Chair comfort

[mfs2k]

My wife and I are thinking about booking the Scarlet lady for a four night cruise from Miami. We have sailed many Carnival cruises, and two Celebrity cruises recently.

i’ve watched numerous reviews of Virgin cruises on YouTube and I’ve read many posts. 
My concern about booking this cruise is seating. Personally, I think chairs are very important and in every video I’ve seen, the chairs in lounges, outdoor bars, public spaces and the Galley look like IKEA furniture. They look uncomfortable, hard and made of plastic or aluminum.  They look like cheap budget furniture.  Maybe Celebrity spoiled me.
The lounge chairs on the pool deck and above the pool deck look uncomfortable and unpadded. These look much more uncomfortable than the lounge chairs I’ve recently experienced on celebrity. 
Also, there seems to be very little seating around a very small pool. I’m concerned about a full ship, and being unable to find an outdoor chair on our sea days close to the pool.
There are no more suites available so the Richard something deck is unavailable to us.

is my perception right or am I wrong?

Chairs matter. 

Edited February 9, 2023 by mfs2k

[jon81uk]

There are plenty of loungers by the pools and on the deck above plus a few more on the promenade deck seven. Most of them are standard mesh suspended between a metal frame, pretty standard compared to many hotels I’ve been to. Comfy with a towel on them. 
 

Most of the chairs elsewhere on the ship and in the restaurants are as comfortable as I’d expect for a restaurant. Only off ones are the solid wood fixed low seats in The Dock.

[rebeccac]

There is no two ways around it, the pools are small.  The other issue I had was the limited amount of seating in the shade.  We were able to work around these issues by going to the pool on a port day where we were in one of the padded lounging areas under shade, although I hear early mornings or later in the evening also work.  I did miss the lovely solarium pools on Celebrity.  As for Richard's rooftop, even though we were in a suite, we rarely used it due to the lack of shade.  There were hot tubs there, but no pool and I was  not inclined to use hot tubs in the Caribbean in July.  I would never book a suite on VV just to be able to use Richard's rooftop.  

 

I have bad knees, so I did find some of the seating uncomfortable or difficult to use, but that was mostly due to the fact that I had a hard time getting up out of some seats.  That being said, I still found plenty of other seating that worked perfectly fine for me.  As for the quality of the furnishings, I did not find a significant difference to other cruise lines.  

[cantgetin]

I'm in my late 60s and not as mobile as I once was (translate that "don't sit of the floor if you don't know how you're going to get up."  The only place that I had a problem was with the funky low seats at The Dock, but there are other styles of chairs available there as well. The low ones were hard to get out of.  There are tons of various types of seats around the pool, the hot tubs, and other areas on the pool deck (15).  There is also lots of seating on 16.  It ranged from pretty normal cruise type loungers to funky looking but very comfortable stuff.  Some are padded, some are not.  I was a "deck walker," and almost every morning saw a crew member cleaning the vinyl or mesh on the various seats.The BEST seat on the ship was the hammock.  We liked that so much that we bought one for at home (amazon...there weren't any for sale on the ship, whether they were out of them or don't carry them on board, I don't know.  They gave us a business card with the manufacturer's info.)

Because my travel partner has a serious mobility impairment (walks with braces and a walker), we checked out the chairs in each of the restaurants.  While many of the seats had obviously been chosen for decor purposes, each restaurant also had chairs without arms (allowed for transfer from wheelchairs) and chairs with arms (for those who need to use arms to stand up) as well as whatever the stools, booths, or other decorative seating was. We were actually very pleased with the way accessibility needs were met.

 

Edited February 9, 2023 by cantgetin

[ociana]

4 hours ago, mfs2k said:

My wife and I are thinking about booking the Scarlet lady for a four night cruise from Miami. We have sailed many Carnival cruises, and two Celebrity cruises recently.

i’ve watched numerous reviews of Virgin cruises on YouTube and I’ve read many posts. 
My concern about booking this cruise is seating. Personally, I think chairs are very important and in every video I’ve seen, the chairs in lounges, outdoor bars, public spaces and the Galley look like IKEA furniture. They look uncomfortable, hard and made of plastic or aluminum.  They look like cheap budget furniture.  Maybe Celebrity spoiled me.
The lounge chairs on the pool deck and above the pool deck look uncomfortable and unpadded. These look much more uncomfortable than the lounge chairs I’ve recently experienced on celebrity. 
Also, there seems to be very little seating around a very small pool. I’m concerned about a full ship, and being unable to find an outdoor chair on our sea days close to the pool.
There are no more suites available so the Richard something deck is unavailable to us.

is my perception right or am I wrong?

