My mother, husband and two 17 year old twin boys and myself just got back yesterday from this cruise. The ship was supposedly given a makeover in 2012, but there were many things that shouldn't have been an issue if this was the case. The first thing we noticed was, the large outdoor screen that they used for evening movies and daytime entertainment had large blackout rectangular bars in it, obscuring the picture. It made watching a movie very annoying--like a block of pixels were dead, only it moved around the screen. The second bit of inconvenience was, the top deck had railing that was missing, so a large section of it was blocked off. This made trying to use the track to jog very inconvenient. The windows looked like they'd never been cleaned since the ship was launched, and the dining room carpet looked as though it rarely got vacuumed. For the first three days of the cruise, the Windjammer restaurant was very crowded and it was difficult to get a table. If I did manage to procure a table from another family leaving, I could not get anyone to bus the table, even though the crew were sanding around not doing anything. In fact, one guy I asked, who was just standing at the dirty dish station gave me a dirty look as though I had some nerve asking him if he would bus the table. Halfway through the cruise, this changed because 600 people had come down with norovirus. Gee, go figure. Then dining did a complete 180. We were no longer allowed to take ANYTHING for ourselves, not even a box of cereal. They had people handing out everything, including butter, salt, pepper, creamers, everything. It was so annoying, because if they'd been more diligent to begin with, it wouldn't have happened. For that reason alone, I will never sail on that ship again.

That was not the only place the crew was a let down. Organizing the port of call tours was a disaster. On the first port, people were lined up at the stairs, and the girl working that station would not let anyone off, even when the captain came over the intercom and announced we could disembark. I can't count how many people called her names, and then she wondered why. People just unhooked the rope and walked around her while she called us rude. We wondered if she was deaf, or did not speak english. In either case, she shouldn't have been stationed at that job. When we took a cruise several years ago on the Navigator, people just got off, and found their groups once off the ship. This ship attempted to organize people on the ship and let them off according to group. It was complete chaos because there simply wasn't enough room. It was a ridiculous way to handle this. In Key West, they assigned us times to get off the ship, according to tour. We utilized this procedure and found our group neglected once outside for almost an hour.

No one knew the correct times for restaurants either. We had a suite and supposedly could dine for breakfast in the Italian restaurant. However the hours for this are not posted anywhere. And when we asked, not once, but three different occasions, we were told the wrong times--BY THE RESTAURANT STAFF. The last time was the return to Baltimore yesterday, and I think they just opened late. We were told 6:30, but when we arrived, they were not set up, and claimed they opened at 7. Read more