Cheapo dad’s trip report on Allure of the Seas sailing December 14, 2014

[soccerdad72]

I do think our sons share the same picky gene, you're right. My son ordered whatever seafood was on the menu each night, except for one of our last nights.

 

And I agree with your viewpoint on DD versus traditional dining. After a couple nights, our waitstaff knew everything about our preferences and tendencies. In fact, the night that my son didn't order seafood, the waiter questioned him a couple times (jokingly) and then when they brought out the entrees, they brought him an order of the shrimp, just in case. :p

[travelgoddess1]

I do think our sons share the same picky gene, you're right. My son ordered whatever seafood was on the menu each night, except for one of our last nights.

 

And I agree with your viewpoint on DD versus traditional dining. After a couple nights, our waitstaff knew everything about our preferences and tendencies. In fact, the night that my son didn't order seafood, the waiter questioned him a couple times (jokingly) and then when they brought out the entrees, they brought him an order of the shrimp, just in case. :p

 

I'm impressed that your son ordered seafood every night. That does NOT qualify him as a picky eater, IMO, lol! :)

 

I agree with both of you about Dynamic Dining. You are correct, it's nice to feel special, and having the waiters know your preferences for the entire cruise, and anticipating them, IS special. We have tried DD, briefly, on Quantum, and there was, admittedly, no special feeling. (We had none of the other problems being widely reported.)

 

Sorry for getting off topic -- carry on. :)

[TrqoisWtrs]

I know there are major fans of my time dining out there

 

I agree with both of you about Dynamic Dining. You are correct, it's nice to feel special, and having the waiters know your preferences for the entire cruise, and anticipating them, IS special. We have tried DD, briefly, on Quantum, and there was, admittedly, no special feeling.

 

On Carnival, if you chose any time dining, you can request to sit in a certain area so you can get the same wait staff every night. Plus you can dine when its convenient, so win win in my book. :) You can't do that on Royal?

[Clarea]

On Carnival, if you chose any time dining, you can request to sit in a certain area so you can get the same wait staff every night. Plus you can dine when its convenient, so win win in my book. :) You can't do that on Royal?

You can request to sit at the same table with the same wait staff with Royal's My Time Dining also.

[travelgoddess1]

On Carnival, if you chose any time dining, you can request to sit in a certain area so you can get the same wait staff every night. Plus you can dine when its convenient, so win win in my book. :) You can't do that on Royal?

 

I think you may be mixing up My Time Dining and Dynamic Dining, which are two separate dining concepts at Royal Caribbean. At present, DD is available only on Quantum, its newest ship.

[harryfat1]

On Carnival, if you chose any time dining, you can request to sit in a certain area so you can get the same wait staff every night. Plus you can dine when its convenient, so win win in my book. :) You can't do that on Royal?

 

As Bob already replied, yes, you can on Royal, in theory. In practice, at least the one time that I experienced on the Mariner when they gave me my time dining (not by my choice), it wasn't perfect system back then, maybe things are better now.

 

First of all, I tried to get reservation for 6 PM nightly, exactly as the regular dining as we can catch all the shows, then was told on day 1 as soon as I boarded to make reservation, Nope. They can't accept anything for table for 6 at 6 PM for any of the nights. Fine. Then they gave a "in between" 6 and 8:30 PM time slot. Which is fine if you don't care about shows but we like to see shows so that meant at certain nights, we had to rush through dinner because the shows were geared for the main or late seating.

 

Then, when we asked to be seated with same waiter/same table. They said "ok, we can do that". In reality, not perfect in that on formal nights, people like to sit and linger longer after their meal so that if the people that is sitting in "your table" decides to sit and chat and have another drink, you can't go in and say "move it, move it, this is my table NOW". So then your options becomes, do you wait for that table or ANY open table for 6 will do as you have a show to catch and that defeats the whole purpose of same waiter/same table.

 

I understand everyone has personal preferences. Just from what we experienced, I prefer an assigned time.

[harryfat1]

OK, sorry, my fault in not explaining “dynamic dining” (DD) to those reading my posts as not everyone follows the development of RCI.

 

DD basically takes the traditional MDR and split it up into 3 different theme restaurants , one is traditional American food. One is Asian Fusion food. The last one is the more formal food. Unlike the typical MDR food where the menu changes nightly, none of the menus of these 3 restaurants change. They remain the same for the entire cruise. So it’s up to each individual cruiser to decide which restaurant they want to eat in any given night and make the reservation accordingly.

