Deceptive: "All-Inclusive"

The dining options were very limited, aside from the seated dinner. I wasn't thrilled to find out that we were seated at a table of ten, with eight people we'd never met. So, my husband and I were never able to have a semi-private sit-down meal. A stranger or group thereof was always present. So, we opted to eat, many times, in the casual areas; but, the food there was always mundane and, oftentimes cold. The only exception was the salad bar, which was always very fresh and well-stocked. The hours of the casual dining areas were very confusing and oftentimes not accommodating to our schedules or to the shore excursion schedules. So, we ended up ordering room service a couple of times (which was included), except that you're expected to tip the person to brings it to your room. The room service food was overall very good, but it was a shame that, in order to get good food at a late hour or even just mid afternoon (b/c everything else was so crowded) we'd have to stay in our room.

There were a lot of activities, but I felt that most of them were just ways to try to get you to spend money (like throwing "deck parties" where you had to buy any alcohol of even soda that you wanted). Another example of "entertainment" was a Bingo contest that my husband entered, where they charged $20 (!!!) just to play. But, just by putting it on the schedule, it makes them look good, even if it costs you money, because it looks like they are just providing complimentary entertainment.

The only example of "going above and beyond" that I can think of was our evening waiter in the sit-down restaurant. He was fantastic. Otherwise, we felt that no one was overly willing to help us and oftentimes just tried to put us off on someone else. For instance, there were beach towels in the room that had a tag on them that said if you lost one, you'd be charged $22. Well, we definitely kept up with ours, but the housekeeper took one that was wet and dirty from the room and didn't replace it. So, we were afraid we'd be charged, so we called our steward. My husband explained the situation to him, he asked our room number, and just hung up. As of now, I still do not know if there is any resolution to this (by the way, that was the second contact we had with him--the first contact was a promise to come by our room to talk about it, which never happened, hence the call).

The decor was gorgeous, and the ship was clean. The layout was incredibly confusing, and they did not provide us with a map from the get-go. So, it took us two-three days of our four day cruise to figure out the layout (of course, we still didn't know where many things were).

The size of the stateroom on the Internet looked small, but its size was actually perfectly accommodating. The bathroom shower was the only thing that felt small, but it, too, was very clean and served its purpose. The location of our stateroom would be the only thing I'd complain about, as it was probably a five minute walk from the stateroom just to get to the elevator. That wasn't a huge deal, though, so there weren't any serious problems at all in that category.