While most of our friends have gone on cruises (and raved about them), we had never gone, so when I saw a deal on travelzoo.com, I booked a trip. We found the ship to be most impressive. Embarking was fast and the employees very pleasant. Loading 4000+ people with luggage seems like a nightmare waiting to happen, but we were able to virtually walk our way through without any delays save filling out the health screening cards. We already had our photo ID's as we boarded the ship.

Upon boarding, we were herded toward the main dining buffet, which is exactly where we wanted to go. The food was plentiful and very good. The staff friendly and helpful. We were invited to explore the ship until all the rooms were cleaned for the trip. We wandered about and liked the layout and size of the ship. I worried about so many people being in such a confined area, and there were areas that were very crowded.

When the announcement was made we could go to our cabins, we went and were very pleased with our room. It was small, as expected, but was laid out very nicely. We felt very comfortable in the room (13740). The room was quiet. Our neighbor was a family of 4, and I only heard them one morning when the little ones were fighting. You could hear them more often from the balcony, but that didn't bother either of us. The in room TV was a big disappointment. The channel that shows where you are didn't function until the 5th day, the "sports" channel was nothing but soccer, there was one movie channel and the rest were news channels or ship channels showing endless loops of the same thing. There was a channel showing the view from a camera mounted on the front of the ship that we used as non-essential announcements were not piped into the rooms but they were on this channel. The room was maintained by an incredible staff the whole week and was always clean and attended to. Read more