Nice cruise, great crew, but a few issues (and worst internet at sea!)

sailing out of New Orleans, where we got The Key. We technically had an 1100-1130 boarding window, the earliest, and arrived around 1100. The first line for The Key was a separate line to go through the security scanners that just sent us to cut into another line that was already there, but that other line really wasn't very long at all. That may be due to the early arrival time so it wasn't really a great benefit for that but possibly with a later arrival window it may be helpful. Past security there was a separate seating area for The Key and another for Pinnacle and Diamond Plus members and a third for Suite Guests. There was a slight delay in embarkation due to, apparently, the lower Mississippi River water levels apparently causing some unwanted extra movement between the ship and the gangway so they were limiting how may people would be on the gangway at a time. I would say due to that delay the lines to get on the ship itself were really the main benefit where having The Key allowed us to get in quite quickly compared to the other quests who had to wait in the terminal for each group to clear through.

The Windjammer was... mediocre at best. Perhaps because the last ship I was on, Odyssey of the Seas, it was excellent I had higher expectations than I should have had. Overall I was never impressed with any meals there, and breakfast was the worst. I tried once where the scrambled eggs were sour (like they had used sour milk or sour cream to make them?) although my mother went later and said whichever she had gotten they were fine, the Muesli was way oversaturated with milk such that it had turned into a thin, gluey liquid (too much milk! The oats should still have come through with some texture to them, not like oatmeal that has had cream poured into it). All of the coffee pots at the main buffet locations AND the ones near the seating areas as well as the milk jugs there and even the ones at the cereal station, were all empty. Every last one of them. I can understand a rotation of one or maybe two being empty but all four of the ones I found, including the other four decaf ones, were all empty. That really should never happen. That being said, the staff were still all quite friendly and willing to address anything we brought to their attention, not just in the Windjammer but everywhere on the ship. Windjammer is smaller and can get quite crowded, and seating could at times be an issue (although there are outdoor seating areas which didn't fill quite as quickly and were pretty nice when the temperature was right), although as noted I wasn't impressed with the food there. The Dog House is also right nearby and they were out of Chicken & Apple sausages, which I wanted to try. The polish sausage was fine and my mother enjoyed the bratwurst with sauerkraut, but otherwise they were pretty lacking on toppings, just sauerkraut, grilled onions, diced onions, and the standard relish, mustard, ketchup and mayo. No chili or cheese or anything like that so it was pretty disappointing on that front. They had two sides, small little cups of coleslaw or potato salad which were heavily mayonnaise-based and I wasn't fond of. There are no drinks right there, either. Honestly it seems to me all of that could just be available in the Windjammer itself (and sometimes was) so I'm not sure why they even keep that there taking up that space. We only ate at the main dining room, Cascades, for our embarkation lunch (we had The Key... that's a whole other review) and for breakfast after the disappointing breakfast in the Windjammer. Everything there was nice, generally attentive staff, and pretty much as expected. We also had the Ultimate Dining package and took full advantage of it most of the time as Chops Grill and Izumi are often open for lunch, and sometimes Giovanni's is as well. All of the venues were quite good, although I must admit that I'm a solid Izumi's fan and I ate there multiple times. Chops was excellent as always, and Samba Grill was very good although we decided once was enough to do that. Do expect that, especially at Samba, that it will be an extended time at dinner so maybe don't plan on an early show! Giovanni's was nice but we also only ate there once, and the pasta was a little overcooked (I'm solidly in the Italian school of wanting fresh paste in particular to only be cooked "al dente"!) Even so every meal was nice with generally excellent service (ok, they may have missed a timely refill on my tea at one or two places, but that was all I could possibly complain about if I was really looking hard to find something even slightly negative! They missed more coffee and water refills in Cascades, honestly, and even then I wouldn't really complain about it.)

The only extra activity onboard was the rock climbing wall which I didn't use... my knees don't really agree with my trying those out anymore, unfortunately. So very limited in that respect, but to be expected on an older ship. They also have miniature golf (a decent enough, if uninventive, course), and the pools were nice enough as should be expected. The Solarium, for our sailing, seemed more crowded than the main pool, interestingly, and my mother, whom I was sailing with, felt it was a kept a little too chilly in there for her. Apparently other guests really enjoyed it, though. The fitness center is fairly large, good-sized for the ship size, and seemed to me to be quite well apportioned with equipment, although I ended up not using it on this trip.

The shows were fairly decent but nothing spectacular. At times the dancers weren't in sync but that's a minor nit to pick. The comedy juggler was an excellent juggler but not that great on the comedy. The main tango dance couple were quite phenomenal and solidly the best show there. The final variety show was rather "meh", however, and almost felt more like watching an advertisement for the cruise itself, although the musicians (and having live musicians is always a great touch!) and performers were still all fairly good.

I do not have any children

As I've come to expect from RCCL the staff we dealt with with almost all very friendly and helpful often going out of their way to assist.

