Pandamonia

People were dragging sun loungers the 50% of the length of the ship to put them there and because they did they they layed them out in such a way nobody else could sit there and made it like their own person sun balcony. The people made this ship worse than it could have been.

Well maybe between RCCL ships but the drinks on P&O and MSC are almost half price with offers on them also and drinks package is 40 GBP fixed not dynamically priced. Im Diamond now so i dont ever see myself buying it again. Quite honestly i didnt realise how much i used to drink for the sake of drinking due to package and at least this time i enjoyed drinking when i did have a drink. first cruise ive ever had where i didnt wake up with a hangover but this time i got a chest infection and a bad cold for 5 days instead!

Domaine Chandon Not Moet Chandon

Well RCCL seems to be doing their best to upset the European market as best as they can. I had a pretty mediocre cruise which was made as good as can be by the fact that the staff were brilliant and the food edible in speciality (except rubbish Jamies Italian) Im convinced that underperforming ships are now sent to Southampton and other Euro ports as punishment for bad customer reviews. I was told that Anthem is the 3rd worst ranked ship in the whole fleet for customer satisfaction. This is both from the US market and the UK market so there is no better performance when they are being tipped better by the US customers. Your experience is clearly just as bad as ours even when you pay the 16 USD per day staff tax as well as extra on all of the services and drinks. It seems that nobody in the UK i met liked the Anthem or the Quantum class in general. Whilst its not my favourite ship i personally dont mind it but its got some stupid design choices and just isnt suitable for UK sailings. The biggest complaint was the sunbed situation. OMG this just ruined so many peoples holiday and its purely Royals fault. Never enough sunbeds and there is loads of space to put them in they just dont have them or have them in totally useless locations such as in the shade. Entire sections of deck had nothing in them which meant that people would just hog them all day for fear of losing a place to sit in the sun. Even the sky bar has space for about 50 high chairs or more but it seems like there is about 10-15 and a load of standing up space???? Only after a complaint did the staff start policing sunbed policy but this doesnt actually fix the problem it just means that you cannot leave to go lunch or anywhere because your bed will be gone. So people felt their experience was being ruled by having to keep the sunbed. So much of the top deck is now wasted by chargeable gimmicks such as Northstar, iFly, and the very poor deck design of quantum that there is just limited places to sit in the sun in general. This means that people are need the same space if the sun is shining in a particular direction or the wind is being a nightmare down the self generated wind tunnel that quantum has created with the annoyingly placed walking track. Second biggest complaint was the total lack of seating in most of the bars with the entertainment in them. The music hall isnt too bad but basically they had the same band on all week and with such a limited vocalist most of the songs were hard to listen to and the dancefloor was basically a play ground for children below school age. The chance of getting a seat in baleros was basically zero, same with scooner bar but vintages was fine but nothing happens in there anyway so its pointless. 270 was ok if you wanted to sit through Spectras show for the 10th time in your life and you wanted to have the view obscured by one of the most annoying locations for a giant glowing LED lamp you have ever seen. But basically if there was something on you didnt have a seat until it finished and then you sat in an empty location with nothing happening. Entertainment - i went on this ship 8 years ago at launch and im amazed to see Spectra 8 years older performing the same show 5 times per week as was the case at launch.... Seriously.... STILL? The only upside was the show is so forgettable that at least id forgotten most of it. The robot screens are just no longer very impressive though. Has We Will Rock you seriously been on this ship for the whole 8 years as well? Is there anyone on this forum NOT seen this show multiple times by now? Food - Windjammer seems to be vastly improved and service seemed excessive. Its gone from cant get a drink to they wont let you fetch your own coffee without catching you on the way to the self service coffee cart.... Not sure how i feel about it as it just seems like someone has dumped a load of staff here to 'improve service' but its basically service i dont need. If im fetching my own food i may as fetch my own juice. Speciality dining - Jamies Italian - Needs shutting down just like the bankrupt franchise that it was. Chops Grill - Food