Anytime Dining - Equinox

How is the anytime dining on Equinox? Do I need to make daily reservation or can we just show up? If we just show up, will we have a long wait? Sorry, but we are new to Celebrity and have typically had a set dining time on other cruises. Just thought it would be nice to play it by ear on this trip.

How is the anytime dining on Equinox? Do I need to make daily reservation or can we just show up? If we just show up, will we have a long wait? Sorry, but we are new to Celebrity and have typically had a set dining time on other cruises. Just thought it would be nice to play it by ear on this trip.

We're doing a B2B cruise on the Equinox in March (24th and 31st). I made reservations in my cruise planner for Select Dining for all evenings on both cruises. But I do this for all our cruises. Personal choice. Yes you can just show up. I believe if you elect just to show up your wait time will depend on the time you show up. Some time frames to eat in SD are more popular than others.

How is the anytime dining on Equinox? Do I need to make daily reservation or can we just show up? If we just show up, will we have a long wait? Sorry, but we are new to Celebrity and have typically had a set dining time on other cruises. Just thought it would be nice to play it by ear on this trip.

You can do either, make reservations or just go eat. Be advised that at busier times with or without a reservation you may wait. Really like a regular restaurant on land.

We make reservations for the first 2 nights. After that things seem to flow better and we just show up when we are ready. Occasionally have had a short wait but rarely more than a few minutes.

I made reservations for 6:00 every night but actually showed up at 5:15 every night last week. Only night that there was a line was the night we left port. I was able to get the same table every night.

We had anytime dining and it worked out great. Rarely had to wait long and they give you a buzzer to let you know when table is ready. We would just go and have a pre-dinner drink. We usually showed up around the seven o'clock time frame and after the first night even requested a certain table with the waiter we liked. Never had a problem.

No problems with select even with a large group (19). We did have to sit at 2 different long tables but next to each other.

I would previously have said you didn’t need reservations. But we just returned from a really bad experience on Silhouette where some 300 people had been bumped from Early into Select and it created a nightmare for all involved, wait staff, hostess, diners. Each evening we went earlier and earlier but still wound up with a pager for from 30 to 55 minutes. And we were stuck in the bars near the MDR as the pager does not work at the Sky Lounge where we wanted to be to see the sunsets. It was such a disaster that while onboard I logged in to the X website so I could make reservations for our April Reflection cruise. Just to be on the safe side I’d make reservations.

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I have tried to book anytime dining for our upcoming Silhouette cruise but it looks as though it only allows me to book one day, not three or four. I have tried to call Celebrity but they are 'experiencing an unusually high volume of calls' and when I pressed option one for a callback the line went dead! So - any advice about how the anytime dining reservations work?

It should show you a calendar of your cruise and you start off with the day you want to make them, Select the guests, pick the time and then go on to the next day... Each night’s reservation will show up as a number in your shopping cart. If you have made 7 it will show 7. You will proceed to checkout even though there is no charge and go from there. It is not intuitive....

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Many thanks Helen. I tried that but obviously was still doing something wrong since it still showed up in the cart as being booked for only one night. However, the website was evidently as frustrated with me as I was with it because it locked me out of the booking for 'security reasons' ! I ended up calling (with relatively little wait) and we now have the reservations we wanted. Thanks again for your help.

We rarely, if ever, make reservations. That is the whole point of flex dining, we eat when we feel like it. Hardly ever, do we wait more than 5-10 minutes. But then we are not picky about which wait staff we have. We get a table for 2 and just enjoy a quick hour to 1.5 hour dinner (instead of 3 hours in regular dining). I plan dinner around whatever shows we are going to see. Works perfect for us.

Last year on our 11 night cruise, we went around 8 pm and were extremely happy with the wait staff and table location we were given and the next night we returned around the same time and asked for the same wait staff....after that, each night we turned up we were automatically given the same area, I asked the young lady at the podium how that was working out and she said, well you were arriving between 8 and 8:15 each night and you liked the location so I just penciled you in each night, if for some reason you didn't come, like the couple of nights we did specialty she just gave it away to someone else...to me she went above and beyond...just amazing....

We are Elite Plus (not to toot our horn just to say we’ve cruised X a lot.) We have never needed reservations before; our experiences were as most of you describe. But it costs nothing to make reservations and it could be a deal breaker if you encounter an unpleasant experience like we did. I’d prefer to not have to...but I don’t want to eat in OVC or wait with a pager over half an hour. And we were not requesting a specific table or wait staff. OK, only my opinion.

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We did anytime dining on a holiday cruise a year or so ago (Silhouette) and we had quite long waits on several occasions. Could have been just because it was a holiday cruise I suppose, but hopefully this will work better for us this time.