We chose this cruise as it went to places we had not visited (Fiji and Tonga) as well as ones we wanted to go back to (Isle of Pines). It also finished up in New Zealand which gave us the opportunity to spend a week at the end of the cruise there before heading back to Australia. Royal Caribbean have Family Rooms which suite larger families (we have 3 kids under 10) which we could not find elsewhere. This was our second cruise with our previous cruise being four years ago when we were only a family of 4.

We generally found the experience positive and are keen to cruise again one day (when we can save up enough for another trip as this took us 18 months to save for). Most significant improvement from our previous cruise experience which was also with royal Caribbean on rhapsody of the seas was in the youth program. On our previous cruise this was the area we were most critical of. We found the staff then were poor communicators and too keen on removing kids from programs if they failed to fit in straight away. On this occasion we found the staff to be that good that our 3 year old daughter wanted to go to a program every day by the end of the cruise, despite us making the decision early on to not place the kids in youth programs very often. We ended up using the morning session for all 3 kids only twice and did 4 dinner sessions as well for all 3 kids. On a 14 night cruise this is not a lot really.

The only negatives we found on our cruise were the swimming pool which was a bit boring and small (but suitable enough), and the photographers. This was another change we had noticed from our previous cruise. Photographers popped up all the time for photos, including occasions when we just wanted to get on with having breakfast or rushing to get to out shore excursion. We are aware that lots of people like to have photos to use as a memory of their trip, but we ended up not buying a photo package as the pics we took ourselves were adequate. I heard other people complain about the photographers as well, so maybe this could be scaled down a bit. Read more