tacticalbanjo

I can’t help you with a toddler but I did take my then 11 month old on the QM2 in December and the QV in October when she was 9 months old. She was crawling and cruising on both trips so we were quite aware of making sure she wasn’t a nuisance to other passengers. We found that there always seemed to be one bar open that was quiet enough for little one to explore a bit without annoying any passengers or staff while we tag teamed drinking a coffee and baby wrangling. The children’s facilities are quite good. There’s a room with all sorts of baby and toddler toys for your little on to let off some steam in but they do need to be supervised by an adult. I can’t remember the exact times this is open but it’s for a few hours in the morning and afternoon. You can drop them off after 6pm to sleep in the night nursery which is the same room with travel cots put up. You get a pager and if your little one wakes up, you have to go collect them. The staff check on them every 10 minutes. You’ll know if you are likely to make use of it but if you can then I’d recommend it as a way to avoid being trapped in your room all evening in the dark being quiet. The staff are all UK qualified childcare workers and seemed really good at their jobs. We took our daughter to the main dining room each night and was able to get through 3 courses most nights with some cartoons on an iPad with the sound turned off and a bit of bread roll while we had starters. My daughter takes ages to eat so we could often get dessert down us while she was finishing her food. They were happy to cook her a meal from the menu each night without salt but we found it easier to just ask for a grilled chicken breast and some steamed veggies to be ready for her each night. We made sure she had a bit of variety via a buffet breakfast and lunch. Buffet also meant we could get food to her quickly. If your toddler isn’t ok with a shower yet then you can ask for a baby bath. Our 11 month old had plenty of room to splash around in and play but she is on the smaller side. One of the biggest problems we had was that our buggy didn’t fit through the cabin door so we had to take our daughter out in the hall and fold it down to get it in the room. On our next cruise we’re taking an umbrella stroller.

You'd need to compare widths but my Baby Jogger City Elite was ever so slightly too wide to fit through our cabin door on Cunard which was a complete pain because we had to get baby out in the hall and collapse the stroller to get it in the room.

Going back to this point. I have personally experienced this on a September 2021 sailing around the British Isles. My husband had the full drinks package while I only had the soft drinks package. However, I was visibly pregnant so it was clear that I would not be drinking at any stage of the trip. I asked bar staff as soon as we got on board but it had to be run by the one of the bar supervisors so we couldn't actually buy the package until the next day which wasn't a problem since we would have struggled to drink the $69/$29 package costs on embarkation day. In fact, a lot of the bar staff were advising people not to buy on the first day because of this.