LongTimeTvlr

I see no answer to this post from August. Can anyone comment on the dancing aboard these Viking ocean cruises?

From the website video's it appears the Explorer's Lounge would be the place, but the floor has a piano on it, which does not usually serve for good dancing.

We use self embarkation and are usually in the terminal waiting for our car by 8 AM. You don't have to go this early, but if you like an early departure it can be done.

Good to have contact with you again Gene. I miss the old thread. There use to be a lot of good feedback on cruise dancing in that one thread.

 

We have a cruise on the new HAL ship, the Konigsdam, scheduled for November. We also have found that HAL does make an effort though their floors are usually pretty small. The Konigsdam purports to have a " Queens Room" though the description of how they use it is not very promising. They talk about it as a great dance venue then mention jazz and "modern" dancing, which is OK, not just what we consider ballroom.

 

Thanks for the heads up on the Gateway. We cruised on the NCL Star a few years back and enjoyed it. In fact our son got engaged on that cruise, married the young lady and they are now the proud parents of two of our four grandchildren. We shall have to give the Gateway a try.

I reread this post and realized the last couple of lines could be read differently than I intended. It's not that they are not proud of their other two children, it's that these other two grandchildren are by our daughter and her husband.

We take your point, and wish you more dance partners at sea as well as in life.

 

Good to see you again Long Time, you Plano Texan!! You are right, even on what was billed as a dance cruise out of Galveston RCCL disappointed.

We've found that Princess and HAL make more of an effort to provide a dance venue on their ships. Dare I say it, but one line that has made an effort is Norwegian. On a recent cruise, we found the Getaway to have a fair sized floor in the main dining room that had a good dance combo nightly. We were able to get in a quick Rumba or Foxtrot between courses. Also, you do have a captive audience which can contribute to a better performance.:)

Good to have contact with you again Gene. I miss the old thread. There use to be a lot of good feedback on cruise dancing in that one thread.

We have a cruise on the new HAL ship, the Konigsdam, scheduled for November. We also have found that HAL does make an effort though their floors are usually pretty small. The Konigsdam purports to have a " Queens Room" though the description of how they use it is not very promising. They talk about it as a great dance venue then mention jazz and "modern" dancing, which is OK, not just what we consider ballroom.

Thanks for the heads up on the Gateway. We cruised on the NCL Star a few years back and enjoyed it. In fact our son got engaged on that cruise, married the young lady and they are now the proud parents of two of our four grandchildren. We shall have to give the Gateway a try.

I used to comment infrequently on your previous thread here on the Cunard site.

Glad to see you had a chance to dance on Cunard.

We continue to cruise and dance and we keep trying to find ships that provide good dancing environments.

We have been mostly disappointed. We just completed a 7 night cruise on the RCL Oasis. It was easily the worst cruise for dancing in our years of cruising. There were several nights were there was no dance music available of any type. Hard to believe. Some nights for short periods they had a band in the Bolero's club which as you would expect played latin music, though in the time we spent there I only heard one bolero. Mostly played salsa's, all at the same tempo.

We had a similarly disappointing experience recently on the Celebrity Reflection, though they at least had a small band playing in their forum with a very small circular floor most every evening for an hour or so. Unfortunately one floor up in their open atrium they had a hip hop DJ playing very loudly and easily drowned out the tempo from the band at the forum. On formal night they advertised a "ballroom dance band" in the forum. We showed up at the advertised time and they had two thirds of the very small floor blocked off so their photographer could take pictures of the couples in formal wear against the decorations in the lobby!!

Sadly I conclude that RCL lines are not interested in attracting ballroom dancers. They show no interest in providing reasonable opportunities to dance.

Our next cruise is back on the QE in August going to Iceland. We have been on the QE several times and are looking forward to some good ballroom dancing again, though for selfish reasons I hope there are not 6 dance hosts. Even the Cunard floors can get crowded pretty quickly.

Leave tomorrow, board the Oasis the next day.

We were on the Quantum back in Feb 2015 and DD was a disaster. Hours spent planning and reserving and then re-reserving when entertainment schedules came out, then again when we boarded and found out the schedules we had been given were incorrect.

