MTD/ Traditional Dining

We are sailing on Allure May 2018 with our children aged 6 and 9. We have always done the traditional early dining and find it can be a rush but the late dining is too late for us. We are planning to try the MTD and just wonder if there will long waits to be seated? Any thoughts or recommendations? Thank you

Make a reservation

Be flexable

Eat other places(WJ) so it will not inter fear with activity times

We are sailing on Allure May 2018 with our children aged 6 and 9. We have always done the traditional early dining and find it can be a rush but the late dining is too late for us. We are planning to try the MTD and just wonder if there will long waits to be seated? Any thoughts or recommendations? Thank you

We are sailing on Anthem in January and we prefer traditional Dining, which is not offered. So I just made réservations for 6pm for everyday of the cruise. Réservations can always be changed once you find out times of your activities. I am hoping it works for us. I have read that there can be line ups at the main dining rooms if you don't reserve ahead.:D

Check your cruise planner every so often to see if dinner reservations have opened up. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason as to when those become available. Go ahead and make reservations and if you change your mind you can just go to the dining room and cancel/change the reservation. We've never waited more than 10-15 minutes with reservations for a table for our family of 4 on Oasis/Allure. Without reservations it could be longer.

Royal runs their MTD very well. Most of the wait is standing in line to get to the Hostess desk. Consider making a reservation for an "off" time...instead of 6:00, consider making it for 5:45 or 6:15. The MDR seems busiest on formal nights so waits may be longer then. I realize even a 10 minute wait in line can be LONG when you have kids with you!

The "popular" times are between 6:45 and 7:30....if you can go either before or after those times, you should be fine. Or, make standing reservations once you get on the ship, if you want something in that timeslot....they don't allow pre-booking of the popular times.

The "popular" times are between 6:45 and 7:30....if you can go either before or after those times, you should be fine. Or, make standing reservations once you get on the ship, if you want something in that timeslot....they don't allow pre-booking of the popular times.

I did not know that. We always eat on late dining. However, the couple we are with has a health issue and they need to eat earlier. so, we switched to MTD. I tried to make reservations for around 7 each night. But everything from 5:30 to 7:45 was not showing as available. I thought it was just because we waited so late to make the change. [3 weeks to cruise]

We will go to the MDR as soon as we board and see if we can get better reservations.