I was recovering from Cancer, and the cruise was a delayed 70th birthday celebration. Celebration!!!! That was the last thing this cruise was. I had believed that Royal Caribbean would be a reputable company, but it seemed that you penny-pinched in almost every corner of the ship. The shows were abysmal. Only two of them were worthy to be called shows, these were the 'Beatles' and the Ice Dance. All the rest were the scrapings of a very poor talent pool.

Docking in the US was a disaster. I was incapacitated and needed a walking frame, this was the only reason that we finally got to disembark in Boston. We were told when we booked that we would have a full day in Boston, not just 3 hours and we had docked in time to have a full day. While we were queuing, we discovered that we needed another 'green' form in addition to the ESTA. Where were these forms in the six days before we docked? It was an insult to the European passengers to have to wait while preference was given to US Citizens I have never seen this happen on any of the cruises I have enjoyed. Trying to process 2,500 people in the few hours allotted to us in Boston was ridiculous. To add insult to injury, in an apology to the passengers, the captain invited us to have a drink on him. What good was that to people who had purchased their drinks package. Cabins on Decks 2/3 were flooded and there was nowhere to put the unfortunate passengers while the cabins dried out. In New York, we were told that we would have two days in the city. We arrived at 5 pm and left at 7 pm the next day, that makes 27 hours, not 48. We had been informed that we were docking in Cape Liberty, New Jersey and had made plans for transport accordingly. It was just by accident that we discovered that we were docking in Manhattan.

We had understood that we would have time to have a whistle stop tour of Miami but when we arrived, we had barely enough time to get to the airport, the only part of Miami we saw was from a cab window. In essence, this trip gave us access to just two cities, not the four as per the schedule. Read more