We had a terrific time on this Latin American cultural immersion cruise. There was Latin music to dance to every night. I don't speak Spanish, but all of the Royal Caribbean staff spoke English and we thoroughly enjoyed the Latin American influenced food. The entertainment was excellent, and we loved the acrobatic aerial show in the Centrum. The food in the main dining room was outstanding, and we had a terrific service and wait staff at our table. We had such fun with our table mates at dinners, we were probably annoying the other guests with all of our laughing. Our room steward Zoe was amazing and we loved our junior suite. The only occasional noise we heard was when they rolled carts in the Solarium above us, but it was so seldom that once we knew what it was, we tuned it out. This was my first Royal Caribbean cruise, and I liked that they didn't constantly come over the announcement system telling us the schedule of where we could be and what we could be doing; they give you the schedule the night before, and it's up to you to plan your time and get where you want to go, or not.

I have cruised on Carnival for years and one of my pet peeves was all the announcements. My biggest complaint about Royal Caribbean is that they are selling special meals and "fresh squeezed orange juice" in the main dining room now. I have no objection to the pay as you go dining restaurants, where people can choose to pay for meals if they want to do something other than the main dining room, but in my opinion, the main dining room is part of the all inclusive experience and there shouldn't be "specialty meals" or extra cost food items offered in the main dining room. Before you know it, they'll be charging extra for anything worth having, and you can have peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for free. For breakfast in the main dining room, the server asked if we'd like fresh squeezed orange juice and we said yes, and then they asked for our card and said it was $4.95 per glass.

I loved the ship, it never felt crowded. I also have to give big kudos to the guest services and engineering department. A baggage handler broke the main pull up handle off my suitcase prior to boarding. I was very upset as it was a brand new high quality suitcase, but I didn't want it to ruin my trip, so I unloaded the suitcase and put it away and didn't give it another thought until the day of debarkation. I then contacted the guest services to see if they thought there was someone on board that could fix it or even come up with an ingenious temporary fix. They immediately collected the suitcase and it was repaired like new and returned to me within hours. I don't recommend waiting until the last minute like I did, but I was very grateful that they were able to "handle" this for me.