Bazzito

Interesting that their home port is Southampton.

My wife and I took the Independence OTS from Southampton to Ft. Lauderdale (Sail Date: 11/22/12) and I recall everyone being held in the terminal awaiting boarding while the ship was "deep cleaned" from a Norovirus outbreak on the arriving cruise.

We were late departing in very rough seas, which smoothed out after our stop in Lisbon.

We noticed that, in addition to the never ending notices to wash hands frequently and the constant presence of the anti-bacterial hand gel everywhere, they had glass shields over all of the items in the Windjammer, which were served to you by staff. And they pressed everyone into service, including dancers and musicians. I talked with one of the band members later in the cruise and he confirmed that, indeed, serving in the buffet as needed was part of the job.

They also provided salt & pepper only in little individual paper packets.

After about four days, the sneeze guards disappeared, the salt & pepper shakers were back on the table, and it was self-serve for the balance of the trip, the outbreak stopped, apparently.

I talked with a number of the staff about this during the cruise and they all agreed that they were looking forward to the Caribbean destinations. They mentioned that the Norovirus was much more common on the European cruises as the European travelers, to put it nicely, "have a different standard of personal hygiene than their American counterparts."

We’ve been on 18 cruises 12 RCI ships over the years and have enjoyed the food on every one of them. And, of course, we agree that food is a matter of taste, etc., etc. and is highly subjective.

Being regular cruisers we have developed our own preferences and habits that suit our tastes, lifestyle, and personal quirks. I’m sure you will, too.

MDR: We’ve found the food to be consistently good. We don’t, however attend formal nights in the MDR anymore – we’ve got plenty of cruise photos by now and I wear a tuxedo for my second job and I’m not taking it on vacation.

We both love lunch in the MDR. It’s among the best meals on the cruise, in our opinion.

WINDJAMMER: Yep. It’s a buffet, but a whole lot better than Golden Corral, IMHO. We’ve noticed and often commented that RCI has really made a concerted effort to improve and maintain the quality of the Windjammer food, over the years. We think they’ve succeeded.

And since we’ve quit attending formal nights in the MDR, we’ve been eating more and more dinners in the Windjammer and have been pleasantly surprised at how good the food is for dinner. We’ve also noticed that they usually serve one or two of the entrees and desserts from the MDR in the evenings.

Our most recent cruise was on the Freedom OTS and we ate dinner in the Windjammer all seven nights.

ROOM SERVICE: Room service is free, most hours of the day, and my wife loves it. Me? Not so much. It takes her a while to get moving in the mornings, so I’ll bring her coffee first thing and she’ll order pastries and fruit, plus a second cup of coffee from room service and it works out great. It’s the same pastries she’d get if she went anywhere else on the ship. I’ll got to the MDR or Windjammer for breakfast and we’re both happy. It DEFINITELY beats any breakfast arrangement we can work out at home by a long shot.

PIZZA: Yes, the pizza isn’t of the best quality, BUT on some of the ships the Sorrento’s serves it 24/7, so after staggering out of the casino at 1:30AM drunk, it’s terrific, IMHO!

SPECIALY RESTAURANTS: We’ve eaten at Chops twice in all of our cruises, each time at my wife’s request, and certainly the quality of the food was excellent. Personally, I wince at having to pay extra for the specialty restaurants when I find the other food offerings perfectly to my liking. I realize that many people love the specialty restaurants and that they’re a huge profit center for RCI, but if they all disappeared tomorrow, it wouldn’t detract from my cruise experience in the least.

So, on the whole, we really like the quality, flexibility and options that the meals on RCI cruises have to offer, and they’re one of the reasons we enjoy cruising so much.

I live in the SW corner of New Mexico with 2 man made lakes 45 miles away.

Yes, I do need my ocean fix! Additionally, I have terrible juniper allergies (except for gin) and for my upcoming 14 days, I breathe pure saline air with no allergens or pollution, only beautiful clean air! Looking forward to my fix in 62 days on Indy!

 

Alan

"Yes. We'll talk when you get there."

Will Panama Canal cruises be a thing of the past with this trend? Surely, Royal Caribbean (or any cruise line for that matter) will have to keep and/or build one or two ships that will fit the canal if they want to keep such cruises. That is, IF the market still demands it...

Well, the Oasis class ships won't fit through the expanded canal when it finally opens. (2016, maybe??) Their beams are 198' - too wide for the new locks, which max out at 160 feet.

But the Quantum class ships will go through with beams of 135 feet.

They won't especially NEED Radiance class ships (Our favorites!) to service ports on both sides of the canal.

Without any opinion on the topic, here, for your consideration, are Neil Postman's six questions concerning any technology:

1. What is the problem to which this technology is a solution?

2. Whose problem is it?

3. Suppose we solve this problem, and solve it decisively. What new problems might be created by because we have solved the problem?

