We had an awful experience onboard Voyager of the Seas departing Hong Kong on August 2. I think RCI had made a wrong decision to choose Hong Kong as a home port for its Asian cruises for a number of reasons. On one of the cruises prior to ours the ship had made a detour to Thailand and Vietnam in lieu of Japan due to two strong typhoons. It was just unlucky and not RCI’s fault to change the destinations. However it was the way they informed passengers which made the situation chaotic, as reported by the local media here in Hong Kong. We were lucky enough to have fine weather throughout the cruise to Okinawa. But overall we were totally disappointed by how the cruise was run and operated.
In general the ship has good hardware. I understand that it just had gone through major refit in October 2014 adding more new signature features onboard. Despite the fact that our staterooms were a bit outdated, in general the ship was in good conditions.
But there’s a huge mismatch between hardware and software of the cruise. I feel like RCI has tried very hard to appease the taste of passengers from mainland China, which is totally understandable. On our cruise about 2/3 of passengers were from China. And I think the cruise had taken up its maximum number of passengers. That alone created a number of chaotic situations.