The ship, overall is well maintained. Any ship may have areas were something happens and, at least for some short while, there may be odd smells or the like, but outside of that it's a very nice ship. Seating in the Aurora theater and in the small Cinema is comfortable, but I will note the legroom leaves a lot to be desired and may greatly reduce the comfortability for those of us who are tall or otherwise have longer legs. Being a smaller ship it's very easy to get around and many areas of the ship don't require making your way through a maze of going up or down decks just to find your way around something. RCCL seems to make it being easy to get around as something of a priority, it seems to me, and even though Radiance doesn't have the whole central atrium concept going, it's still very nice to get around on, which I certainly appreciate. Hailed as "the fastest internet at sea", RCCL's VOOM Surf & Stream package was available (and I got The Key primarily for that). I was half expecting something like what I had on Odyssey, where I had actually been able to stream an Amazon Prime movie one afternoon with only minimal freezing. I had seen bad reviews of the internet service on Radiance before, but those reviews were for Alaskan voyages where the ship is above the level of the orbit where the majority of satellites provide the best service so I would expect to see greatly reduced bandwidth there. However in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean you're in prime location for those satellites and still the service was horrendous. You could barely use text-based apps with it, and pulling up a website with graphics would be quite slow. Streaming anything was absolutely impossible and even opening a little time-waster phone game that required any kind of minimal internet connectivity (things which send and receive a minimal number of megabytes to check in with their servers and get a response) were completely unusable. Worse for communication within the ship Royal's text-based messaging app will cost each person that wants to use it an extra $10 for the trip. If you use Apple you should be able to use text to other Apple users to bypass that, at least. For Android best to set yourself up with a chat app like Signal or the like to stay in touch, but even then expect there may be some delays. Email was working for my mother, and I could get those emails but sending them was simply impossible for me. Overall it wasn't just bad, it was almost entirely unusable! Better to just skip using the internet entirely and maybe just using the internet café/business center they have onboard instead when you need it. Maybe once Starlink gets rolled out to Radiance it will be worth it, but until that happens I would avoid it like the plague! Otherwise all of the other venues served their purpose well and it was a nice ship to be on, lots of glass and places to get out on deck and all of the specialty dining are in positions to look out a window. Indeed any time you went into a venue they would look to seat folks near windows first which I think is a very nice touch overall. I tend to get balcony staterooms because I love to just sit out there and watch the sea for hours, even while doing other things (reading, playing a game, whatever). There were often musicians at various locations throughout the cruise, although it was pretty much the same ones just rotating locations, so to some extent that was a bit of a lack of variety in that sense. This ship doesn't have the big shows which is both a disappointment and a blessing in disguise (at least in terms of dealing with the lack of legroom in the theater! Anything more than 45 minutes does start to get a bit rough, at least for me.)

To start with the bad... the thermostat in the room simply didn't do anything. Ambient temperature in New Orleans when we left was chilly and our room, indeed most of the ship, was quite cold. While in port in Mexico having the sun face our side of the ship we could fully draw the curtains but the room would still get quite warm. As far as I could tell the AC vent was just always pushing out cold air, but at least once we were out of the cold front that had moved into South Louisiana and the northern part of the Gulf of Mexico we were able to open our balcony door to warm the room when needed, or close it to help it cool off (I went with my mother and we both like a cold room to sleep in). In that sense we had some ways to mitigate the temperature of the room, but it wasn't ideal. Still it's an older ship so likely not much can be done about that. The bigger problem was the shower. Also, older ship with fabric curtains so you will flood that entire bathroom floor when taking a shower, but that's practically to be expected in that layout (although it can be mitigated a little by plastering the wet curtain to the back wall when showering). The real problem was the water temperature. There is one knob for water pressure and another that is supposed to control the temperature. At the coldest setting the water was almost unbearably hot, at the hottest temperature you would easily be scalded. Only by reducing the water pressure at the lowest temperature setting could any of us stand the do something like put our head under the shower to wet and rinse our hair, and even then it would be a bit of a dance to get under for as long as you could handle it to rinse out shampoo before taking a break and going back under to rinse it out some more. Most of the time I washed and rinsed my body by cupping my hands in the water stream and pouring that water over the area to rinse. In a cramped shower like that it was something else to try to handle it. Our room steward said he would mention it to maintenance but nothing really changed for us during the cruise and maybe they just couldn't do anything about it due to design flaws in the system. The Balcony is an angled balcony which, in other ships, often means some extra space, and indeed this class of room costs just a slight bit more than the standard balcony. It's very difficult to tell from the deck plans what that balcony is like and since I am taller and love to stretch out and relax on my balcony I decided on this one as I thought it may have space for me to put in a deck chair or chair and foot stool to relax while looking at the water, instead this balcony is actually smaller than a standard, IMHO. The door opens at the point where there is the least amount of room and the have the usual 2-chairs and a table set-up that only fit in one corner of the balcony so no room at all to stretch out that way. To be fair I was originally going to travel solo so it's possible I could have asked my room steward to swap out the table and with a foot stool it may be able to fit looking straight out that way, but overall the configuration is a bit cramped, I feel, over a standard balcony, so something to consider if you are looking at one of these. It will be of note for some that there are also no outlets near the bed, they are all clustered at the desk. Otherwise the room was clean, decently-sized and very well kept up. Our room steward, Deni, was also around, always attentive, and on top of any questions we had (such as quickly reconfiguring the bed from a queen to the two twin bed configuration).

Disembarkation was fairly smooth. A bit of a line and delay for a customs agent to check our passports, but there are signs that say the port has facial recognition in use so that may assist in the process. There was probably not too much more room from there for agents to check so expect a little bit of time in line, but I want to say it wasn't more than maybe 15 minutes. They also do not allow congregation inside the terminal by the exits, so if the weather is cold (as it was when we came back) you still may be stuck waiting outside for your ride. We're local so had a local pickup so I can't speak to the Uber/Taxi, etc., experience. The Harbor Police (who direct traffic) can be a bit... aggressive, so just be aware of that and there can be a line for your ride to get there as they are not always, IMHO, as efficient in getting traffic in and out for pickups as they could be. I've seen folks worried about getting from the port to the airport, but I will note that if the disembarkation process we saw was any indication I wouldn't worry about it. The ship arrives fairly early (feel free to take your bags down to the Main Dining Room if you want a leisurely breakfast!) and disembarkation will likely take no more than an hour (possibly a little less if you carry your own bags off) and the airport is maybe 30 minutes away (depending on traffic, and that early it could be just 20 minutes, really)..