The first few hours were good, but then the other people started to arrive, and getting about became more difficult as the queues for the lifts grew, it also became quite obvious that the gym wasn’t going to be the “go to” place for many of them, which was good in many respects, but bad for queues at buffets and bars.
I had the pleasure of the company of Mr Blowey who has become an expert in cruising in his latter years.
Queues
In general, queues were the issue. My companions were experienced cruisers, and they assured us that this was the worst ship they had been on, and it wasn’t common to have problems getting into restaurants and getting drinks at the bar.
It was a real shame, because the restaurants had a good mix of food themes and were well decked out. Generally the food was good, but too often we ended up in the 24 hour buffet because there was less hassle getting served there.
Over time we realised that the cruise was under resourced, there simply weren’t enough staff to cope with the level of customers. Within the restaurants it was common for the tables not to be cleared while there were people waiting for a table.
By booking the restaurants in advance we could have avoided some of these queues, it is a lesson for everyone else, but we don’t like being that organised!
In the bars, they had a strange process where bar staff only dealt with orders from the waiters, who were inundated with queues of people trying to place orders, especially out on the deck bars where they were overwhelmed with 20 or 30 people trying to give orders. This hardly made for a happy workforce, and they seemed a pretty miserable bunch on the whole.
Entertainment seemed to be targeted at people in their dotage, if you like piano music and cabaret then it is fine, it was what we expected and we accept we are the outsiders on this type of thing.
The cinema seemed to be running for 24 hours a day and the films were a couple of years old that you will have seen on Netflix or somewhere, but it does offer an option, the only films I really noticed was Alvin and Chipmunks and Riders, as they came around pretty regularly on the schedule.
The shopping was good if you were looking for a tax free Rolex or diamond ring, but not too helpful if you needed toothpaste, but as we went to a new port every day it wasn’t really a problem.
One of my reflections on the whole onboard experience was that it wasn’t “Fun”. It felt like hard work all the time, getting from A to B was always a challenge, from deck 10 everything was either 6 floors above us or 4 floors below. We worked out the lifts in the end, basically don’t bother OR use the lifts at front which were quieter.
No communications
One of the problems is that you can’t communicate with friends unless you pay £20 a day for internet access. So mobile phones don’t work and the only way of contact each other is the phone in the bedroom, which we have all forgotten how to use.
So we had to resort to historic skills like organising where we meet and making sure we turned up on time. It wasn’t a skill that came easily to us and you can imagine what it is like trying to bump into friends in a giant shopping mall, but somehow we did manage it but it was mostly by accident.
We were lucky that we went with a couple of experienced cruisers as without them it would have been much more challenging and I doubt we would have had much company either, they weren’t really “our people”.
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