First Royal Caribbean Cruise

My sister and I cruised on the Enchantment of the Seas from August 1, 2014- August 4th, 2014. Overall, we had a very enjoyable time, and would not be opposed to cruising this line in the future, however, there were a few things about the trip that stood out as negative experiences for us.

I'll start off by saying that we are unashamedly spoiled by Disney Cruise Lines, so that was the standard by which our trip was judged against. With RCL, we found the main dining room entrees to be excellent, and we actually preferred them to the entrees aboard the Disney ships we had been on. However, the food in the Windjammer Cafe was not at all anything special, neither were the other food stations outside of the main dining room. Disney definitely has better buffet style food, appetizers, and desserts. 

The room was satisfactory; kept clean and tidy. Again, comparing to Disney, you couldn't leave your room for 15 minutes without having come back and it finding it re-cleaned. on the Disney line we saw our room attendant constantly, and bonded quite well with them. On RCL, we saw our room attendant twice, and whereas he did a fine job, it was not quite up to the standard we expected.

The last point I'd like to mention was our most troubling. We never had this issue in the cabin, however, at least 80% of the time, when you used the bathroom on any deck outside of your cabin, the toilets would not flush. To me that is a huge health hazard and not quite something I'm ready to tolerate, especially on a cruise ship where disease and sickness can spread so rapidly. The staff member we alerted to the problem was very apologetic and obviously understood how big of an issue it was, but it continually happened throughout the cruise.

Also, (this is to no fault of the cruise line whatsoever) the weather was cloudy and rainy off and on the entire trip, and 40mph winds kept us from being able to dock at CocoCay, which gave us an unexpected day at sea. To their credit, the staff did everything they could to add more activities and games to participate in on board, however, nothing was particularly interesting, and there wasn't a great variety to the activities. And again, we're comparing this to a day at sea on a Disney ship with so many possibilities and varieties of activities that we wanted to do, we actually had to force ourselves to spend time just relaxing by the pool instead of doing all of the activities!

Overall, we did have a fantastic time. We really felt like this cruise line focused on the "relaxing with a pina colada" in your hand more than Disney, and at the end of summer it was just what we needed :)