Beautiful new ship

The ship is beautiful and the crew and staff on it are fantastic. We have been used to cruising other lines and this was our first experience with "Freestyle Cruising", and as they say "change is bad". We missed the large dining rooms with different menus each night, we also missed the specific times to eat, which to us made it easier to plan your ship time. We had the dining package which does not work. We tried to make our dining reservations on the first day on the ship and we were told that every restaurant was already booked for each night of the cruise, and had been for months............  We were told we could go on a wait list. We ended up talking to other people on the ship which also had the dining package and it was extremely frustrating to everyone.

It appears that when the ship does not sell out, then the marketing office starts offering the drink and dining packages as incentive to sell cruises and they all know that the dining package cannot be utilized which is maddening ..

The casino was advertised as non smoking as I recall, but people were smoking at the tables. The cabins were smaller than what we have experienced on other lines, but very well done. The bathrooms were very nice and the glass door on the shower is nice.

We enjoy the music in the atrium area and sitting at the bar each night on the 6th deck before dinner. The open atrium to the 7th floor allows very LOUD noises from games right overhead to ruin the music and entertainment going on in the atrium on the 6th floor. We also felt that many of the larger game shows etc should be held in the theater not in the atrium were there was not enough room for everyone to see. The acoustics in the area is awful as I mentioned before from all the talking and game noise from the 7th deck.

The theater shows, especially the Christmas special and the Million Dollar Quartet were excellent.

We really enjoyed the Spice H2O area for quiet time in the sun without kids running around. We are both non smokers and wish they would not allow smoking even on the one side of the ship as the wind blows the smoke everywhere.

The Margaritaville restaurant is a dismal failure, and we are "Parrotheads" The additional surcharge is an outrage and we did not see more than 5 people there at any one time and we checked everyday.........  

Overall we felt the menus and food in the three main dining rooms were not very good at all.

We are booked on the same ship, same itinerary in April with a large group of over 500 people and we are really concerned now about the dining packages