generally good but stick cooking steaks in the oven which results in overcooked steaks 70% of the time. Order them rare and you get medium a lot of the time. Izumi is the latest Royal scam introduced. price increased to 39.99 USD and you get 50% less sushi rolls now. So the fixed priced menu is now actually more expensive than if you ordered the same items a la carte. Yes you can now pay 40 USD for 30 USD of food. As we had UDP we didnt really care and the staff knew it was a scam and give us what ever we asked for anyway as they just wanted a good survey score and the food and service was always good. Wonderland - Same menu for 8 years running.... Food was ok, getting bored of same stuff though. Can they really not think of anything else to serve? Pub food - Was good 8 years ago. Terrible now. wouldnt eat there again. Vintages - for some reason cant eat on UDP so dont know. Johnny Rockets - Nice burgers and fresh chips. Terrible chicken tenders which were also in Windjammer for free and Milkshakes are not great. Milk, icecream and Syrup = artificial high calorie synthetic tasting gloop. Is it really that hard to use some real strawberries instead of Hershey's Syrup? Chefs table - Probably the best bit was the wine. 2 of the 5 courses were from other restaurants. Fillet Steak from chops and the World Dessert from Wonderland we had the day before! Guess what.... they over cooked that steak as well. He marinated the steak in olive oil overnight.... lol.... for tenderness he said? Well im pretty sure that didnt do anything. After eating it i was sure it did nothing. Pretty lazy to serve 2 courses from other speciality dining restaurants. Staff told me it was good i wasnt on there a couple months ago as the complaints about the food were crazy bad. One 10 year veteran waiter told me that hes never seen the food so bad but a new set of chefs were sent on board to improve things. Thus proving things can always be worse. Royals Price hiking has found its limit - UDP was cheaper on the week before we sailed resulting in 2 pages full of UDP guests on the Johny Rockets UDP list. Royal raised price by 50% on my sailing resulting in 18 guests with the UDP thats pretty poor and shows Royal dynamic prices has zero to do with sales its just a game the system plays to keep you guessing. The speciality dining was dead nearly all of the cruise. 20% of the tables full on any given night. Revenue must be tanking. Drinks package - Never seen so few people with it. Everyone said 68 GBP pre cruise was a joke and 80GBP on the cruise even worse. Irony is that now i dont have the drinks package there seems plenty of waiters asking if i want a drink! The revenue must be down massively on this. Drink prices - Laughable. 68 USD per bottle for the cheapest sparking wine on the ship? With just one choice under 100USD? 15 USD for a cocktail now... 8.25 for a bottle of beer. 13 - 15 USD per glass of wine. I have never seen so few alcoholic drinks consumed on a cruise in my life. Probably helped by the fact nobody could sit at the outdoor bars to drink anyway as the few chairs were camped in all day by sunbathers not drinking. Royals drinks package would have cost us 1630 GBP for 12 nights. That's over 2000 USD. My bar bill was 200 USD by end of the cruise. Well done Royal. Im sick and tired of drinkers subsidising the price of the cruise for none drinkers. Im not playing this game any more. Raise the cabin prices, remove the staff tax per day and price the drinks reasonably like MSC or P&O. This isnt the US market. You cannot get away with it here. I bet the revenue proves it. Diamond status - The ONLY reason id ever consider sailing with Royal now. 4 drinks per day each, free days wifi, Diamond Lounge with free Coffee and nice food and a relaxing place to sit and listen to people talk about how bad Royal has gotten it seems. 16 USD per day Staff tax now includes only 1 room clean per day. Going Fleet wide!. 4 USD goes to Stateroom attendant they said. Stateroom guy told me he gets 3 USD per day. 5 USD is going to something called 'Hotel Services' What part of the ship deserves more than my room attendant who literally folded all my clothes every day i left out? The tumble drier? the washing machine? How much do i get for fetching my own towels every day from the ONE open towel station at the other end of the ship? I think now all my FCC are used up its time to explore other cruise lines and holidays and from the sounds of it other people will be doing the same going forward. Im sure the Royal fans will come down on the above but you got to remember that this isnt the US, this isnt the newest or best ship in the fleet and some of the above are common themes from many guests and it was YOU the US market which scored them down to the 3rd lowest score in the entire Royal Fleet!

Not any more. The cheapest sparking wine is now 68 USD on Anthem per bottle. Best bit is that its a knock off of Moet called 'chandon' from California.

