gets together to finally meet face to face.  People who are interested in doing this sign up for the Roll Call and this is where they post notes to each other.  For all of my past cruises, the roll call has been pretty lively with lots of interaction.... not so much this cruise.  We had a couple of members who were chatty (mali, pambo, trumpy to name a few) but for the most part the roll call was very sedate.

As an experienced coordinator, I volunteered to organize our Meet and Greet and finally got about 45 people to sign up for attendance, most of whom did in fact show up to the event.  I brought door prizes/party favors for the guests then started off the event with a "Getting to know you Bingo" game I had put together.  Mostly everybody participated and had fun doing so -- Tonya won the grand prize by getting bingo first.  It really pepped up the crowd. 

Next we had a short introduction by the officers present and then we collected $5 each from everyone who wanted to participate in the Poker Run/Cabin Crawl.  With 20 participants, the jackpot was $100 so we all wanted to win that!  I had previously purchased 6 decks of cards, shuffling them all together and then dividing them into 7 separate piles.  For each pile, I wrote the cabin # on the back of the card (to eliminate cheating) and put them in an individual ziploc.  Everyone got their first card when they paid the $5 entry fee.  Then, at each cabin we visited on the crawl, you would take another card.  At the final cabin, one of the two Owner's Suites that took part in the event, you got your 7th/final card with which to make your best 5 card poker hand.  One of the ladies was leading with full house, Aces over Kings and we thought that was going to win.  But when I verified the hand, saw that she had two cards with the same cabin #.....that's a no no so the hand was disqualified.  Everyone was scrambling to see if they might have the SECOND BEST hand when a little voice peeped up "I don't know anything about this game poker but I have five of the same card, 9s"  It was funny - she had such an awesome hand and didn't even know it!

Later in the week, Executive Chef Orwill Saldanha treated my group to a private, very all-inclusive, galley tour.  He is such a comedian in his own right and I promised I wouldn't blog about the things he let us in on but it was a major treat and I think my Meet and Greeters were very happy to be a part of it.

 

Overall I think the cruisers who took part in the Meet & Greet enjoyed themselves and I did hear from more than one that this was the best one they had ever been to.  I am not patting myself on the back here -- I am just trying to give you, dear reader, a suggestion to plan some activity(ies) if you are coordinating a Meet and Greet rather than just leaving your guests to talk amongst each other.  It makes all the difference in the world!