Queen Mary 2 (QM2) Review

4.0 / 5.0
1,327 reviews

geezers at sea

Review for Transatlantic Cruise on Queen Mary 2 (QM2)
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bearman
First Time Cruiser • Age 70s

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Sail Date: Jul 2008

My wife and I decided to try taking the QM2 to Europe in order to enjoy the experience rather than suffering jet lag and enduring the pain of a long plane flight. As we live on the west coast, the flight takes around 12 hours, and we're strung out from jet lag for at least a couple of days. For the most part this was a successful strategy as the QM2 is FAR more comfortable than even first class or business class on any airline of my experience. Even though we lost an hour each day, it was much easier to hit the ground running when we got to Great Britain than it was on the times we have flown or when I traveled to Europe on business myself. And the cost turned out to be only a little higher than coach fare on a plane would have been. Bear in mind that we got a good fare from the online agency and we were willing to travel in an inside cabin.

Embarkation. We flew into Hartford the night before the sailing as we had free tickets on Southwest. We rented a car and drove to Brooklyn the next day. We dropped our luggage at the pier and then returned the car to the Avis agency in downtown Brooklyn, about a mile away from the pier, which we walked as it was a beautiful day. The all went very smoothly, and we had no trouble checking in even though we had not received our cruise documents from the internet agency through which we booked the cruise. All we needed was our booking number and our passports. Although there was a substantial line, we were on the ship fairly quickly. When we arrived at our stateroom, our bags were already there.

Cabin. As we have cruised many times before, we chose an inside cabin. We figured there would be nothing much to see on the way, and we like the quiet and, yes, even the darkness of the inside accommodations, figuring that we would only be in the cabin to sleep and rest. The cabin was very nicely laid out, including robes and nice toiletries. We were on Deck 5 in the middle of the ship. The ship was so well designed (and this crossing was relatively calm) that we barely noticed any motion at all. My wife is sensitive to motion, but she used neither her seasickness patch nor seasickness tablets on the entire crossing. The only problem we had was noise on the first morning of the voyage. We awoke to a banging sound around 7:30 a.m.. I went outside and saw that a ceiling panel had been removed a few feet from our door, and various wires were hanging from the opening and pieces of equipment were nearby. I saw our cabin steward, who nervously told me that he had already reported it. When my wife called about it later, she was told it was necessary ship maintenance. It would have been nice if they had waited until later in the morning, but at least they gave us a complementary pass to the spa that day.

Cabin Review

Small but very well designed.

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