Cabin Review

Sadly, if this were my first RCCL cruise, I'm not sure I'd be returning to the line, solely because of how unpleasant our stateroom - especially its bathroom - was. I'm not particularly room-snobbish, and I'm quite used to the usual kind of "you can brush your teeth, pee, and shower at the same time" cramped bathroom on cruises, but this bathroom was nearly unusable.Let's talk about the shower first. The shower was, to my eye, half the size of a comparable stateroom shower on ships like Explorer or Allure; rather than a circular or curved stall with sliding doors, Grandeur's shower was a narrow rectangle about 4 feet long and two feet wide, with the shower head on the narrow end and one corner chopped off, all edged by a shower curtain (oh, yeah, Grandeur still uses shower curtains, some of which are six inches too short and some of which are six inches too long, none of which appeared to be waterproof or hung on a curved curtain rod and all of which *really* wanted to get up close and personal with you). Area-wise, imagine cutting a circular-style shower in half, then shaving off the rounded part. It was physically impossible for me to wash my hair inside the shower's boundaries because raising my elbows made me wider than the shower, and I heard the same thing from every woman I spoke to onboard. Most of us eventually hit on the same solution: pushing aside the fabric shower curtain and using the entire bathroom as a shower stall. Luckily for us, the non-shower portion of the bathroom has a drain. With a few days' practice, one perfects the art of leaning sideways to wash your hair or shave your legs, then using your towel and the bathmat to squeegee the pool of shower water down the outer drain when you're finished showering. There was nothing about this shower that made me think a human had been put into it at any point along the design line, to see if it was actually usable.And now, the toilets. Yes, those famous Grandeur toilets did not disappoint, as long as "did not disappoint" means "were every bit as bad as I'd heard." My husband described our stateroom toilet as a random-number generator. You would close it, push the flush button, and then at some random time point ranging from immediately to five minutes afterward, the toilet would flush. The average time seemed to be about 45 seconds between button pushing and actual flushing. Our room steward told us about this on day one, and we assumed she meant that there was a problem that was being fixed and she wanted to warn us in the meantime. Nope, this is normal on Grandeur. When I advised guest services the next day that our toilet still seemed to malfunctioning, Cara (a lovely woman who worked hard to help people out in any way she could!) replied that unfortunately, that was just how the ship was, due to low vacuum pressure. Cara did promise to ask maintenance to take a look, and it seemed like the flushing got a bit more reliable after that, but at no point during the week did the toilet flush normally.The bathroom sink, like many in the fleet, has a tap that sits too low to the sink bowl to actually fit hands under, and the water pressure in it (oddly, given how blastingly strong the shower pressure is) is very low. Not the hugest deal, but in combination with everything else it rendered the bathroom essentially useless for all three of its main functions: shower, toilet, sink. In contrast, toilets and sinks in public washrooms on the ship had none of these problems - their toilets flushed on command, and their sinks had adequate pressure and hand room. All bathrooms on the ship, both in my stateroom and in public areas, were prone to exuding unpleasant odors at random times, ranging from stale urine to "I could swear there's raw sewage flowing across this floor right now, if the smell is any indication."The bedroom portion of the stateroom was less terrible, though I wouldn't go so far as to label it adequate, either. The room was cramped, which is par for the course, but I did find it a bit odd that it was *so* cramped that there wasn't enough room to walk alongside the bed without dodging protruding furniture. I had assumed these rooms were designed so that everything fit alongside each other, but in this case it didn't quite work, and more than once either my husband or I got up during the night and bodyslammed either the television (which is on a swivel arm) or the corner of the dresser (which projects into what would otherwise be the walking space next to the bed). The bed itself was little more than two cots; the mattresses were about an inch thick and dipped in the middle, funneling both people sleeping in it toward the center of the bed, where we had to fight it out for sleeping space (I usually won!). We asked for a mattress pad, which we got, but it was a scant improvement. I woke up most mornings with serious back pain. Our larger suitcases did *not* fit under the bed for storage.There was adequate closet/drawer space and plenty of hangers for our clothes, but there was extremely limited shelf space for smaller items. Two cabinets alongside the vanity mirror looked promising, but one was occupied by the contents of our minibar, which our room attendant "took away" by putting the stuff inside it (it had started out sitting on the desk, taking up about half the space there). This left one cabinet of four small triangular shelves for everything else we owned (the bathroom had one shelf next to the sink, entirely taken up by the ship-provided drinking glasses), which didn't work out terribly well.