Its a complete waste of space on a ship. Pure useless gimmick. Especially now on sea days they charge 19 USD to go on it for 16 mins. On Anthem there is not enough places to sit on deck and there was almost fights breaking out over sunbeds. Why you need even higher view of an already 16 deck ship i dont know but this comes back to royal wanting to use gimmicks to separate themselves from other lines alone with that useless robotic bar they keep putting on ships now which is devoid of guests and is barely used.

they wonder why inflation wont go away any time soon as well....

you mean if you totally forget that you already paid to eat on the ship once and now you are paying again for some mostly overcooked greasy wings with which cost 3$ bulk bought? Yeh sounds like a bargain. Just like the bottle of Yellow Label Wolf Blass which i used to sell wholesale for 5$ per bottle with tax that royal sells for 45$ a bottle and doesnt pay any tax on..... thats only a 10x markup ... great value... make it an even 50$ between friends why dont they!

You are trying to secure a highly desirable month during peak booking season for the following year. Wait until end of this year in the winter and the deal will be better. Royal is scamming right now. August 2023 = 2200 for 2 people in a balcony (1100pp) but its 6k for 3 people!!!! The website is claiming as soon as you add a kid then all the rooms are sold out but without the kid the rooms are free.... This is their computer system locking you out for some unknown reason. Its likely because all cabin types have not been released so it basically looks like there are no sofa beds in any category which isnt true.

i booked my holidays this year. There are times you should and should not book a royal cruise. I got 12 days on Anthem with free balcony upgrade for 1100 GBP per person leaving on Sunday 4th June. This cruise has been 1400-2000 GBP per person for the entire year depending on promotion for a balcony. sometimes you catch the right promotion and sometimes it never comes. School holidays are risky as it depends on how much demand there is but there are two periods i never book. One is a year in the future around the time people are going on holiday and the second is around the time people are thinking of going on holiday in the next 3-6 months. I book my holidays often in November/December or January for June or July because nobody else is thinking of summer holidays. This means that ships are not filling up and the algorithms which control the pricing are not meeting the conditions set and thus prices come down and offers increase in variety and type. Royals dynamic pricing model looks complex but in reality its basically just computer code checking for variables. These are 'Ship capacity by stateroom type' which is likely checked against a curve checked against time to sail date and then finally by the number of bookings in that month or promotion period. So for example 1000/5000 capacity on a ship 12 months out is a low priority to fill = less deals 2000/5000 capacity on a ship 7 months out is getting higher risk of sailing less than full and then the run rate of bookings is likely to be the final variable which tells the model if they need to increase or decrease the pricing or offer values. So ideally... low occupancy + less than 9 months till sail date + low rate of bookings = best price for a cabin. Id say ive hit the lowest price on any cabin type i wanted on 9/10 cruises i booked using this method. its really not that hard when you think about it. Nobody is thinking about booking summer holidays before the Xmas period and that is getting close to the 6-9 month window of where they want the ships 2/3 capacity booked so they can milk the final 1/3 with higher prices.

isnt living in Scotland brutal in general? Driving to southampton should be easy 😆 Ive met plenty of scots which have to get to london airports to go anywhere decent as most airports north of the border are useless for a lot of destinations.

Thats not true. I found my brothers holiday for him on Anthem for 9 days in August for 4 people in a balcony for 3200 GBP. Its just timing, the ships are not sailing full out of the UK and Europe so royal is playing pricing games. you just need to learn how they play them and what a good price is.

This is because they are not allowing booking of the GTE cabins and when you add the child it forces you in to a cabin grade with the sofa bed so you lose the GTE price. What i found was that if you keep an eye on it and the promotion isnt working they then sneak the GTE cabins in to the deal which means you get the cheapest fare plus the 99 for kids and they just make sure you get a sofa bed. Royals promotions are highly illegal in the UK as they are just outright misleading and scammy but nobody has taken action against them as of yet. If i had kids i highly doubt Royal would be on my top 3 cruise lines to deal with and if i did then id book via a US TA on credit card on day of release during UK school holidays as far out as possible. Ive seen some of the crazy prices parents have paid Royal for holidays even outside of school holidays. You just need to learn to play the game with these people and if that fails then book P&O or MSC.

