The Fun Researcher

We've never had that happen. Not saying it didn't but pretty shocking if you had early traditional booked. One way to mitigate or solve this is to go to the Maître d' at the entrance of the dining room as soon as you board and get a table confirmed. Don't wait until you show up for dinner.

I agree that it would be easier to take the luggage with you in the cab/Uber/Lyft. However, if you are a family of 5 like ours it can be difficult to fit us all with our luggage in one cab/Uber/Lyft. In that case I've normally had to drop off everyone and luggage (except me obviously 🙂 ), then return the rental, then get a ride back to the ship. However if it's just two people you should easily be able to get yourselves and luggage to the ship from the rental location.

Sounds good! Just be aware that the stronger the magnification the more steady you need to be to have a stable image. The view can get shaky as you go higher and higher in magnification unless you have a tripod or something. 15x might be perfectly fine though

ETA, I also evaluated the size you mention, the Vortex 10x42's and while the optics were sharp, they just don't let in as much light, so viewing things in lower light conditions is going to be more difficult than the 10x50's. The 50mm outer lenses are great for letting as much light into the binocular as possible. The tradeoff is that they are slightly bigger/heavier than the 10x42's.

I second the Vortex 10x50’s. We also purchased the Vortex 10 x 50 binoculars for our cruise on the Quantum July 10th. They were fantastic. However, we bought the next model down, the Crossfire HD, 10 x 50 binoculars. I had my hands on both at Cabela’s, and while the Diamondbacks were slightly better, I could not justify the additional $100. It’s up to you. I thought there was maybe a 10% performance improvement with the Diamondbacks https://www.amazon.com/Vortex-Optics-Crossfire-10x50-Binoculars/dp/B07V3L3ZSX/ref=mp_s_a_1_4?crid=23XPCEZISTIXG&keywords=vortex+hd+10x50&qid=1690214242&sprefix=vortex+hd+10x50%2Caps%2C235&sr=8-4

It really does seem like they have made things worse. It seemed to work just fine in the past when they had dedicated space for my time dining. Just throwing this out there, but you don’t think it could be because the wait staff would get a lot less additional gratuities for My time than Traditional, do you? I know if I was jumping from Wait staff to Wait staff each evening, I would be less inclined to leave an additional gratuity for them at the end. We tend to find a good waiter and stick with them with MTD but I’m guessing many don’t. That could create a pretty big delta between wait staff in traditional vs MTD

Quantum = 169,000 gross tonnage, 29 ft draft Solstice = 122,000 gross tonnage, 27 ft draft We really enjoy the solstice class. By the way, we will be on the sister ship the Equinox in December right before Christmas.

That’s only if you purchase an additional land tour as well, correct? I can see that being a fantastic addition to the cruise. something Royal doesn’t offer correct? We did a day each at Mount Rainier and Olympic National Park before the cruise, both spectacular but I’m sure the land portions of Alaska are something amazing.

Explain please

In my opinion, the itinerary choice matters far more than the ship itself. I would be interested to see pictures from other classes of ships that got right up close to Dawes glacier. How often does that happen regardless of ship size? Otherwise, the OP chose an itinerary that doesn’t visit any glaciers like you will see at Hubbard or Glacier Bay. We made the same choice, but knew that ahead of time. We did make a separate trek out to Mendenhall Glacier in Juneau, which was amazing.

Interested in hearing what you consider misassumptions? Seems to me more people are commenting based on their actual experiences, like us. Your situation is much more like the old way of my time dining, which is awesome, and we love the Freedom class by the way. Love the fact that your early dining was as 5:45 PM. Much better than our 5pm. Any idea what time your lunch venues opened? It was pretty brutal for us to have all of them open at 12 PM with early seating at 5 PM. Unfortunately, it seems that your situation is more like the exception than the norm nowadays though. The mass of lines outside the main dining room were the largest we had ever seen waiting for my time dining. No way it was five minutes. Glad your experience with different

I have a sister and her family that lives in Seattle and after our Alaskan cruise last week she mentioned checking into cheap last minute cruises. Is there a website you use for that?

Thank you. Yeah, I really don't like how they've changed the implementation of MTD. I'm used to prebooking something like 5:45pm or 6pm in the past. 😞

Was just on Quantum last week and couldn't disagree more. I was perfectly fine with how close we got to Dawes. I knew the odds of getting close were slim. There is an excursion that you could have taken that tenders you off the ship right to the face of Dawes. The Endicott arm was just spectacular with lots of floating ice, greenish blue water, the waterfalls on the hills, etc... Gorgeous. A little research would have given you a clue that ships, more often than not, cannot get that close to Dawes glacier. Did you make use of your stop in Juneau to go to the Mendenhall glacier? You knew the itinerary. Not Royal's fault. If you wanted Glaciers for sure, book an itinerary that goes to Glacier Bay or Hubbard Endicott Arm and Dawes Mendenhall

Dang, that's pretty serious. Thanks for the info. It didn't really impact our cruise. It's fun to do once but not a big deal to us either way.

So major tradeoffs either way for us. Either eat super early and get well prepped meals with early seating, or suffer food quality. 6-6:30pm would typically be about optimal for us, but sounds like we'd be gambling with our meal quality. You bring up a good point. Maybe it's because we've done early traditional seating these past two cruises, but our food quality and temperature have been excellent. We have no big complaints with the new menus despite all the ruckus about them lately.

