I have to say the she is an impressive ship. She does not feel as large as she really is except in poor weather on a sea day. I enjoyed my 7 days learning where to go and what to do. Let me deal with the negative elements before I offset them all with a lot of very positive points.

I have traveled on seven or eight different cruise ships and never come across the problems caused by their being no passenger stairway at the center of the ship. Before I traveled, I had read about this situation, but though little of it - so you have to take the lift is your are close to midships. Even though I like to take a little exercise going up and down two or three decks a couple of times a day, this was little loss to me. The missing stairs was no in fact the real problem. The problem was having three different banks of lifts which were not linked to the demand. The center four lifts were connected to one call button and the two side lifts were totally independent of the other five lifts. Once this had been recognised, passengers soon calculated that they needed to press three buttons to call a lift. That meant that three lifts eventually called at the floor. This slowed down the movement of passengers. The next step, on about day three of the holiday, passengers started pressing all the up call buttons and all the down call buttons. Their objective was to get into any non-full lift and travel in whatever direction it took them until they reached their planned destination. This needs addressing before we have "laundry" type battles to enter lifts. One suggestion was to walk to one of the other two areas where there are lifts and stairs. This then causes an imbalance in the planned passenger flow. The real solution is to supply one up button and one down button on each landing, to educate passengers to only press one button and encourage them to only join a lift traveling in that direction. An essay on something insignificant? You need to experience the mood of passengers who have waited nearly 10 minutes as they board a lift by pushing in front of a wheelchair bound passenger.

The 900+ seats in the Theater, even with three shows an evening is not sufficient for almost 4,000 passengers when a "good" show is promoted. Read more