 

That is what I meant when I said you go to the restaurant for different menu instead of the restaurant changing its menu for you. So now there will be no one big MDR, but various smaller venues. Very controversial topic with many cruisers chiming in at the RCI forum. Originally RCI was going to implement this on Oasis/Allure in the Spring time but a recent announcement says they will delay implementing it until later in the year. So for now, only Quantum has this.

 

Again, sorry for the confusion.

[Johnamac123]

OK, sorry, my fault in not explaining “dynamic dining” (DD) to those reading my posts as not everyone follows the development of RCI.

 

DD basically takes the traditional MDR and split it up into 3 different theme restaurants , one is traditional American food. One is Asian Fusion food. The last one is the more formal food. Unlike the typical MDR food where the menu changes nightly, none of the menus of these 3 restaurants change. They remain the same for the entire cruise. So it’s up to each individual cruiser to decide which restaurant they want to eat in any given night and make the reservation accordingly.

 

That is what I meant when I said you go to the restaurant for different menu instead of the restaurant changing its menu for you. So now there will be no one big MDR, but various smaller venues. Very controversial topic with many cruisers chiming in at the RCI forum. Originally RCI was going to implement this on Oasis/Allure in the Spring time but a recent announcement says they will delay implementing it until later in the year. So for now, only Quantum has this.

 

Again, sorry for the confusion.

 

Speaking of the Oasis class ships of one week duration, the menus in the three inclusive dining rooms will change once mid week. This way, you can have a variety of six menus in those three dining rooms over a week long trip.

[two4me]

Dear Harry,

 

You have made this review like a soap opera, you have

me hooked and can't wait for the next posting,lol

grrrr. :):D

[big_schots]

On Carnival, if you chose any time dining, you can request to sit in a certain area so you can get the same wait staff every night. Plus you can dine when its convenient, so win win in my book. :) You can't do that on Royal?

 

On our last two RCCL cruises (Oasis and Navigator), that is exactly what we did. On the first night, we liked our wait team, so we had the hostess make a note on our future My Time Dining reservations to put us in their section for the rest of the cruise. We even had different dining times some nights. We didn't always sit at the same table, but were put in the wait team's section. It worked out great. Dining flexibility plus getting a wait team that learned our preferences. We were told by both wait teams, that the top performers are put into My Time Dining. This is due to the added complexity of having to juggle tables that are dining at different times. Whether that is true or not, I can not verify. Maybe they were just blowing their own horns. We now only book My Time Dining.

[OttoCal]

Huh, that's funny, on hmmm... Adventure maybe this past January, we had MTD and really wanted different positions in the dining room every night, and really varied our times by hours and still ended up in at the same table with the same waiters every night. This ended up being annoying because the people at nearby tables were rather loud. Even the waiters commented on the poor manners of the other tables when one night they were not there and we breathed very audible sighs of relief at being able to enjoy our dinners in peace.

We have MTD again next month on Independence, will see how it works out for us.

 

As Bob already replied, yes, you can on Royal, in theory. In practice, at least the one time that I experienced on the Mariner when they gave me my time dining (not by my choice), it wasn't perfect system back then, maybe things are better now.

 

First of all, I tried to get reservation for 6 PM nightly, exactly as the regular dining as we can catch all the shows, then was told on day 1 as soon as I boarded to make reservation, Nope. They can't accept anything for table for 6 at 6 PM for any of the nights. Fine. Then they gave a "in between" 6 and 8:30 PM time slot. Which is fine if you don't care about shows but we like to see shows so that meant at certain nights, we had to rush through dinner because the shows were geared for the main or late seating.

 

Then, when we asked to be seated with same waiter/same table. They said "ok, we can do that". In reality, not perfect in that on formal nights, people like to sit and linger longer after their meal so that if the people that is sitting in "your table" decides to sit and chat and have another drink, you can't go in and say "move it, move it, this is my table NOW". So then your options becomes, do you wait for that table or ANY open table for 6 will do as you have a show to catch and that defeats the whole purpose of same waiter/same table.

 

I understand everyone has personal preferences. Just from what we experienced, I prefer an assigned time.

[harryfat1]

Dear Harry,

 

You have made this review like a soap opera, you have

me hooked and can't wait for the next posting,lol

grrrr. :):D

 

Thanks for the kind words. I think every trip report is a soap opera – Day of Our Lives, right? We are just re-telling what happened everyday on our vacation. Glad you find it entertaining.

 

Too bad I can’t sell ads in my soap opera to make couple bucks – cheapo dad needs funds for the next cruise...