Then spent 30 - 60 minutes almost daily remaking reservations day by day with each dining venue we wanted for that day.

I am really surprised RCL hasn't fixed this by now.

Given our experience, we now only make final payment on cruises when our TA can guarantee we get traditional first seatings or we cancel the cruise.

Sadly there have been cruises where there weren't enough first seating. This seems to be an issue on many of the cruises we book. We have to twist the agents arm to get these seatings booked. Seems to me they need to add more traditional seating.

We bring small flat magnets that we attach to wall to hold single sheets that show the cruise itinerary, or special invitations we receive, or schedule of dress codes by day, or any other misc. stuff that we like to reference during the cruise.

We also bring larger stronger magnets with hooks the we use for coats and maybe robes depending on the configuration of the cabin.

I voted "I don't care " because , wait for it , I don't care what others wear . I usually take a suit but might just take a jacket . Jettisoning a tie will be the next step down my personal road to slovenly attire . :D

 

Like many (most ?) of you , there isn't a single restaurant near me where one is obliged to dress up.

Gotta ask - If you don't care why are you reading/posting on this thread?

Hasn't Crystal always had a "Black Tie Optional" dress code? Even Cunard doesn't insist on anything more than a tie anymore on formal night do they?:confused:

Quite right, but in our experience most of our fellow passengers were at least semi-formal if not formal on the designated nights. Gives the evening a much more interesting and enjoyable tone to the evening for us.

Not the case the last time we were on Celebrity. It's been a while since we tried Celebrity so we wanted to check in and see for ourselves how they have changed. Reading reviews on this site would suggest we will be disappointed.

We have had better experiences on RCL than X, and I know they are owned by the same company.

Just seems that X targets itself to the casual club crowd. Again, that's fine, just not us.

What company have you been cruising with for your last 30-40 cruises?

 

I assume they still have a strict dress code.... :confused:

 

Cunard is by far our favorite. This year we have sailed on Cunard Queen Victoria, Seabourn, Crystal, RCL Quantum. Radiance class ships on RCL are spotty but at times great deals.

Will be doing Crystal again right after the Reflection. Change ships in Miami. We just got off the QV a couple weeks ago, we had 5 formal nights in 17 days. Loved it. Best cruise in years.

Does this help?

We are just returning to Celebrity for our next cruise next week. We haven't cruised with them since an Eastern Med trip on the Solstice in summer of 2009.

We will be trying out the Aqua class on the Reflection. Sounded unique and interesting.

We cruise 5 or 6 times a year. We really enjoy the cruising experience. Most of the time here in Texas when we go out we dress in what Celebrity is calling Chic Casual. Here in Texas we call it shirt and jeans. That is not why we cruise. Sorry to see Celebrity going in this direction but it makes sense. To attract more passengers they feel they need to lower the bar. Completely understandable. Just not what we are looking for. Don't need to spend $500 a night to do that.

They have survived without us for 6 years and I expect they will continue to survive without us for another 6 after this cruise, unless we are blown away by Aqua class. Given the reviews on this site, that does not appear likely.

But as everyone on this site knows, there is no such thing as a bad cruise. But there are better choices.

Slow Foxtrot has given you a great answer to that. Now the question is, which dances to learn? I started a thread asking this question, so you can find some suggestions here: http://boards.cruisecritic.co.uk/showthread.php?t=2222015#

 

Just for your interest, I had a private dance lesson today and asked to learn the Cindy Swing. It's the easiest I've found. We walked through it twice and then put on the music and danced the track once before going on to revise the Balmoral Blues. Of course, now that I'm home I've forgotten it! However, I know I'll pick it up again as soon as we start dancing.

And thank you as well Fantasy51. It turn out we did have a lesson here from one of our European Dance couples on a Quickstep Sequence dance, except they modified it to have the couples change partners after each full set of steps. We enjoyed it, though they have not repeated it nor used it at any of the events they sponsor.

