Cruise with caution

Cruises: 4-6 cruises

Review: 1

Helpful Votes: 49

Review summary

Generally speaking:

 

Ship seemed very cold Technology operated inconsistently. Ship seemed way too focused on sucking money out of you.  I appreciate that that’s what they are in business for but really, do you need to be so obvious about it?  

 

Onboarding
 

Was 15 minutes early for a scheduled 1215 check-in time.  Check-in time didn’t seem to matter.  Was hustled into the 1:45 check-in seating area.   Eventually the check-in person came down the line to check us in but then when they were two people away from checking us in they went to the other end of the line and started to work their way back. Very strange.  We had taken showers before leaving for the ship so it made no sense. Once we got by the check-in person it was right on the ship and to our stateroom which was an unexpected pleasure.  HOWEVER, in all our past cruises the stateroom attendant would always come and introduce themselves while we got settled in the room.  Ours didn’t.  I finally found him and introduced ourselves and he turned out to be very efficient and pleasant to work with.  I like to think maybe I got the jump on him for the introductions.       

 

General Service:

 

Insufficient wait staff in bars No real wait service in balcony of the theater One time in Two70 my wife ordered a soda on her drink package and the waiter waved his hand at her like “forget it”.  I’d say we misread him but he never brought the drink.  I’d also say he forgot but he walked over us two times to bring other people their drinks.  We figured that because her order didn’t involve a fee/service charge he had better things to do.

 

 

Restaurants:

Never had same waiter or matradee.  Wait staff seem confused and disorganized. One night Deb got a desert fork and coffee spoon and I never did.  Ate my desert with her coffee spoon. Tables left with dirty dishes for inordinately long periods Ice person in the Windjammer had attitude for the entire cruise. Salad dressing in the windjammer seemed to be at a premium.  On at least two days for lunch the salad stations had dressings bottle refill issues such that people were walking from salad station to salad station trying to wrench some kind of dressing out of any of the bottles. Drink delivery in the restaurants was consistently a debacle.  On past cruises we found that as soon as we were seated we were asked if we wanted drinks.  The order here in all the restaurants seemed to be that someone would seat you, someone would come and fill your water glass, someone would then bring you menus, and THEN someone would come to take your order which was to include drinks.  What happened after that was a crap shoot.  Appetizers seemed to come quickly in most all cases which meant that in a number of cases we got our drinks after the appetizers.  Then there was the night that the waiter took my wife’s drink order and walked away from the table never taking my order.  We also had one night the drinks came in the middle of the meal.   And then there was the night I got my drinks after my appetizer and Debbie got hers on time.   Drink issues aside, for some reason wine orders were spot on and timely.  Made no sense.  When you ordered wine it was brought in a timely manner IF they had the wine.  Seemed they had an issue with the wine selection in that they didn’t have the wine we ordered in a number of cases.  And when I say a number of cases I mean at least 6 or more times across different restaurants they didn’t have the wine we ordered.  One night in one of the restaurants we ordered four wines before we hit on one they had.  I will say that if you bought a bottle they did a good job of following you from restaurant to restaurant with the bottle.  We were afraid we’d never see the bottle again but it did manage to follow us quite well.    Silk - Food not as described on menu.  Meal was supposed to be served with mushrooms and vegetables but ended up coming with no mushrooms and different vegetables.  Funny thing was that a couple of nights later we went to Chops and the meal I got in Silk was on the menu at Chops.  Went to Silk again the next night and we came to the conclusion the food was well made but not to our taste.  Service not good and the drink issue was at its worst.  That was the last night we ate in Silk.  Changed our other Silk reservations to another restaurant. One night the waiter waited and made small talk while I signed for our drinks.  I felt like he was waiting to see if he could pressure me into adding an extra tip.  I did not.     Service was often very slow compared to past cruises we had been on.

 

Generally speaking it was not the best cruise and compared poorly to the cruises we have taken in the past.  Would I cruise on it again?  Tough to call.  We like sailing out of NY, NJ or Baltimore but we heard that ultimately all the RC ships were going with this new dinning concept which we thought was a complete fail.  There was talk that they are going to do something about not having the same wait staff every night and truly hope they do because that above all was our biggest issue.  Maybe if we hear that that situation has improved we would try again.  One of the comments on our review to RC was that we figured they would ultimately get the service thing figured out so it wasn’t so unprofessional but we didn’t think they would ever be able to bring back the pleasure and intimacy of having the same wait staff/matredee every night. 

Ship experiences

Food and Dining

Entertainment

Children's Programs

Service and Staff

Ship Quality

Cabin / Stateroom

Ports of call

Cape Liberty (Bayonne), New Jersey

Labadee (Cruise Line Private Island)

San Juan, Puerto Rico

Philipsburg, St. Maarten

Fort-De-France, Martinique

Bridgetown, Barbados

Basseterre, St. Kitts

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