Firstly, we were extremely disappointed that Royal Caribbean International changed the 7 day cruise to a 5 day cruise at the last minute without explanation and that the itinerary changed so drastically from having FOUR ports of call to only ONE. We had planned this trip for over twelve months and had booked this cruise because we wanted to go to Jeju Island and Japan. Although we were given the option of cancelling, it was such short notice that it was not financially feasible for us as there was holiday leave from work, bookings of hotels and flights to be considered.

Secondly, we were greatly disappointed with the actual cruise. It became obvious once we had embarked that this was not going to be the cruise that we had expected. We were informed by the crew that the cruise ship had been chartered by various Chinese tour groups and that the cruise was totally tailored for the Chinese guests. There were only 25 English speaking guests on this cruise, half of them children. (This cruise ship holds 3,500 guests plus crew) The Cruise Director and some of the other English speaking crew, did apologise for all this, and spoke to us as if we already knew about the cruise being chartered. They were surprised that we didn't know. Upon speaking with most of the other English speaking guests, none of them (including ourselves) had been informed of this by their travel agents.

I wondered why there were No shore excursions listed on their website and found out when on board that there were NO shore excursions planned for independent guests as the tour groups had organised their own. Fortunately the cruise director went out of his way to organise ONE shore excursion in Seoul, for the English speaking guests. Read more