This was our third cruise and the first from Southampton with RCI. We were aware that the ship would be very busy with lots of children given that the cruise covered the last 2 weeks of the English school holidays - we were told that 1,400 children were on board - and clearly some of the passengers without children were not happy that the ship was so busy. Surely they should have anticipated this.
We didn't travel with children but had no problems with those on board; as long as you kept away from the main swimming pools and the promenade deck in the early evening you didn't really notice the high numbers. Some of the parents we met on board seemed to encourage their children to go away and do their own thing all day; it must be tempting to do this and relax without kids around you all the time but it did seem irresponsible to us.
The ship is the biggest we had cruised on so far but there were lots of places that you could go where you could get peace and quiet if you wanted it. When the weather was hot and sunny (which it was almost all of the cruise) we used sun beds on the 'St Tropez' deck at the front of the ship; it was never really crowded and it had some seats under cover if you wanted to get out of the sun. Unfortunately the sun beds are not very comfortable; for a ship as new as this we would have thought RCI could have had something more modern, a lot of the beds were damaged as well.