Anytime dining

We almost never to to dinner with a group, because our group likes to eat later.

We are early eaters, so if we are on our own we have YTD (Carnival's version of anytime dining). If we have a group of 7 or more we choose Early Seating. We still go to diner early (near the opening of the seating) unless we have a reason to go later (shore tour, napped too long, spa appointment ran late, etc.). Usually, on Carnival, that is about 5:45.

You can do early dining with MTD too. On some cruises they even started earlier than traditional.

I've always done early dining, until I tried anytime dining on my last three cruises. I do think I prefer anytime dining. I will however be doing early dining on my next cruise, mostly because I know my sister prefers early dining and we are going together. I don't know that I won't ever do early dining in the future (other then my next cruise) but I will consider anytime time for each cruise now.

That's all we use now. Like flexibility with regard to attending shows.

Opinions differ and there is nothing wrong with that. We have had a couple of occasions with Traditional dining that we were stuck with for the entire cruise. One was a wait staff problem and one had to do with dining partners.

Used it on our first cruise. Since then our cruising style has changed and we prefer early seating.

RCCL (at least on Anthem) has 4 MDR all serving the same menu. The 2 on deck 3 are set seating and the 2 on deck 4 are my time dining. We reserved on one night and just walked up on the other 5 nights we ate in the MDR and had no wait on any of the nights regardless of the time. We were always asked if we had a dining room, table or server preference and if the my time rooms were full the fixed time tables that were not taken for that night were offered. Also the fixed time dining was mostly tables for 2 or 4 unless a larger one was requested.

Hmm. We have not cruised on either of those in a few years, but we have never had a problem with it. (Except for HAL, which was truly disorganized.)

Not all cruise lines have the mechanisms in place for making reservations in the main Dining room. It is true on NCL but not on Carnival nor, do I think, on Princess.