[harryfat1]

OK, so in my previous posts I equated photo activities on the ship to having the crazy aunt in the basement that nobody in the family wants to acknowledge. You know I would need to give equal representation to the male side of the family so in my warped world, I would say the shopping experiences on cruises to be similar to having an uncle who is a convicted felon serving time in jail and nobody dares to mention that name in any family reunions (Yes, I have very interesting family tree. Be thankful you are not related to me).

 

If you look around the any cruise ship, there are shops and more shops. If you attend the “port talk”, which is just a sales talk, they have discussions about what to buy while off the ship. Everyday in the cabins, the ship gives you pages and pages of sales ad daily enticing you to shop. Yet, this topic seldom shows up in cruise reports. Just like the uncle in prison. We know he is there but we don’t want to talk about him.

 

Yes, I know shopping is a very personal thing and everyone has subjective tastes and it’s hard to have any one general overall conversation. Fine, I understand that. But I would argue that food and alcoholic consumption is just as personal and subjective - how much more personal can there be in what we shove into our mouths? – yet, we see every cruiser’s report (including mine) proudly displaying every last drop of booze we consume and every morsel of food photographed in every angle and detail.

 

Thus, even though I am not a big shopper by any means, I will at the minimum acknowledge on what we bought/time spent in the shops/point out sales if I see any. So to that extent, I am not saying I like the felon uncle in the joint but at least I will ask the family on how he is doing at the next reunion and get a whole bunch of death stares in return…

 

With that in mind, we went shopping after tracking down couple of the small wonders. Remember from my Labadee info that I bought a pair of new water shoes on Amazon? Well, if you don’t have them, the ship is more than happy to sell you a pair at $40, obviously much higher price than land based prices. That was what my wife is pointing out in this picture. So be sure to bring your own if you want to save $$.

 

 

We typically buy a Christmas ornament from every cruise/land based vacation so that come holiday season, it’s a summary of remembrance of the places we have seen. For this cruise, we bought the Allure ornament as shown in the picture. If you buy something else from that rack area, it’s 2 for $20. We used to buy magnets for every vacation as well such that our old refrigerator door was full of them as a living memorial. But then we switched over to stainless steel look refrigerator and none of the magnets work so we stopped buying that. If magnet is your thing, grab some here.

 

Also note that if you are a gold level or higher member, you can get a 10% off your purchases of RCI logo merchandise if you buy more than $25. So walk around the store and mentally add up your purchases to make sure you have over $25 and group them together to utilize this savings. We waited until day 7 to buy everything. I know, more people on day 7, but we wanted to be sure we know we wanted to buy on and off the ship as not to duplicate things.

 

 

So after the gift shops, we made our way down 1 flight of stairs ono deck 4. This is our first time visit down here as we didn’t have time in previous nights. I must say I really like Royal/Allure stair cases. They have interesting shapes and styles and many times the floor coloring is nice color/type.

 

 

Jazz music if you like that

 

 

Comedy club which we are not allowed to reserve (BOO!)

 

 

Blaze

 

[harryfat1]

More shoppers back on the Promenade deck. At the 7:30 time slot, they were having the “Omega and Breitling Swiss watch sale”. Check prices on land before coming on board to be sure you have a good deal.

 

Note the line on the right with people with paper in their hands? That’s the tour excursion line.

 

 

 

The staircase at Focus is one of our favorites

 

 

OK, this picture looks simple but had to do it several times. My wife being the more creative photographer of the family, she wanted to be at the bottom of the series of the stairs and have me take a picture of her from it and still include the various staircases on the side. First few didn’t turn out to what she wanted and this was the last one as I gave up after that. I am the “move it, move it” street photographer. Take a picture and keep moving. Now looking at the picture in detail, I should have tried to raise the camera way above my head and tilt the screen to capture the rest of the stair case to get the complete picture.

 

 

Few more pics to show life at the Promenade

 

More staircases

 

 

Time stamp of this picture was 8:30. Noticed how uncrowded the place looked? Second seating dinner has just started and only the first seat/my time cruisers are milling around. The ship photographer is trying to drum up any walk-by business to take pictures by the Christmas tree. So if you show a picture of this to others, you can easily make the argument that the ship is not crowded.

 

[Birdnutty]

Enjoying this so much! We will be the Allure soon and this is really getting me even more excited.

 

If you posted this, I'm sorry I missed it, but which toiletries are provided in the bathrooms? On all our many cruises, many have been different, and I'm trying not to overpack.

 

Thanks for taking the time to do this! It's great!

