Ruby Princess Review
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There was so much about this cruise that I liked. First off, the staff was really great. Every person we got to know - our stateroom steward, our nightly server - was great. I really enjoyed the food. The buffet isn't great, but you can always go to the restaurants. We never paid extra for the more expensive restaurants and found the options and food at the normal restaurant to be very good.
One thing I was surprised about was the constant selling for extras. This is my first ever cruise so many this is normal, but I really don't know. However, everything is SO expensive. First, they suggest you add $11 per person, per day for tip. This is fine but I really have no idea WHO is getting the tip. So at the end, we still wanted to tip the people we got to know even though we had already paid a lot in tips. Almost all of the events are focused on selling something. The art events to sell art, the gym "educational" sessions which are interesting but ultimately are to sell a nutritional product. The thing is, when you are on vacation, it's really nice to not feel like every 10 minutes you have a live commercial in your face.
The activities were okay. But going back to my previous paragraph, a lot of things framed as activities were really just an excuse to sell something. And many of these things were insanely expensive. For example, the prices are the spa are almost laughable compared to prices in everyday life. It's really just blew me away how much it all cost. The drinks are not cheap either (they say $8 but they don't tell you that gratuity is automatically added so it's more like $11, and they are not high quality as you would expect for that price). In fact, immediately when you get on the ship the first day, you are bombarded with people trying to sell drink cards. These are so that you pay $50 per day for drinks. A couple of people in my family did this. It was an okay deal, but really the drinks are just not good enough to be worth that much. We bought excursions on the ship and of course they were a lot cheaper had we just bought them at port. However, we wanted to be sure that we had an activity to do. So that's a hard call, to wait or to buy them on the ship.