 

Well, LTT, there are not many good demonstrations of proper sequence dancing on the internet but there is a couple called Shannah and Phil who do a reasonable demo of all the popular sequence dances. If you go on to Google and print the words (say) " Mayfair Quickstep demo Shannah and Phil" you will find they will oblige. Then try the same heading with "Saunter Together demo Shannah and Phil". And so on and so forth for the dances you wish to learn. Fact is that if you learn about a dozen of these popular dances they will be more than enough to keep you going !!!!!

 

Try the link at the top as an example and you will soon be in business. Note that they do a quick version and a much slower version. Hope you will be able join in for at least some of them on your October cruise. And well done for trying.

Of course there are some wonderful ballroom dancing demos and tuition on Youtube and they are all free, and very often by top professional and even World Champions. The days of buying expensive videos are now a thing of the past provided you have a reasonable grounding in ballroom dancing fundamentals.

Thank you Slow Foxtrot, exactly what I was looking for. Very helpful.

We have sailed on many Cunard ships. We are American trained ballroom dancers and came upon the sequence dancing by accident on one of these trips. Since then we have come to understand what it is and are fascinated by it.

It is not taught here in the states, but we would be interested in learning the basic patterns before our next cruise on Cunard in October.

How would we discover the basic set of sequence dances so we can master them before this cruise?

The patterns seem to be short and comprised of fairly standard steps for the most part. I like the idea of all couple doing the same steps at the same time, it greatly reduces the challenges of floor crafting I assume.

Here are the areas I think you'll be wowed over RCCL:

 

Buffet food: far superior on Celebrity. Real eggs, made to order omelets, delicious waffles, yummy pizza. (Sorry, but Sorrentos is HORRIBLE). Plus, there is outdoor seating which is really nice!

 

Solarium: Celebrity's solarium (on M class ships like Summit) has a wonderful spa like bubble pool, with a built in lounging section...it's great!

 

Ice cream: Forget the subpar soft serve coming out of that dirty machine poolside on RCCL. Celebrity has homemade, hard scoop ice cream in several flavors which change daily...plus a load of great toppings. This is located in the buffet as well...no surcharge!

 

Lounges: Live music and great service in the pre-dinner and evening hours...really nice! We had a hard time finding live music before 9:30pm on RCCL.

 

Service: Dining room and room stewards are equal on both lines. But on Celebrity you'll notice little things, like champagne on embarkment, ALL staff saying hello, a tent set up on the pier where you can get a drink or relax in the shade after a port day.

 

Smoking: None indoors on Celebrity ships, which means you can actually enjoy the casino and other areas without disgusting secondhand smoke!

 

Fellow passengers/ambiance: They follow the dress code on Celebrity, which means you won't see some chump in a tuxedo-printed tshirt on formal night. Also, no Bingo announcements or belly flop contests by the pool.

 

I think you'll have a great time! Come back and report, would love to see what others think the differences are!

We have sailed on the Century, Summit and Solstice with Celebrity and the Radiance, Liberty, Serenade and Quantum with RCL.

Just got off the Quantum and booked with Celebrity again. Agree with all of micmacmissy's points. Key difference we found is on RCL we get the feeling that they are always trying to upcharge you. For example on the Quantum's daily activity flyer over half the items listed were Spa events, Art Sales or other "marketing like" activities.

Don't get that same feel on Celebrity. More refined and low key.

That being said, we haven't been on a Celebrity ship since August of 2009 (Solstice), and all of our RCL cruises have been since that cruise. RCL draw for us is the great dance floor in the Colony Club or equivalent on the RCL Radiance class ships. Greatly disappointed in the dancing on the Quantum. Seems with RCL the larger the ship the worse the dancing. That is a big thing for us. Also RCL seems to be trying way too hard to draw the younger crowds.

Just our view.

For what it's worth - we just sailed on Quantum for 11 nights. We looked at the beverage packages but felt we couldn't justify the costs.

So we decided go drink whatever we wanted each day and then at the end of the cruise see how much we spent for future reference.

We are Emerald so no free drinks, except the BOGO deal and the 10% off deal.

We are both wine drinkers, red only, and DW likes specialty coffees occasionally. We typically order a bottle with dinner and it lasts 2 nights.

