This was a awesome ship for our family to travel on to New Zealand. The first day was exploring and was great fun. Embarkation took around 45 mins and once we were on the staff were great and helpful - although it would have been good if we were given the passenger departure cards before checkin rather than in the middle before immigration. We had traditional dining at 5.30 and were seated with another family of four from South Africa - we could not have picked better dining partners if we tried..we were all around the same age and so were the kids. We ended up having dinner in the dining room every night of the cruise and the wait staff were awesome. We even had one of the head waiters peel the prawns for my daughter!! After being on P&O and Carnival I have to say that the food was ok - not stellar but pretty good. The choice of food in the dining room was not as big as the two other lines but all in all was fine.

My one bug bear with Royal Carribean would be that there is no public laundry. So, to have washed clothes you need to either handwash (what I ended up doing and hanging over the chairs on the balcony) or on a few of the days they had $30 for a bag of laundry that they did and this was limited to shirts, shorts, underwear and socks - we did this once.

The ports visited were great however it did cost for the shuttles into town - luckily we had asked the concierge desk the night before and knew to buy the tickets for the shuttle before we got off in the morning. The line to buy tickets at Dunedin was huge! Read more