We just completed our 6th 7 day cruise with Royal Caribbean and it will probably be our last. The staff continues to knock themselves out delivering great service, but management decisions have been detrimental to the entire cruise experience. The food has gone from superb to mediocre, with all of the efforts focused on the up charge venues, which along with everything else RC would like you to buy, are hawked virtually nonstop, day and night. It is extraordinarily annoying.

The new prepay gratuity policy is deliberately confusing and I fear that the room attendant and wait staff that we personally interacted with are not being adequately rewarded for their efforts, so we tipped them again. The last nail in the coffin was paying an exorbitant fee for a week's worth of very bad WiFi service on my iPad and then being informed that I would need to pay them an additional $12 to access a computer with a printer in their internet lounge to print out a boarding pass for a flight home.

Customer Service reps were totally confused by it all and it wasn't until one of them accompanied me to the Internet lounge and personally tried my access code that they believed what the lounge attendant told me to begin with....I had to pay up again to use their PC for 5 minutes. After I politely told them what I thought of this policy, they told me I could go ahead and put it on my card and they would arrange a refund. Absolute nonsense, the very definition of penny wise and pound foolish. Such a shame to see how this cruise line has deteriorated.