cruiseturbo

We saw Mo5aic on the Allure last year. Five guys singing a Capella. Incredible.

Mosaic was great but our favorite was Home Free, who is also an Acapella group. They recently won the Sing-Off and they are amazing!!!!

How long are the captains on or off for? We are sailing on the Allure on August 31st and are hoping to have Capt Johnny, however I see the other Capt just started his rotation. Does this mean we will have that captain?

Thanks

We have been on both Oasis and Allure(many times) and think that Chops and Giovanni's were very comparable, didn't notice much difference but loved them both. I actually like Giovanni's better than Portofinos due to the menu options however others in my party prefer Portofinos.

The solarium bistro on Oasis was not to our liking as everything was meant to be a healthier choice and we couldn't find much that we liked. We also did not enjoy Samba at all!

We did not have any temperature issues on either ship, if anything we always get cold on the Allure and end up taking light sweaters with us to shows and dinner. I am a hot sleeper but once the thermostat is all the way to cold, I had to use a blanket.

We have been on the oasis once and the Allure five times and not once have we noticed crowding. The ship is set up in different neighborhoods and there are so many options for eating and activities that everybody can do their own thing and it keeps the people spread out.

Also the best embarkation and debarkation process of any ship!

Go and enjoy yourself, you will be missing a lot if you don't!

Bon Voyage! Have a great trip! I know we are all ready to follow along and enjoy it with you! I don't sail the Allure again until Aug 31st so this LIVE review will help pass the time!

We have decided to get the drink package this time so I am interested to hear any feedback or experiences you have with that.

Again, have a greet time!

Debra

Just sent an email to Adam to voice my concerns about the new menu as well. Very upset that my favorite prosciutto potatoes and the smaller filet option are gone. Also concerned about the sauces missing. Hopefully they will take all of our feedback into consideration before rolling out fleet wide.

Debra

As far as I can tell the menu order generally stays the same on the same ship. I have compasses from the Allure eastern itineraries from March 2013 and Feb 2014 and the order on both sailings was the one below.

Day 1- Mojo

Day 2- Saffron

Day 3- Pimiento

Day 4- ****take

Day 5- Basil

Day 6- Jasmine

Day 7- Pomodoro

Debra

Have you looked at the Chops menu on Royal Caribbean's website? That would give you a better idea if you like the food they are offering or not. I would consider myself a very picky eater but Chops is one of my favorite specialty restaurants. The filet is amazing, my favorite side is the potatoes with cheese and prosciutto and the mud pie for dessert is to die for!

By the way, Chops serves the largest slice of carrot cake that I have ever seen!

Enjoy!

We saw them on the Explorer as well! Absolutely loved them then and now! Really hope they win!

My mom and I always enjoy the basket when we travel and what we don't eat on the ship we take home and eat there. We have only ever received one basket though, but sounds like we should be receiving two. We do not live together and we both have accounts. We do each receive a beverage.

I am like others one here that do not want Royal to think we don't appreciate the baskets cause we do! Please don't take them away!

We have a promenade room booked on the Liberty over New Years. It will be our first promenade room as we normally get balcony rooms however holiday cruises are a little pricier than what I wanted to pay for a balcony. Can't wait now that you have all did such good things about the rooms!

My biggest concern is that we booked 6313 and the deck plans show it is a connecting room. Although when I booked it my travel agent said his plans don't show it as connecting?! Funny thing is that it shows not connecting on Freedom or Independence but as connecting on Liberty. Thought they usually had very close to the same plans. Oh well, guess we will see for sure in 22 days!

I for one am happy with anything extra that they choose to give us cause they didn't have to do anything. If we all continue to complain about every little thing I don't blame them for giving up and just not giving us anything. Lets's try to appreciate what we do get.

;)

Try to email the diamond lounge concierge. When we were on the freedom in september I emailed that concierge before we went. He said obviously the suite guests get first dibs but that he would hold my information and if any cabanas were left available before the other concierge opened them up to the explorations desk he would grab one for me. He did and we had a great location as well! Doesn't hurt to try.

I believe 150 Central Park is excluded and I think there is one other but can't remember what it is. Sorry!

We have used ours at Chops mainly but I know you can also use it at Giovanni's.

We just had a cabana on barefoot beach during our cruise in Sept and the upgraded buffet is definitely still there as well as the water. However we did not see people coming over from Nellie's like we had the last year and the line was very short the entire time. We even commented on how quiet it was in there. Which of course we loved for relaxation purposes but didn't think about the Nellie's folks not be allowed over.

We will be on the Freedom three weeks from tomorrow for this same itinerary and loved reading your review! We have been before but you know how it is in the time leading up to a cruise.....you just want to be there so anything you can read or see about the cruise makes it seem closer!!

We always rent a cabana at Labadee and seeing the pics of yours really got me excited again!

Wow this is a very long Allure review and I am loving it!!

This is working out well, cause you are getting me thru until I leave on the Allure in 8 days! The next few days at work are going to take forever....

Thanks for your great review and your funny commentary, I can't imagine that your wife doesn't love cruising after this!

Hey there’s a car in the middle of this ship

Let’s take a picture with it (Which we will never get to see)

 

On the way to Giovanni’s DW and I had a few minutes to kill on the Promenade and there was the car just sitting there all alone and a RCCL photographer begging to take our picture. We were dressed up and I wanted some pics with the car so we posed. The photographer surprised me when I handed him my seapass card and he just gave it back to me. He didn’t scan it so the pictures he was about to take could be identified and put in our folder/account. He did ask if we had taken an embarkation pic and we had and our seapass had been scanned at that time. He informed us that there was no need to scan the seapass again because they had special photo recognition software that would magically find our pictures and put them in our folder for us to purchase. OK, I thought I guess we will see if it really works or not. The answer, at least in our case and the case of all 8 of us in the group, is NOT. Emphatic and overwhelming NOT. As in complete failure on every level NOT.