4. Which people and what institutions might be most seriously harmed by a technological solution?

5. What changes in language are being enforced by new technologies and what is being gained or lost by such changes?

6. What sort of people and institutions acquire special economic or political power because of technological change?

I'm sure had he lived long ehough, he'd surely have added, "No. 7. How will they track my slot play?"

Thanks for the review. What's a crap's 'special shooter'?

Sorry I wasn't clear about it.

Typically, there are usually about the same dozen or so crapshooters on any given cruise. So, they get to know eachother pretty well and the dealers all call them by their first names (friendliness encourages tipping).

"Special shooter" was my inept way of saying that on the final night of the voyage, a woman who none of us had ever seen before steps us and rolls more than 30 (thirty) place bet numbers - and never made a second winning pass line point! This is what is commonly called a "monster" roll. During rolls like this, players that make bets in the boxes on the table with the big numbers in them make lots of money.

You know what they say, "Better early than late. Better late than never."

We’re just back from a 7 night cruise on the Freedom of the Seas out of Port Canaveral. Sail date was 08/24/2014. Itinerary was eastern Caribbean (Coco Cay, St. Thomas, St. Maarten). Coco Cay stop was cancelled due to Tropical Storm Christobal. 2 sea days to St. Thomas was O.K. with us, but we heard many complaints from passenger who wanted the beach day.

We’d cruised on the Liberty OTS and the Independence OTS, so this trip completed our “flush” of the Freedom class ships. Everything was right where we remembered it, so it was a familiar layout.

The Cruise Critic review mentioned that this cruise is popular with families – and they weren’t wrong. Lots of families taking advantage of the last week before Labor Day and the start of school in the civilized northern states. (School has been in session in Florida since the 2nd week of August. The geniuses in charge just can’t wait until students drop dead from heat exhaustion during football practice.) On the whole, we found nearly all of the children and teens extremely well behaved at all times. (We had a very different experience on the Liberty in June, 2008 where the rude and unruly behavior of the children and teens was a constant annoyance. But that cruise sailed out of Miami. You may draw any inference from this fact that you care to.)

THE GOOD:

Our stateroom steward (Walter Cordova) was among the best ever. Attentive without being intrusive and he responded to every request promptly, including a need for assistance from maintenance. Couldn’t have been more pleased.

Soda package value increased quite a bit, IMHO. The new tumblers are much better than the old “Tower O’ Suds” model from years past. (These, we’ll probably actually use around the house when we get home.) But the big deal is the installation of Coca Cola Freestyle machines by Sorrento’s and in the Windjammer. What a great addition! Finally, RCI added a feature that I actually can use. Well done!

They showed “Gravity” in 3-D in the theater one day and it was really impressive. My wife hadn’t seen this movie and she just loved it, the discomfort of the 3-D glasses notwithstanding. I thought they fit just fine over my Rx specs. It was really a great movie experience. Now they REALLY need a popcorn machine on the ship!

The smallish orchestra was one of the best I’ve ever heard on an RCI ship, and the onboard orchestras on RCI ships are typically of excellent quality. They were flawless in their playing, perfectly in tune at all times (I’m a conservatory trained musician, so I know.) and their tenor saxophone player was about as good as one could possibly hope for. Very impressive.

The casino:

After 6 straight nights of losses at the craps table, they brought in a special shooter who “shot the lights out” on the last evening, allowing me (and many others, if they were smart) to recoup ALL of my losses from the previous nights. Thanks, RCI! You did that for us years ago on the Sovereign OTS as well. Glad to know that you still offer that service. You’re the best!!

Connoisseur Club:

It’s nice to be able to enjoy a cigar in comfort with excellent attention from an attendant. The attendant on duty (Sanjayduth) each night was much like our cabin steward - attentive without hovering or being overbearing. The cigar lounge is one of the really nice features of the Voyager and Freedom class ships. It’s just too bad that RCI keeps building bigger and bigger ships – yet somehow they’re not big enough to accommodate cigar smokers. Civilized gentlemen would gladly trade a merry-go-round or a zip line for a cigar lounge! (Pssst. Cigarette smokers love it, too. But I guess they don’t count, either.) It’s nice to find a class of ship that doesn’t treat smokers like pariahs.

And while I’m on the subject, these ships offer all kinds of things that not everyone wants to participate in, yet they are there for the passengers to enjoy .nonetheless. Honestly. Do more than 5% of passengers ever climb the rock wall? Yet RCI has made it the centerpiece of their marketing efforts for years. Why not offer a cigar lounge on the mega-ships as well? And do more than 100 people a cruise shoot baskets on the basketball court? Yet they’re still on even some of the “smaller” ships for an activity option. And did they sell more cupcakes on our cruise than they did cigars? I’ll wager not, but the cupcake shop is prominently located on the promenade for those who want to patronize it. It just seems to me that there ought to be enough room on the ever growing behemoths that RCI keeps floating out to remember to install a cigar lounge like they used to on the Voyager and Freedom class ships. (Writer descends soapbox...)

