Not a vacation worth the money or time lost.

I was warned in advance, but I was told I had to try it and make my own opinions. Well, I now can say our family has done this and I will forever refer to it as the 10K vacation mistake.  It all began when I spent over 3 hours on the phone booking the cruise through United.  I wasn't allowed to book online because you cannot book more than one room at a time.  So once this was complete, I made the assumption that our family and three rooms would be together, especially after I made it clear this trip was celebrating my parents 40th anniversary and our 15th.  Wrong, our cabins were on different floors and half a boat away.  Not to mention our dining times were different.  So much for a 'family vacation'. 

At the start of the trip, the rules of what is and isn't allowed were very unclear.  We attempted to take sealed drinks (bottles of juice) on the boat.  They threw them away.  As well as our unopened water bottles, although I saw cases of water make it through.   The process to get on the boat was like herding cats and for the money that was spent on this, I expected to be treated like a human, not cattle.  Security officers were rude, loud and unaccommodating.  

The boat.  This is clearly an older boat.  The rooms were kept neat, but far from nice.  They also had a single wall plug.  Yes, that is right.  One plug-in, not one wall unit with two, but a single plug-in.  This allowed for the one c-pap machine to run at night, but that meant no phone chargers, etc.   Evidence of the boats age were present throughout, but if that was my only concern, I would have been fine.  Our room was the bottom floor, something that I wouldn't have guessed considering I paid for an upgrade of sort.  I can't imagine what people had to pay to get away from the dungeon.  Our room literally shook the entire trip. This was topped off by the 3am-5am wake up call on the last day of the ship when the staff proceeds to load the entire boats luggage above our room onto who knows what.  Needless to say, sleep for the week was minimal.  My parents room was also on the bottom floor and turned out, they had their toilet backing into their room before they had even used the facilities.  Their room had to be cleaned and the toilet serviced before we even were out of the channel.   Needless to say, they were scared to use their bathroom the rest of the trip for fear of another incident.   Happy 40th mom and dad!

The pools and hot tubs.  I rarely saw an adult attempt to enter these as I can only assume they saw what the rest of us saw, a human waste land.  There wasn't a time when the hot tubs were open that there were not at least 20 children in it, with the turn over never stopping.  My kids actually got in the pool the first day only to get out fairly quickly as another child vomited in the pool and then swam away.  The floating pile was enough to make my kids second guess swimming that day. 

The constant need to show and scan your sailing card.  This was such a waste of paper and ridiculous. And it didn't matter if you broke down and paid the prepaid sodas or other options.  They still made you sign the paper with each swipe.  EVERYTHING you did beyond eat costs money.  And I don't mean chump change.  Our family of five purchased a number of photos, played bingo on two separate days and partook in adult beverages. Not to mention that they add on gratuity to everything and daily resort fees.  Do you know what that costs...and yes, beyond the money that was already paid for the trip...an additional $1500 for our family.  It was another $1000 for my parents.

I honesty could go on, but one should get the gist of this by now.  I will NEVER recommend a cruise.  At least not one anything similar to this and to my understanding, this is the majority of what is out there.

The only thing I can give positive feedback to is the staff.  From the waiters, to the housekeeping to Kevin the cruise director, the staff were truly kind and seemed to sincerely care about their guests.