Your first problem is August. Your second problem is if you are thinking 2023 then you are too late. Third problem is you need to wait for promotion where 3rd guest sails for 100-200pp. My brother got 9 nights on Anthem for 3200 for 2 adults and 2 kids in a balcony with one over 12 so adult prices. Booked 9 months out. Your ideal situation is getting the 3/4th guest cheap and booking a guarantee cabin either large inside or balcony. Stick the kid in the sofa bed and you should be fine with one cabin. two cabins does not fix your problem as you will then have 4 full price fares to pay. use both a TA and Royal direct to advise on prices as they can be different sometimes. If this fails then just book P&O big ships as you will likely save a fortune versus royal but there is less for the kids on those ships but at 4yo would they even notice or care?

What happens when all the FCC run out? Ive been on 3 weeks of cruises now just on mostly FCC vouchers from one pre pandemic holiday that got cancelled. I know people that had significantly more FCC than i did. Demand is softening over the whole world economy as rates increase and growth stalls. Royal is not a special company with a unique service or product catering to the super rich. Its a floating bargain bucket serving overpriced beer and average quality food which thinks there is no upper limit on its pricing and no shortage of demand.

I had a fillet steak on P&O on a hot lava stone, perfect quality, cooked to perfection due to the stone and it was 15 USD equivalent with no tips to pay. 42 USD per day for the drinks package (no tips) Prices are sometimes per course which means i dont need to force down a dessert if i dont want to just to get my moneys worth. No daily tips on the room either....

This should be royals corporate slogan going forward. 'Always striving to charge you more....... whilst we work out how to get away with delivering less '

Thing is. Royals food isnt great most of the time. hit and miss even in speciality. The entertainment is also sometimes very good and others entirely forgettable with occasionally too painful to watch. The difference is royal is charging prices now like its a cut above everyone on all areas. Especially once you are on the ship. Its about delivery sub par for top shelf money.

Royal is doing its best to put me off ever booking with them again. Royals pricing goes up MSC and P&O is going down.

Not true. UDP is always cheaper than per night package regardless of sea day lunches. This it the first time ive seen this pricing issue and ive had the UDP on every cruise ive been on since they started offering it. a 14 night UDP used to be 188 GBP ive seen it as little as 166 GDP pre pandemic.

im 100% sure the UDP price that was "sold out" was a website problem. Ive been affected by it too but their phone advisor confirmed the price and then charged me higher one. They really are terrible these days,

If you think this is bad wait till you see the mess that is the cruise planner. Advertised UDP for 240 GBP Charged me 298GBP then denied the price. so i sent screen shot of website. Still no refund. Still denies it was this price. UDP increased now to 400 GBP for 12 nights = 33 per night 5 Night package is 208 GBP is 41.60 per night OR 3 night package 75 GBP for only 25 per night! Royals new pricing strategy is to charge you more the more you buy! and if that dont work advertise one price and charge you another!

What you find out eventually is what the market temporarily allowed suddenly becomes unacceptable and those new customers you thought you found with the big credit cards are suddenly gone and your loyal customer base who you screwed over for many years with crap food and 18% tips on everything have found a new place to spend their money. its happened before and it will happen again.

Not sure what cruises you do but in Europe it aint 100$pp per night. the drinks package is now like 80$ a night on its own. Food is pretty poor unless you upgrade and even then it's not always good. Im talking about the crappy junk they sell to guests on the ships. Such as Invicta watches. 70-80% discounts, gold coloured chains and other junk being passed off as "luxury" Is this the upper class guest royal is coveting with its one room clean per day policy? Royals game is to charge as much as it can for as long as it can until its guests realise they are being over charged for a less than great experience.

Where are these higher paying guests going to come from exactly? and do they like mediocre food, 90% off Invicta tat watches and cocktails made from syrup in plastic cups? Last time I checked, higher paying guests want higher level experiences. Not Royals floating version of holiday in express. Cruising is a budget holiday experience which is being priced like a premium one. This never ends well when the music stops... which it will.