[harryfat1]

They have the Calpyso music playing above the Cupcake area for an hour between 8:30 to 9:30 of those that likes live music in the shopping area

 

 

Different angle of the Focus’ staircase. Also my favorite spot for watching parade.

 

 

So then we wandered off to the Boardwalk area as the younger one wants to ride the carousel again, this time a night scene.

 

 

I really like the colored lights of Boardwalk area at night

 

 

Not the best focused picture but taken from a moving carousel at night time has its set of challenges

 

 

[harryfat1]

Enjoying this so much! We will be the Allure soon and this is really getting me even more excited.

 

If you posted this, I'm sorry I missed it, but which toiletries are provided in the bathrooms? On all our many cruises, many have been different, and I'm trying not to overpack.

 

Thanks for taking the time to do this! It's great!

 

Hi,

 

Glad this is helpful. Just trying to pass on whatever info I do have about the ship to others before the memory/energy to do this project fades away.

 

As for toiletries, good question, I meant to point that out when I get to the bathroom pictures but come to think of it, I don’t recall taking any bathroom pictures (shocking, eh?). I can’ tell from your cruise history what ships you have been on, but in our previous Carnival cruises, they typically have a free sample size of many things so we didn’t have to pack much. For this cruise, there was nothing, meaning zip, freebie samples in the bathroom. Only thing they have is bar of soap and the wall built in shampoo/soap.

 

I had seen previous cruisers taken pictures of a piece of paper saying if cruisers want the bottle sizes, they can ask cabin steward but I didn’t see this paper in either of our 2 cabins. In the in-laws bathroom, they have some bottles of lotion and other things left there from previous cruisers and we asked the cabin steward about that and he said those are only given to the higher level C&A people so depending on how high you are in the Royal caste system, you may or may not get anything. We are very far down the food chain so we got zip. Pack accordingly.

 

Have a great cruise.

[harryfat1]

Couple more pics of the area before we headed back to the cabins. In looking back at the daily schedule now, I should have gone back to the Royal Promenade to have our pictures taken with the some of the DreamWorks characters from How to Train your Dragon. They were there from 9 to 9:20. Too bad I missed them. I know the rest of the family wouldn’t care one way or another about this, but I am the only big kid in the family that wanted pictures with all the characters. So if characters pictures are important to you, be sure to circle their appearance times and be there.

 

 

Did I mention my son loves ice cream?

 

 

So we are back at the cabin

 

[harryfat1]

I realized the other day that I had forgotten to include the towel animals from day 2 of the cruise. So here they are for our 2 cabins

 

 

 

For those that have cruised with Carnival or other cruise lines, do note that Royal only does towel animals every other day versus Carnival’s nightly presentation. Also Carnival does a big deal with their towel animal demonstration in holding it at the main theater with hundreds of people attending to learn how (of course they try to sell their towel folding books as part of the infomercial). Royal has it in a much smaller less elaborate venue.

 

Here are some pictures from the previous Carnival cruise where they let people go on the stage floor and follow along step by step to learn how to make various towel animals. We always go to those on every cruise and we have bought 2 books from different cruises and my kids have gotten pretty good at making many shapes from the books.

 

 

 

 

 

So those nights when Royal didn’t have a towel animal in the cabin, I thought about asking them to make one so I can take a pictures of it. But then cheapo dad would feel obligated to tip them a buck per animal and it’s not worth it to me…

[lilyhammer]

Harry, thank you so much for writing this awesome review. This has got to be one of the most detailed and useful reviews I've ever seen. I've been on quite a few cruises and Allure seems like it requires the most planning, so I've got a few questions for you.

 

1) Since you had multiple cabins booked, how was the process for reserving shows/excursions/dining online? It looks like I'd need to log in individually to each cabin reservation and I'm worried we won't be able to book all the same stuff together. Is this done online, or do you call? This is the first time I'm travelling with multiple cabins and having to do all the work. Or is this nothing to worry about?

 

2) Did you have any difficulty choosing excursions to suit both the kids and the in-laws? I'm traveling with my 4 year old son and my elderly mother, so this will be quite a challenge, since age restrictions and different interests need to work out. Did you mostly do everything together, or did everybody do their own thing?

[Floridafamily4]

lilyhammer,

You can add guests from another reservation when booking shows for more than 1 reservation. No need to go into each reservation.

[harryfat1]

Harry, thank you so much for writing this awesome review. This has got to be one of the most detailed and useful reviews I've ever seen. I've been on quite a few cruises and Allure seems like it requires the most planning, so I've got a few questions for you.