We also have a glass at lunch and one or two either before or after dinner depending on the timing, but not every night. We tried several of the available Reds at the various bars and actually discovered that the one we preferred was usually listed for $8 a glass. At dinner the bottles varied, favorite being the Kendall Jackson Cab.

Our total for drinks on average was $20pp/pd. Not even close to the Select package ($35pp/pd?), which would have capped our wines at $8 a glass.

It would take a 50% discount for these packages to make sense for us.

I would hate to be in situation where I felt I had to have two or three more glasses of wine a day just because I had a package. That seems like the reverse of peace of mind, at least for us.

Like I said, for what it's worth. It just seems like you have to do a lot of drinking to make these packages work, and that's every day.

We were on the 2/2 sailing and there were several elevator problems.

We would often see half filled elevators pass our floor going in the direction we were going and our corresponding button was pushed and lit, but the elevator passed us by. Because of the glass you can see the people in the elevator.

Clearly something is wrong with their programming.

However, in our opinion in the spectrum of issues this is a minor one. We usually just climbed up the 9 flights of stairs to our cabin.

For us the DD hassle is a show stopper. DD concept is a winner but RCL's implementation is seriously flawed.

Okay, back to last night. We saw Starwater in 270. Only people who like to watch half naked men and women gyrating on stage and doing contortion acts in the air would enjoy something like this. Luckily for us, we love that kind of thing!

 

Seriously, to say I found the show impressive would be an understatement. The gowns and costumes were stunningly beautiful, the dancing and acrobatics were great, the lighting and video backgrounds were amazing (except for one brief campy part during the 1920s segment). The vocals were outstanding - and I have sung in my share of choirs over the years. But my favorite part was the music itself. I lost count of how many sampled songs I recognized. Just the first piece blended sampled segments from Madonna, Peter Gabrielle, Deee Lite, and a couple other artists I can't remember right now. Whoever found a way to combine such disparate music into a beautiful and coherent whole and then put new vocals and a modern sound over them is an absolute genius. Other pieces had bits from The Police and Cab Calloway, among many others. I'm going to try to see it again before the end of the cruise.

 

Dinner was at Chic. It was our worst dining experience yet. So far service has been pretty good or great everywhere, but it was terrible last night. Perhaps it was because our reservations were very late and the staff was tired. We never saw the assistant waiter, and our head waiter was rude even though we went out of our way to be polite to him (I grew up in Texas and DH grew up in the Midwest, so being polite to others is in our blood). Even though most of the tables around us were empty, we had to wait a long time to make our order and even longer to get our food. The food was not good. I had a tomato and onion salad, which was exactly that with a little dill. The waiter realized he had forgotten the herb dressing that should have come with it until I was almost finished. I also had the crispy salmon, which was a bland piece of salmon with phyllo dough strips stuck on top of it. These were neither crispy, nor flavorful. The asparagus and carrots that came with the fish were good. DH had the baby greens salad with goat cheese and thought it was okay. He also had the snapper with crushed potatoes and creamed spinach. He didn't care for it at first, but decided it was good by the end of the meal.

 

The strangest part of the experience at Chic was the end of the meal. The waiter came to our table, asked for our stateroom number three or four times as he fought with his iPad (you would think he would have it already, since we had reservations), and then he just walked away while mumbling to himself. We sat there for a couple more minutes and then got up and left. We knew we didn't owe anything since the wine we had was under $12. Needless to say, we won't be going back to Chic.

 

One note here - DH and I have both designed and managed the development of websites and user interfaces professionally over the years, and RCI really needs to fix both their customer website and the interfaces on the crew members' iPads. The user experience provided by their commercial website is bad, as I don't have to tell anyone who has used it. And I have watched several crew members fight with counter-intuitive screens and workflows that require them to ask for the same information more than once. They also need to beef up their servers and/or bandwidth because at boarding the lady who was helping us had to wait one or two minutes for each new screen to load. It's not as if RCI doesn't know how many people will be boarding at the same time. I'm sure crew members find these issues frustrating, and that feeling can't help but get passed on to the passengers in one way or another.

