Cabin Review

We had a balcony cabin on Aloha deck (deck 11). Beware of cabin A410 (port side) and also any cabins near this one on the port side for 2 reasons. Firstly, it is on deck 11 which is obviously more expensive, yet this cabin was directly under the Riviera Bar and quite often you could hear very loud scraping noises from the moving of the furniture, chairs and tables whenever people were getting on and off chairs and also I assume when staff were repositioning furniture on the deck early morning and late evening. It wasn't bad enough to stop us resting or sleeping but I just thought I'd better mention it. Secondly, the port side directly underneath the cabins around A410 is a smoking area as it is adjacent to the Riviera Bar. All smokers gather in this area to smoke (I don't know if there are other areas on the ship where they can smoke) but in this area there can be 10 or more people at any one time smoking and the smoke wafts down into the cabins directly below of which A410 was one. It can be very overpowering if you are not a smoker and if you have your balcony door open which you would want to do for a lot of the time as that is why you have paid the extra money. We had to shut the door on a number of occasions, so if you have a choice of cabins then consider a cabin away from this area for the above two reasons. Also the cabin was a bit small for a balcony room. In the other cruise ships we have been on we did have a 2 seater lounge in each of the balcony rooms we have had so you don't have to watch TV on the bed all the time. The room was a bit worn as many of these older ships are, but it was still OK. The bathroom was very small but still OK. Some rust on the balcony and what looked like large salt deposits stuck to the frames of the balcony doors on the inside of the room. The sheets did not seem a crisp new white colour but more of a light beige colour but they looked clean so it was OK for us. There was also a motor starting up somewhere near our corridor or in a shaft somewhere near us resulting in a whirring engine noise in our room which we noticed seemed to come and go. It went for good eventually but if it had continued, it may have become a bit more of a problem when trying to get to sleep. We did call the pursers office and they sent a man quickly but it had gone by the time he got there and he said that he hadn't done anything to fix it and I got the impression that it was not something that could have been fixed very easily anyway if it had continued.