Dining Room question please

[divawife]

What happens if the dining room has "open seating"?

This is supposed to happen on 8/30 EOS cruise since it is chartered by a travel agency (although open to everyone through a bunch of web pages).

My mom and friend are on it and they were really looking foward to meeting new people. They had signed up for early seating, large table. NOW the TA tells us it is open seating!

They are nice and friendly but I am afraid they will end up by themselves at a small table or worse yet-at a large table where they are the only ones!!! Has anyone out there been to open seating? What happens? How can they avoid being lonesome or excluded????

Thanks

Best-

Diva

[maxxboy]

I've never experienced open seating at dinner, but at breakfast and lunch you just show up anytime the dining room is open. You don't have an assigned table, but the staff usually seats you with several others at a table. Plus, I think its easier for the staff to serve full tables instead of a lot of half full tables. We've done breakfast and lunch in the dining room on many occasions, and we've always had several tablemates.

[kenandlaura06]

I never have heard of this! I wonder why the travel agency is doing this.

[rjg41]

Likely they are the employees and friends of the TA and the TA wants to allow people to mix and mingle at dinner. How this works is that when the dining room opens at the scheduled time people will either be allowed to pick any table they want or be escorted to the next available seats by the staff.

[BobBeaSea]

This is normal for the superlarge group cruises-basically the whole ship. They handle it very well according to previous threads. The dining room is 3 levels so they "layer" it as guests arrive. Fill up one tier, move to the next and so on. Just cycle through the levels.

[divawife]

Thank you all.

I am having my doubts about Vacation Outlet. They have given us 4 different sets of info regarding dining seating. First-open seating, then-2 seatings with questions about time, size of table and ages of the passengers. Then open seating, then 2 seatings and now open seating again. It is fine if they decide to use open seating but they never seem to communicate this information to their agents.

I think one of the joys of cruising is to meet other people. I know you can do this with the open seating concept. I also know you can get stuck with dining table mates who don't communicate. But more than likely your dinner table mates can make the cruise more fun if you see them every night. The charter it open to anyone anywhere who saw it advertised on any of the Naitional Leisure Group's owned discount cruise companies including BJ's, CruisesOnly and...Vacation Club. So it is not the travel agent's friends or relatives. It is the entire cruise owned by NLG.

I think next we go with the RCI company itself. The differnt stories and lack of communication between the company and its representatives are leaving a bad taste in my mouth. The dining arrangement is not the only thing they haven't gotten a clue about.

But go with the flow we shall, and have a great time they will!

Thanks again for taking the time to answer

Best-

Diva

[CaptData]

I have had open seating. You show up when you want between the times ie 6:300 to 9:30. You ask to be added to a large table. You are taken to a table where the people have not ordered yet. You introduce your selfs and seat down. Then you all order as a table.

 

Where this is an advantage is you can watch sail away. Then go and eat. The problem here is that you never sit with the same people twice nor do you have the same wait staff. Some of this can be solved by pre-bboking a table for the evening in Jerry's section. As for tips, you have to do the auto tip so that the right people get the money which is pooled.