solinar

Took our 7th Carnival cruise on 12/18 on the Valor out of New Orleans. It has been 5 years since our last Carnival cruise. We had a good time (excellent service, boat was nice, excursions fun) but the food was just awful. I have been on a diet, and I weighed the day I left and they day I got back and I lost 1/2lb over the 5 day cruise.

• Same cookies every night (overcooked chocolate chip, a sandy, double chocolate at the deli). The cookies were BAD. I have 3 kids (6,11,16) and only one would eat the cookies and the other two are the sugar addicts and said they were horrible.  One night they had brownies at the dining room for desert, and two kids ordered them, ate one bite, and asked if they could have something else. The brownies looked like dry crumbly cake.
• All of the food was super bland. No flavor, no salt. Upon reflection, my wife and decided that dinner at a local cafeteria would have been a better option than the food offered at the dining room and Lido on every night.
• The Lido buffet was the exact same food as the dining room every night, just served in pans. Its been 5 years, but I don't recall this ever being the case before.
• The specialty dining options were all pretty good (Guys burgers were great, Deli was good, Seafood was good, Steakhouse was very good but not great), but there are only so many times you can eat them before they get old with the same menu all the time.

The staff was wonderful. It seemed like everyone was very appreciative to be back at work. The food quality was just very subpar, and very disappointing; so much so that I doubt we will do Carnival again unless I see evidence on the boards that their food gets a big upgrade.

Same on Valor 12/18. Camp Ocean was a go but you had to pick up by 10:00, no night owls. Bad time to pick up too, because every night there were 9:30 shows that you had to either skip or dive out of early or take the kids out early and bring them (but the 9:30 shows were sometimes adult shows).

Also, I forgot to mention it, but one night the cruise compass said "meet and greet, madagascar characters, (bring your own camera)". We got there and posed for the picture, let them take their picture, then went to take our own on our phone, and they told us "No pictures allowed!". We showed our butts at that point, busting out the compass and pointing out what it said. They were still reluctant to do it! They just wanted to make a buck. We felt like that was the common theme of the cruise, get extra $ from any place you can from the customers.

We do not mind spending money on a vacation at all. RCCL lost money on us by pushing the advertising so hard. We certainly weren't going to pay to go to another upscale restaurant again after the hard sell at the first restaurant.

I would have bought a bunch more drinks if I hadn't been so concerned about prices. We went to an adult scavenger hunt one night (which was fun) and ordered a bar brand vodka martini, a strawberry daquiri, and a shot of bar brand tequila. It was $54!!!! I am not inclined to order another round after that...

Royalton white sands was about as good as it gets. Two resorts right next to each other on the beach. Each with a private beach, pools, lazy river, waterslide park, unlimited drinks, and a really upscale buffet. The staff were all super nice. There were scores of private couches, cabanas, and other shaded places to sit and enjoy the weather in relaxing peace. Our kids loved it, we loved it, great food, and all you could drink. Well worth it for $100 per person for adults, and kids were $50. I would expect a buffet like that to cost $30 a person easily without anything else. We have already looked into going back to that resort for an extended stay. It looks like its about $500 a night for 2 people all inclusive.

Also, a couple we were talking to were on the 2nd week of a backtoback on that ship, and they said the upselling was off the hook, but was nearly non-existent the previous week. Maybe a quota week or something? I hope its not their new standard.

> You mentioned that there were some good points. Any you care to mention?

I felt like the ship appearance was very nice. The activities they had, like rock climbing, slides, waverider etc. were all great. The shows (saturday night fever, the cirque du soleil type show, and the comedians) were all top notch. Our 6 year old loved the kids camp. Our 11 year olds felt like their kids room was way too childish for their liking (and we agreed after hearing about it), but the teens room (12-17) seemed always full of kids having fun.

A waiter in Johnny Rockets (Mahendersomething was from Myanmar I think) was absolutely fantastic. Very genuine, very nice, catered to our every wish without being annoying. We left him a $30 tip on a $42 bill.

Cayman was great (rays snorkeling and rum point) and Jamaica was out of sight (royalton white sands day pass).

We had a good time on the trip overall. We just had problems on our first Royal Caribbean cruise, that we have never experienced on our previous 7 Carnival cruises.

Hi all. I just wrote up our experience on the survey form from Royal Caribbean from our sailing last week on the Liberty of the Seas out of Galveston.

There were good parts to our cruise and bad parts, but overall the bad outweighed the good.

We felt like Royal Caribbean used every possible opportunity on the ship for an up-sell. During our lunch at Sabor, that we paid money for the upscale experience, we were pitched a class for making guacamole and margaritas, and insistently asked were we going to sign up. Then when we said we would think about it, they brought out an avocado cutting plastic tool and offered it to us for $16, then left it on the table so we could look at it all meal long while experiencing our upscale dining. A plastic kitchen tool. Very unclassy. We had planned to go to all 3 upscale restaurants, but after our first one, skipped the other two. Then, every announcement in our mailbox outside our door, on our phone, over the loudspeaker, or on our TV was an art sale or some other such up-sell. Every night at dinner, the waiter tried to sell us on a discount for the up-sell steak or lobster. It was ridiculously over the top.

We also felt like the opportunities for fun activities on the boat were very limited vs what we are used to on Carnival. There didn't seem to be as many events like games, scavenger hunts, stuff done by the cruise director and assistants as we are used to on Carnival. Also, many of the activities on the ship seemed to overlap with dining times and with shows. We missed many things we wanted to make because of poor scheduling. We felt like the cruise was very "buttoned up" compared to Carnival. We aren't huge partiers (we drink a little and gamble) but this cruise felt like it was catering to retirees.

The my time dining was a disaster. We didn't realize we needed reservations, as the RC website said just show up when you wanted and you might have a 10-15 minute wait for a table. We did this the first night and it was a 45 minute wait, not acceptable with children standing in the lobby in dressy clothes. We were assured that if we made reservations the wait would be quick. The second morning we decided to get smart and make reservations for that night, but were told they only had 8:00 and 8:30 left. We took the 8:00 and decided to get smart and make reservations for the 3rd day while leaving supper on the 2nd day. There was still an extremely limited set of options to choose from (like 5:30 or 8:00). My time dining is not my time, it is Royal Caribbean's time.

I put my wallet and phone in the safe the first day, and by the next day it was broken (error message 90 when you tried to open it). We called maintenance and they opened it and installed another battery. I put my wallet in it again, and the next day, same error message, no access to my cash for ports. I called maintenance again and they opened it again and they said it was fixed. I wasn't trusting it again. I decided to go to our adjoining kids room and use their safe, guess what, same message! "error 90"! couldn't use it either. Only one of our remotes for the two rooms worked. We had to share. We asked for the steward to fix it, she replaced the batteries. Now it worked but only to turn the TV on or off, changing channels or volume didn't work. We gave up and just shared a remote, knocking on the adjoining door for the rest of the cruise when we wanted to change a channel.

The casino had a holdem table (something we love to do on vacation) but the limits were $2/$5 which meant to sit with a standard stack of chips was a $500 buy-in. Too rich for our blood. The drinks averaged $12-$14 each. That is a ton of money for drinks.

Overall, the ship was nice (we enjoyed the promenade), but the experience was poor. I don't know why we would choose Royal Caribbean again over Carnival.