Queen Mary 2 (QM2) Review

4.0 / 5.0
1,327 reviews

Queen Mary 2 (QM2) - Bahamas

Review for the Bahamas Cruise on Queen Mary 2 (QM2)
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Lizcourt
First Time Cruiser • Age 20s

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Sail Date: May 2007
Traveled with children

We returned yesterday from the 4-day "Memorial Day Getaway" cruise on the QM2, a four night cruise with two sea days and one day at the Cunard/Princess private beach at Princess Cays. Since there are any number of QM2 member reviews posted here, I wanted to take a different tack with this review.

This was my ninth cruise, but my first with Cunard, having previously sailed with Carnival, Royal Caribbean and Celebrity. When we thought about booking on the QM2, we had a lot of questions about whether and to what extent a Cunard cruise would be different from the "standard" (in the best sense of the word) cruise experiences we had had on other lines. Everyone on the boards was helpful, of course, but since many of them tend to be Cunard "loyalists" with little experience on more mainstream lines, we weren't able to really anticipate whether we'd be as comfortable on the QM2 as we've always been on our other cruises. Accordingly, for those who, like us, might be considering "stepping up" to the QM2 from these other lines, this review will focus on the comparison between our prior mass-market experiences and our QM2 experience.

EMBARKATION: We left from the Brooklyn, NY terminal, and it was far and away our smoothest, best organized and most painless embarkation ever. We had booked Princess Grill suites, and therefore had the earliest embarkation time. There were no crowds, plenty of porters to take our bags, and parking was plentiful and very close to the ship. We have previously sailed out of Miami (a nightmare), Manhattan (even worse) and Bayonne (well organized, but you have to be bussed to the ship after checking in) and found that there was absolutely no comparison to the ease of boarding the QM2 -- even though we had had priority check in status at each of those other venues. After going through the normal security screening, you fill out your health form and walk right up to the check in counters. The entire process took no more than ten minutes and, best of all, once you finish, unlike at Bayonne, you simply walk on board the ship, where someone was waiting to escort us directly to our suites. It took all of 30 minutes from the time we drove up to the terminal and dropped off our bags to the time we entered our cabin -- and that includes the time spent parking the car and walking from the parking lot to the terminal.

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