We chose this cruise because we had not been on this itinerary before and it seemed like a good alternative to the Caribbean. When we first booked the cruise, over 1 year before sailing, our travel agent told us that the only option for dining was my time dining. When we met with our travel agent he asked us which seating we had chosen and explained that he had earlier told us that there was no seating times and only my-time. So I am not sure if he messed up when we booked or that the cruise line later added the two seating times. Our travel agent believes that with my-time you can just show up and let them know you would like to eat, that is far from the truth. Luckily I found on the cruise website that you can preset your my-time dining times as opposed to waiting until you are on the ship. There was always someone waiting to be seated that did not have a reservation and was handed one of the vibrating pagers waiting for a table to open up.

The next big problem with the my-time dining is that the waiter is dealing with multiple tables that are in various stages of eating their meal, from waiting to order, getting their appetizer, getting their main course or waiting for their dessert. It really does take an organized person to be able to keep up with all of this. For the first three nights we were sat at a different table each night and found that the 3 waiter was struggling with all of this. On the fourth night we were seated at Yaser's table and we new we found a winner. Yaser made the dinner wonderful and we made sure we were seated at one of Yaser's tables each of the remaining nights.

It was explained to me by a dining services manager that the servers in the my-time dining room are the more experienced servers, which makes sense when you realize how much they have to juggle. Read more