THE BAD:

The Drew Thomas magic show was ruined for me by all of the rotten music played at ear splitting amplitude. Sad, really, because he is certainly a talented magician who presents big stage illusion show. To have one on a cruise ship is a real accomplishment, for certain. The use of the dancers and assistants is really well done. You can tell that RCI spent a bunch of money on the staging, costumes and the use of their resident singers and dancers. It’s obviously professionally choreographed and well rehearsed. But the assault of relentless ear splitting electronic, auto-tuned, THUMP THUMP THUMP sound from the moment the audience is seated left me in a foul mood by the time the show actually started. And once the show starts, the loud volume was similarly unrelenting as well, completely sapping any enthusiasm for Thomas’ obvious talent. RCI is usually very good with the details of their shows, but this one has really gotten away from them. They need to reign in the volume and re-think the entertainment experience of this show. It’s a well known phenomenon that the amplitude (volume) of touring shows increases with the length of their runs as the sound technicians become jaded. Replacing the sound engineers on this ship should have been done a long time ago. Or at least the director should stick his head in the door once in a while and make sure that the show is an entertainment rather than an instrument of torture.

THE SURPRISING:

Windjammer:

(Really not that much of a surprise, actually.) We booked this cruise at the last minute and got one of the last two balcony staterooms on the ship, so we were assigned My Time Dining. My wife doesn’t especially like MTD and neither of us care much for the formal nights, so we ate every evening meal in the Windjammer. I know that food quality is a common topic on the forum, but ever since our first cruise on RCI in 2002, we’ve noticed that they've taken great pains over the years to improve their buffet food across their fleet. My wife enjoyed every meal she had in the Windjammer, and commented on it a number of times. I’m pretty easy to please when it comes to food, but to hear her consistently praise the food in the buffet was a bit of a surprise.

Dreamworks characters:

I’m here to say, and honestly do so, that an adult can actually spend a week on an RCI ship and NOT encounter a single Dreamworks character - except on purpose! This had been a worry for me, but it seems that my fears were groundless. I’m not a big fan of the Dreamworks “Fractured Fairly Tale” movies with their scatological humor and cheap pop culture references, but it’s their empire and they’re certainly entitled to do what they want with it. I just didn’t want to have Shrek wandering around where I might bump into him by surprise.

I needn’t have worried. The character appearances are spaced our throughout the cruise and the times are listed in the Cruise Compass. Great for families who want an encounter (and photo op, no doubt) and also for adults who want to avoid the fray. And probably the biggest surprise of the cruise was an experience that any cruiser will want to enjoy - and that’s the “Move it! Move it!” parade.

As I went to the promenade to retrieve a purchase made earlier on Day 7, I could see that preparations were being made for the parade. I thought that I might just as well check it out, since it looked like I was about to be trapped on the promenade anyway. Much to my surprise, it was tremendously engaging and enjoyable with a pumped up soundtrack of just about every pop song you’ve ever heard with the word “move” or “dance” in it revved up to a double-time pace.

"High energy" doesn't begin to describe it. The costumes were elaborate, colorful and gave the impression that RCI hadn’t skimped on a thing. All of the performers were enthusiastic, smiling, energetic at all times, and really seemed to be having a good time. The parade proceeded from both ends of the promenade and made a full circle so that every person got to see the Dreamworks characters up close twice. It was a ton of fun and I even wore my green Shrek ears back to the stateroom with pride! Whoever put this thing together was just brilliant. “Fun for the whole family” would be an apt description of the “Move it!” experience. If you’re in SOMEBODY’S family, you’re going to have a good time. Yep. I’m a believer!

We really enjoyed our Freedom OTS cruise and we eagerly booked an Oct, 2015 trip from Barcelona to Tampa on the Vision OTS while onboard. We’re looking forward to it.

Note to Self: Pack earplugs!

I was going suggest Tampa, but thegima beat me to it.

We love the Radiance class ships and the Brilliance is one of our favorites.

My wife and I have fond memories of our 20th anniversary on it which includes our most memorable bunch of table mates, the only ones we have ever kept in touch with after the cruise.

We also live in Florida and would rather sail out of Tampa than Fort Lauderdale any time. Traffic and parking are much better there, IMHO. (Of course, if we sail out of Tampa, we can get our son to pick us up from the terminal!)

My wife and I make a game of observing passengers exhibiting rude behavior.

If either one of us witnesses a rude passenger, we remark to the other:

"in the lifeboat, I'm voting to eat them first!" :)