Once you have dodged all of the booking mines and read countless paragraphs of do's & don'ts and spent hours online then you might consider that the holiday coming to you would be more than enough compensation. Wrong. Problems do not end with the issue of a boarding pass.

Security at Check In is akin to that of an airport only probably worse as your photo is taken and your credit card details taken in order set up an on board account for anything you buy on board including any bottled water. This excludes food served at normal mealtimes unless you want to eat in the better restaurants, Ocean Grill & Sorentino, both of which carry a hefty supplement charge, (£35 & £19). Upon our arrival in the Pacific Restaurant, (no surcharge), we found we did not have a table for 2 as requested but had been placed on a table for 6. We were told that the seating could not be changed so we made a complaint and opted to eat in the surcharge restaurants. Perhaps you are the type of person who likes to mingle a lot but some people like to have privacy during mealtimes for private discussions. We are certainly of the latter type. After our complaint and after we had booked the surcharge restaurants the manager of the Pacific called and said he had found a table for 2. A bit too late for us so we stayed with our surcharge restaurants. And we are glad we did as we still had to take our lunch in either the Pacific restaurant or the Conservatory buffet / grill. In these there was no strict seating for lunchtimes or breakfast but the food was of low quality and one (Pacific) lunchtime I sent back a jacket/tuna as it was poorly cooked and stewed.

In particular the breakfasts in the Conservatory was akin to a Motorway cafe and we found that a boiled egg was actually a hard boiled egg, bacon, sausages and fried eggs were shrivelled, hard and dry, toast was dry and immediately crumbled when approached by butter knife and the coffee was weak and mostly like coloured luke warm water. Read more