We booked our cruise over 6 months in advance after researching for a service-oriented cruise. We initially had booked with Oceania but cancelled and rebooked with RSSC because their advertising "misled" us to believe that the customer service experience would be far better. We opted for a butler level suite as we are service junkies and are used to high-quality service in our daily lives. The first problems arose after booking but prior to the cruise - due to "computer issues" we had to re-input our guest information 3 times and in the end, the cruise documents that were sent to us were wrong and I had to spend more time to correct the information; aside from that the cruise representative was not helpful or particularly competent. We opted to arrange for our own private transfer to the port and I can't tell you how glad I was to do so as we left the hotel at about the same time as the Regent cattle herding and it was impersonal, disorganized and truly chaotic (we arranged for a towncar ourselves for less than 200euro - Regent wanted to charge us 4 times as much!). Fortunately, we arrived at the port before everyone else so we had a perfect boarding experience (in hindsight, this was more likely due to the fact that no one else was boarding at the same time). All around, our 1st day was practically perfect and we were very pleased and relieved.

Unfortunately, our 2nd day was drastically different - terrible customer service, noticeable decrease in quality of services and food. It was night and day - I guess they figured they could stop trying after you were onboard. Our first port was changed to Naples (instead of Sorrento/Capri); however, our shore excursion remained the same. Naples is a terrible port - nasty. Fortunately, we thoroughly enjoyed our "free" shore excursion to Pompeii - guide was a nice elderly man who was very knowledgeable and entertaining(despite a few too many corny jokes), too many people on the tour but the guide provided headsets so that we didn't miss any information.

2nd port: Amalfi/Positano. Beautiful surroundings but disorganized and unacceptable tour. Everyone met in the theater which began the cattle-herding. Then were squeezed into a tender boat (far too many people) and tendered to shore only to find another chaotic meeting place with a tour guide who was an elderly man with a bad attitude and a very quiet voice, let alone clearly incapable of guiding the tour. Unfortunately our group was 38 people and half of the people could not hear a word he was saying (no headsets either) - despite several people speaking up, no improvement was made and we decided to returning the pier to speak with the excursion "director" in an attempt to obtain a few suggestions for us to pay for an alternative (we would have done anything from a local double-decker tour bus to a private driver). She was very unhelpful and seemingly unconcerned. The only advice she had was to wait for the last group to arrive because they had less people (only 27!) - so we opted to wait at the peir for our boat transfer to Positano. Our excursion began at 8:15am and the transfer boat didn't leave Amalfi until after 10am - even after our group caught up to us, we waited almost an hour on the transfer boat so that the rest of the Regent groups could transfer at the same time (even though they had the benefit of sleeping in and starting the day later without waiting like we had to do). Again, terrible chaotic and crowded. Positano was beautiful but the "tour" portion lasted about 5 minutes (just to walk up some steps). By the time we returned to the ship, we felt that we just wasted 6 hours of our lives to something we could have done in a 15 minute boat ride past the two seaside villages. We wish RSSC would have provided more details in the excursion description as we would have opted to sleep in, relax and maybe take in an extra spa service. Read more