Chairs matter. 

I have to laugh because my husband is also a picky chair person and he has the same concerns anytime we travel.  We have been on for 4 cruises now and I can let you know that he is about 50/50 on the seating.  Some he finds comfortable and others he hates with a burning passion.  The good news is that the comfy ones are spread throughout the ship enough that, beyond swapping seats with me at dinner sometimes, he was generally able to find something that met his needs.  

 

One important note: The chairs on our balcony sucked, but the hammock is so dang cozy that it negated that problem pretty well.

[jon81uk]

Oh one other thought on the pool loungers, if the ship isn’t busy or the weather isn’t great they might not unstack the loungers and put them out on decks 16 & 17. But most of the time there will be some on both 15 & 16 and sometimes deck 17 at the rear, but that does have exercise classes up there in the mornings. 

[CruisingWalter]

14 hours ago, mfs2k said:

My concern about booking this cruise is seating.

 

The pools are ridiculously small with very little lounge seating around them. If you get there early enough, there are sort of 'bed type loungers' tucked up under Deck 16 that are sort of comfortable triangular padded things. Those big round weird bed things are at the back of Deck 16 near the net, barely used by anyone as is the big padded area behind the net that was looking quite a bit worse for wear when we sailed Scarlet. 

 

However, a space that does not get mentioned much at all with fantastic outdoor seating are the 'porches' on Deck 7 midship. I don't know what their official names are, but there are two really nice wings set out in the middle of Deck 7 between the lifeboats that are quite lovely. Varied seating and often empty because most folks gravitate towards The Dock at the aft of Deck 7. Completely uncovered but since they are on both sides of the ship you can choose the side opposite the sun to get shade. 

 

Much of the seating inside the ship is quite comfortable and there is a huge variety of seating to choose from. The Dock House has all sorts of comfortable seating as does On The Rocks and Sips champagne lounge. I can't say I paid much attention to the seating in the restaurants other than to remember I wasn't uncomfortable anywhere. 

 

The big wooden chairs at the back of the Dock on Deck 7 for me were the most uncomfortable chairs on the entire ship other than those small silver chairs on the balconies. Otherwise, the ship was quite inviting and social. VV has a Celebrity vibe and I think they compare very nicely. Celebrity absolutely wins for the pools, but you'll find the overall vibe of the ship quite similar. We've sailed 8 cruise lines including four 4 times so far with Celebrity. VV honestly compares most closely to Celebrity and Disney for overall quality, food quality and the quality of the crew. VV has some of the best crew we've ever met and it is nice to see a crew who can express themselves a bit more. Plus they're among the highest paid in the industry and they get free WiFi. I think how they are treated by the company really shows in their performance. 

 

For us, right now VV is among the best cruise experience at sea. No nickel and diming, almost all-inclusive, no photographers, no hard sell, amazing crew, best food by far of any cruise line. We'll be back on Scarlet in April and Valiant for the first time in November. Between those we'll be cruising MSC, Princess, possibly Celebrity again and probably another RCCL. 

[rebeccac]

15 hours ago, cantgetin said:

The BEST seat on the ship was the hammock.  We liked that so much that we bought one for at home (amazon...there weren't any for sale on the ship, whether they were out of them or don't carry them on board, I don't know.  They gave us a business card with the manufacturer's info.)
 

 

 

They must have been out of them, because they were for sale when we were onboard.

[Lustate]

19 hours ago, rebeccac said:

 

They must have been out of them, because they were for sale when we were onboard.

Yep. We bought one as well and it’s pride of place in our garden all summer.

[cantgetin]

The company (Yellow Leaf) appeared on Shark Tank a few years ago.  There was very little interest from the "sharks" until the woman mentioned that they had a contract to put one on every balcony on each Virgin Voyages ship--not only a huge sale for them, but also super advertising as proven by those of us who purchased during or after sailing.  Suddenly they had multiple "sharks" interested in a deal.

[mfs2k]

Original poster (OP) here. 
You guys reassured me a bit. I booked Scarlet Lady.