We started out in Rome for 4 days and travelled to the cruise ship via RomeCabs doing a 4 hour tour through the Italian countryside and touring Castle Odeschali in Bracciano, eating lunch at a nice Italian restaurant afterwards. If you get a chance, take that tour with RomeCabs...awesome! Arrived and boarded Royal Caribbean's Allure Of The Seas to celebrate our 37th anniversary. Yes, the ship is a Mega Ship, but there is so much room on this ship that we rarely felt crowded.
There were plenty of places to eat...the dining room with exceptional waitstaff had set dining times or "my time" dining, the Buffett style dining on the upper decks had 2 large areas and we always found nice seating even during the most crowded eating times. The food was prepared well and there was a huge assortment to choose from. There were smaller "restaurant" style eateries that were included in your paid price which you could eat at, too. There were plenty of extra dining places at which you would pay to eat at, although we felt we had such great experiences in the other places, we never used those. Bars and gathering places were everywhere.
The Amber theater was clean and the Mama Mia show was very good and the comedy shows were fun. There is a huge Aqua Theater on the ship, but the two different nights we had reservations for, were cancelled due to technical difficulties and then bad weather, so we were not able to see it, but heard it was great....so, try to see it early in your cruise if you can. This was a split boarding cruise, passengers got on/off in Barcelona and in Rome, but it was handled so smoothly we couldn't even tell it was going on...we actually think it made boarding and disembarking less crowded this way.
We had stateroom 11184 with a balcony. While we had read the showers were extremely small, we didn't experience any problems with them. The balcony was so nice, viewing shorelines and scenery while we dined on room service breakfast on early touring days was fantastic! The room had a nice couch, flat screen TV, plenty of storage and the king bed was comfortable...never had a sleepless night. If we would have any complaints about the room, it would be that there were no continuous playing movie channels to watch in the late evenings...movies cost about $13 to rent on the TV.