 

 

 

Tonight is Grande and maybe a virtual concert back here in 270.

Great thread. We were on the Quantum cruise right before yours. We loved Starwater and Sonic Odyssey. We thought that on our cruise all the entertainment was first class. Mama Mia is the best show we have seen afloat.

We also ate at Chic, twice in fact. Our snapper was also mediocre, however I had the crispy Salmon and I thought it was great. Crust was crispy and the salmon was very good. I am sure this stuff varies from night to night.

We also had a strange experience. I ordered the Crepe Napoleon for desert and when it came is was clearly not a crepe nor could I see any resemblance to Napoleon. When the waiter returned he asked how I liked the desert and I told him I didn't. He then said he thought so because no one likes that desert! Thanks for letting me know :-)

We loved Grande. Ate there 7 out of 11 nights and we always had great service and meet several really interesting fellow guests. Food was great, except one time my wife's sole was tough and flavorless, but a second time it was good, variations again, and the atmosphere is the best. Loved the piano player though I never saw him. Saved a tip. Just kidding, I am sure it was piped in.

Thank you all for your very helpful replies.

We have danced on Crystal and our experience is similar. Empty or nearly empty dance floors don't bother us as we like as much space as we can get. Our favorite dances are the Quickstep, Waltz, and Foxtrot. They take up quite a bit of floorspace and I anticipate we won't be doing any of them on the Legend.

We also enjoy the spot dances - Rumba, Cha Cha, Salsa, Bolero and Swing.

I am hoping we will find suitable floor space and music to do a little of each of these each evening. Based on experiences on other cruises the Phillipino bands are very good at covering wide variety of music.

Serendipitously it seems we may be on the best Seabourn ship, short lived as it is, for this.

Ironically on the giant Quantum we found great floors but the bands were one-dimensional, either Rock or Salsa. Targeted for a younger crowd I guess. We found that boring after a day or two but that is clearly a taste thing.

Thanks again for your help.

This post was from 2015 ;)

Found this thread by using the search function.

It is from last year. Does any know if the Phillipino band will be on the Legend next week?

Hope so.

Slow slow quick quick slow.

So they Tango.

Not easy on a small floor.

We will also be on the 3/1 sailing and you have our sympathy. DW spent too much time on the phone getting our dining and entertainment reservations booked and if they were to disappear at this late date (thankfully they haven't) we would be apoplectic. Did you print out your reservations? If so, I would go the appropriate dining room at the assigned time and demand to be seated. I've read that this has worked for others. If not, I'd think that you should at least be ok on the nights where you have reservations for 1. The person with the reservation can just request a table for 2, and the second person can just walk in and join them. For the other nights you have to hope that additional time slots will materialize once you're aboard ship. It appears that this sailing is pretty fully booked so get there early and make your reservations right away. If all else fails it seems that walk-ins have good success if they eat early. Good luck.

It is good to have your reservations for dining and entertainment sorted out before you board and yes it does take a lot of effort.

But once you board you will find things change, like show times and other events that you were not previously aware of will show up on the daily Compass that you would like to attend.

Then you have to engage with the on-board reservation people and try to make changes. Good luck with that. Sometimes it works and most times not so much. The Royal IQ app is very clumsy because it has no change function and frankly the real people have more open seating times than the app shows per site so it really is a waste of time to use base on our experience.

Good luck. Quantum is a gorgeous ship and the entertainment is first rate. It is a shame they have mucked it up with this train wreck of a reservation system.

We debated getting the Select package on our Quantum cruise because the wine prices, which is all alcohol we drink, were higher than on previous RCL cruises by a fair amount.

Instead we decided to buy whatever we wanted and then figure out what we spent per day for future reference. For us the average daily cost was $20 a day per person. That is all beverages that we paid for on the cruise.

Wine for lunch though not every day, wine for dinner every day and wine in the evenings, and an occasional specialty coffee or two.

I can't imagine drinking enough to make even the Select package worthwhile. And the Select package had a limit of $8 a glass. No way is this a deal.

My wife and I are ballroom dancers.

What is the dancing like on the Legend?