 

1) Since you had multiple cabins booked, how was the process for reserving shows/excursions/dining online? It looks like I'd need to log in individually to each cabin reservation and I'm worried we won't be able to book all the same stuff together. Is this done online, or do you call? This is the first time I'm travelling with multiple cabins and having to do all the work. Or is this nothing to worry about?

 

2) Did you have any difficulty choosing excursions to suit both the kids and the in-laws? I'm traveling with my 4 year old son and my elderly mother, so this will be quite a challenge, since age restrictions and different interests need to work out. Did you mostly do everything together, or did everybody do their own thing?

 

Hi,

 

Thanks for the compliment. Glad it’s helpful. Being detailed is just occupational hazard. Actually it’s easier for me to be detailed to describe the cruise than to try and summarize it in few paragraphs as then I would have to think hard on what to put and what to leave out. This way, I tell as much as I know/remember and everyone picks out whatever items they find useful. It’s just like a buffet…

 

To answer your questions:

 

1 – Very easy to make reservations online for you and your traveling parties. On the RCI web site, just log in and select the entertainment venues and first you select the people in your cabin and then the system will give you a choice to add other cabins, as long as you have their reservation number and last name, which you will as it’s your family. Then you add the people to your list and keep adding cabins until you have all the names and then you “check out” as if you are buying something from Amazon.

 

It will say $0 and then you make the reservation and you will get an instant email verification that you have reserved whatever show you wanted. The show date and time will also show up on your personal online schedule as a reminder in case you had forgotten weeks later what night you booked what show.

 

I do believe they have a small % of seats available to reserve once you get to the ship but if you can do it online form home, it’s one less thing to deal with as once you get on the ship, there are many things happening and you may forget.

 

2 – I can’t speak for Eastern Caribbean tours as we were on the western and of course, Europe is a totally different ball game and I assume you are not talking about that. For western, booking excursion wasn’t that hard as Labadee is just a simple beach day for us. No need to book anything unless you really want to such as roller coasters or zip lines but given your party’s make up, simple beach day should suffice.

 

I didn’t find anything thrilling or appealing for Falmouth for the family so we just walked around (that is coming up soon on my day 4 report). For Cozumel, we booked a simple sightseeing bus tour with RCI. Take a look at what we did and see if it fits your needs. If not, you can also hire a private driver for the day in Cozumel. I did some research on going that route and will talk about it when I get to day 6. Stick around and ask me tour questions when I get there.

[harryfat1]

We picked up a deck of cards from the card room on the way back and played cards inside the cabin and then watched the 6th and final showing of the water show from our balconies. Since I haven’t seen the last deck of the secret balcony (been to 14 and 12 but not 11), I wanted to go down there to see what the view looks like for the show but nobody else wanted to go. They were content to just watch from our balconies. So I just went there by myself.

 

These are more or less the same pictures as shown on day 1, just from different perspective, this time from deck 11

 

 

 

 

 

People watching the show from the secret balconies on the port side

 

 

Or you can watch from the back of the theater if you get there late

[harryfat1]

Control booth for the aqua show

 

 

Look, Ma, no wires

 

 

Tandem diving team

 

 

 

 

[harryfat1]

After the final show, time for the kids to go to sleep as I work on the wonderfully exciting project of checking our cruise money balance on TV. As I mentioned earlier, we have various OBC from different sources (shareholder/travel agent/RCI credit card redemption points) and they will show up on your cruise account by day 2. So when you first get onboard and check your balances and don’t see any OBC, don’t freak out. It will get there later.

 

Here is the hard part (or easy part depends on how you look at it), since I combined all 3 cabins charges together on my credit card, all of the cabins charges now shows up in my name. So doesn’t matter what cabins the other parties are, if you link their reservations to your credit card, their accounts will have zero and it will just show up as one. In theory that is easier but also creates a long list of charges and credits as we had line by line OBC from the various sources and then Royal charges $12 of tips to each guest daily (which means 6 line items per day) to scroll through on the TV so I had to break out the iPad to calculate how much theoretically our OBC would be combined as one large sum and then net against the $12 X 7 days X 6 people of mandatory charges to see how much OBC left we need to use up. This is more work than being at work…

 

After that is all settled, looked outside the balcony once more to see that they have the fountain show with accompanying music at the back of aqua theater. If you have ever been to Bellagio in Vegas, this is a smaller version of it, but instead of standing, at least you get to sit down. For what’s worth, the port side high spray fountain did not work all cruise long so you only get to see one side of the water spraying high. Took few pictures of the show and that pretty much wraps up our day 3’s events.

 

 

 

 

 

Aqua theater dark after the water show