That's a very astute and interesting observation! How late would you suggest to get a better chance of getting freshly prepped meals? I also wonder, if pre cruise, you reserved MTD for something like 6pm if the meals would still be fresh. Not sure I want to wait until 7pm or later to eat.

In my opinion the only drawback to My Time Dining is waiting for a table. The past two cruises we've had early traditional seating (which I'll discuss in a bit) and walked right to our table with no wait. If we left dinner to use the restroom, or after we were finished eating, many times there were literally hundreds of MTD passengers jamming the entrance to the dining room waiting for a table. I'm not sure if making MTD reservations ahead of time helps with that wait or not. However, I'm not sure we'll be doing traditional dining anymore. They've made changes to how they handle MTD and traditional seating. Early seating is FAR, FAR too early. It's the only thing I complained about on the survey from Royal after our cruise last week. It was crazy, all lunch venues did not open until 12pm, and early seating was 5:00 pm!!! By the time you were done with lunch it was around 1pm. We were NOT hungry only 4 hours later for dinner. It also really cramped opportunities for afternoon activities. How does Royal think this is an o.k. solution? We will be going back to MTD unless Royal changes how they are handling the MDR. The way they are doing it now, they seat all the early traditional dining folks first, then fill in with MTD folks as the early seating people leave. That's why they've moved early seating SOOO early, it's to allow the MTD folks to find tables not too late in the evening. It used to be that MTD folks could be seated at the same time as early traditional seating, so there was no need to push early traditional dining so early. Often times MTD folks would have their own floor or section of the MDR. This seemed to work well, and we did MTD many times that way. Not sure why they made this change, but it drove early seating to be super early, and increased the lines to get into the MDR for those MTD folks. In the past with MTD, if we found servers we liked we would always request the same table for the rest of the cruise and were always accommodated and it felt like traditional dining but at a better time that we preferred.

Best for unobstructed views are the seats center front of deck 6. I would not personally choose the front row of 6 due to the glass. I prefer the rows a few higher. However we found that those were many times reserved for suite, sky, pinnacle, etc right up until close to show time On our Quantum cruise last week, for Star Water, we sat at the very bottom few rows, far left, floor level and loved it. By BIL and I were actually sitting floor level and it was very cool having the performers just feet from us. For us, Star Water was FAR superior to Spectra as well.

After sailing on the Quantum, unless you are dead set on Glacier bay, I agree that the ship matters a lot. If sailing closed loop out of Seattle or Vancouver, most sailings across all the different cruise lines stop at mostly the same places anyway and rarely include Glacier bay. I'm so glad we were on a ship that had SO MANY excellent entertainment options and activities to choose from all week. It really helped our extended family group of 14 (ages 13-53) find lots of fun things to do that suited their style. In addition, it was awesome having the beautiful temperate indoor solarium with hot tubs, wading pools, and 180 degree views to the front of the ship. The additional indoor pool and hot tub area was used extensively by families with young kids as well. Food was just as good as what we've come to expect from Royal. I'm sure Princess is great too, but now that we've actually done Quantum class in Alaska, I'm very glad that's what we chose.

We were told immediately upon boarding, when trying to book the North star, that it was not working all week due to technical issues and would not be fixed. I'm sure they are lining up the proper technicians to get it resolved but it was a hard no all last week.

Depends on which ports you are visiting

North Star was closed all last week. The pub (Harp and Horn) was showing sports all last week. Deck 4 midship.

Bummer, lesson learned I guess. Hope you have a fantastic cruise. In my experience, you don't need a dining package to truly enjoy a cruise on Royal, but your mileage may vary. We've been sailing royal since 2012 and this was the first year we even tried a specialty restaurant. We still wouldn't say it's needed. I do like booking one for lunch on embarkation day. Saves the madness of the buffet that particular afternoon. Dan

Thanks for asking. Unfortunately the week before the cruise the doctors told her that she was unable to go for two reasons... 1) Still a blood clot risk on the plane, and 2) Cannot stand on the leg for 3 months. It was a real letdown because the doctor's originally indicated that she should be able to go. I guess the break is severe enough, and close enough to the hip that it needs more healing. They were troopers about it. They made out almost 100% whole though. Cruise fare is being reimbursed thanks to their credit card (Chase Freedom Unlimited), and all other prepaid items were able to be cancelled with refund. They have airline credit (instead of a refund) to be used by mid 2024, but that will get used. So... as far as the cruise itself, our family still had an amazing time with all of my siblings' families, 14 of us in all. We had gorgeous weather (warm and sunny, jeans and T-shirts) for the main Alaskan portion (ISP, Sitka, Endicott Arm and Dawes Glacier, Juneau). No rain the entire cruise. We saw so many amazing things. In Sitka we walked to the Raptor Center, the Totem park, and then back to the shuttle walking along the rocky coast. Was a gorgeous day. In Juneau, we saw Humpbacks up close "bubble net feeding" pretty much identical to the video below, Orca's, walked to Mendenhall Glacier and Nugget falls. Sunny and warm. Cruise ship, service and food was great. Just an overall excellent experience. My parents are super itching for a cruise now, especially after living vicariously through ours this past week. We are eyeing up summer 2024. Maybe sooner... 😉 Some random photos from our trip. Sitka: Endicott Arm: Nugget Falls: Mendenhall Glacier: Our views: