We were willing to give one of the "away" class ships a try and chose the Getaway. We decided that we are going to focus on cruising the smaller ships. Too many people, too much cigarette smoke and some serious customer service issues.

We were in a 2B/2BA in the Haven and loved our suite. Our cabin steward and our butler were fantastic and the concierge excellent as well. We had prebooked all of our dinners (we had UDP and UBP) and are glad that we did - even with a Haven suite towards the end of the week most of the specialty venues were sold out. Dinners ranged from good to excellent - but the service was poor at best. It's clear that there are too many pax booking specialty meals and too few servers to adequately take care of their diners. At one point in Cagney's, I had to get up from our table and track down our server (we had waited 30 minutes to place an order) and service did not improve.

The horrible weather was probably a factor - this ship is clearly not meant to have 4,000+ people crammed inside the public spaces. The lack of a retractable roof in the Haven rendered it basically unuseable for 3 of the 7 days. Read more