 

Now in Disney they take your picture all over the place in multiple parks, hotels, water parks, restaurants and anywhere else the Mouse can find to snap a photo. An area that is spread over miles and miles of real estate and yet every single photo I’ve ever had snapped at the most magical place on earth shows up in our account, every time. (We’ve been there 4 times).

 

When we go snow skiing at Vail Resorts (Keystone, Breckenridge, Vail, Beaver Creek, etc.) they take it to another level completely with EPIC MIX. Your lift ticket has an RF chip embedded in it and every time you go up a ski lift you get registered and you earn points and pins for your runs down the mountains. It all gets posted to Vail’s own social media site. Every picture you take on the mountain is scanned by waving the scanner in general direction of your lift ticket; you don’t even have to take it out of your pocket or anything. Oh, and this technology works on multiple mountains that are miles apart in separate resorts, even in resorts in other states. Every picture, every ski lift, every vertical foot skied is logged and loaded.

 

So imagine my amazement when I went to the photo kiosk to look at our pictures by the car. There were no pictures by the car. Now there were a lot of pictures, pictures of some other family that looked absolutely NOTHING like us. My wife is a petite blonde and the women in these pictures had jet black hair and were not even remotely the same body type as she is (I’m being kind here). After getting help from the staff person we finally found an embarkation pic we took with our group of 6 that boarded together. We didn’t take one of just the 2 of us which may have been a big mistake in retrospect. Maybe the “magical recognition software” would have performed better if it had just been me and DW alone. But no one in our group looks anything like the pictures that were in our file.

 

As the week progressed the mystery family kept showing back up on the computer and in the actual photo print binders. I would delete them and then they would return. I can only imagine who these other people were and what they were going through if they were looking for their photos. My cousin took some pics with his mom at the Prohibition Party and they showed up in my folder! We were not even at the Prohibition Party. We never got the car pics. Finally the staff found some contact sheet that contained our car pics but we never saw them in our folder or on the computer. The last day the photo place was a zoo and it just wasn’t worth the hassle to see if they ever got the pictures printed at all. We would probably have purchased a couple at least.

 

Pretty much the customer service we encountered on board was excellent in every area except the photo department. The photo experience was horrible. And it is so easy to fix – scan the seapass!! Or RF tag the seapass. Do something to make this process work. I encountered several others who were also looking for their lost photos. How often does this happen? How many photos are lost in the digital cesspool of unidentified pictures every cruise? A complete mess that is easily fixable. Really this was my only major gripe with anything on the cruise.

Sorry to hear that you had a bad experience with this. :(

We have been on the Allure three times and the Oasis once. All 4 times the photo recognition system has worked great and we were amazed how quickly out photos showed up. Wish this was the experience you had!

A friend and I went on a quick girls weekend last June that went to Cococay and we rented one of these cabanas. We really enjoyed it so for us it was worth the money. They were relatively new at that point so most of the cabanas by us were empty and it was very quiet in the cabana area.

When we checked in at the cabana area, they walked us to our cabana and gave us towels. Shortly after that they brought us a cooler with our waters and a bottle of champagne. Then a fruit plate came about an hour later, which was really good! Since we didn't have many people in the cabana area, the lunch buffet was really nice cause it seemed like we had it to ourselves! They made steaks, chicken, shrimp, and something else on the grill that I can't remember. Also had the normal salads, rolls, beans, drinks and desserts. Only down side was that the water is farther away than it is in Labadee but we just ended up sunning all day anyways.

I would book a cabana again if I go back to CocoCay.

Thank you for the information!! I think we will definitely look to add this to our day!

Does anyone know how much it would cost to take a taxi to the Hacienda Antigua Tequila Tour in Cozumel? We were just planning on doing some shopping and getting back on the ship since we have been to Cozumel several times, however just read a review about this tour and it sounds like fun.

So we would either take the taxi from the internationa pier to the tequila tour or from downtown after our shopping. Just trying to figure out based on how much it costs to get there if we want to go that bad.

Thanks for any feedback!

I have been on the Allure three times and the Oasis once but have never signed up for this class. However, I am treating my mom to a cruise on the Freedom for her 60th Birthday in May and I think I am going to sign us up! She said she wants to do everything she has never done on the ship like ice skate, rock climb, etc. (She did try the flowrider on our first Freedom cruise several years ago) I haven't told her that I am signing us up, think I will surprise her with it. I am sure that regardless of the price, we will have a great time laughing and making the most of it! Great memories I am sure!

Debra

I booked the 3 breakfasts because there are different Characters at each breakfast. Last year on Allure B2B I didnt have time to see any of the Characters so as I only have one week on the ship this year I have booked all 3 breakfasts.

My mother and I attended the character breakfast last May on the Allure and a group of four of us attended again in Sept on Allure. We did not have children with us but enjoy these characters as they are for all ages as another poster already stated. The reservations open up at the same time for all cruisers, so everyone has the same opportunity to book. Do not see anything wrong with adults choosing to reserve, we had a wonderful time and will probably book it again next time we are on a ship that offers it.

I also agree with a previous poster who said that we are comparing two completely different things. Exposing Children to an adults lounge with alchohol is not something I would think any cruise line would allow.

So if Captain Johnny started his rotation on the Allure on 6-5-11 how long will he stay on? I am sailing on 9-4-11 and was wondering whether we will have him or Captain Zini? Thank you!

Debra

I booked my character dining the day it opened and the only time I saw was 8am.

 

We are going on May 15, we can't wait!!

We are going on May 15th too and we also are two adults who booked the Character Breakfast!! See you there!