Cabin Review

We booked a Category M6 (Large Balcony Mini-suite) Cabin. They’re all located on deck 8 Forward. These have a balcony which I estimated at 12 feet long by 9 feet wide. It’s big. Ours had 2 lounge chairs, two standard chairs and two small tables with room to spare. Really great. We were on the Starboard side of the ship in cabin 8730. The bed was by the closet which we preferred to give us more room to not block the balcony door. We didn’t have an issue accessing the closet with the bed right there but it’s true that it doesn’t give you a lot of space. If you’re a larger person…you might have problems with it. The room itself was nice. Nothing fancy and other than the bathroom, no difference from a standard balcony room (other than the balcony itself of course). So now seems the time to address a few things I’d read about the various Balcony categories. Our M6 was as I said around 12x9. I had read various things about how much or little they were “exposed”. This concerned me a bit and was a big reason why I had looked into switching to an aft balcony. Since I’m a big nerd, I took some graph paper and sketched it out based on what I knew of dimensions. I came to the conclusion that people would really have to want to look down at you to do so. So we kept our M6 and put to rest the B1 thing. The M6 was about 1/3 covered by the B6 on deck 9. Those appeared to be around 7’x9’. So now you’re saying….but Winston…if yours is 12’x9’ and the B6 is 7’x 9’, isn’t that over half covered? The answer is no. Look at pics. The B6s are set back from where the M6s are. The doors are not above each other. I assume this is from the bigger bathrooms. Anyway, like I said. About 4 feet of cover on the M6 balcony with another 8 feet exposed. The standard balconies above the B6’s on deck 9 were about 4’x 9’ so the B6’s get about 4 feet of cover too. The standard balconies are not big…but doable for two average sized people. If you’re tall, you’ll have problems unless you sit sideways. One other thing I’d heard about was debris falling onto these balconies because they stick out from the others. We found one cigarette butt after the first morning. That was it. Didn’t ruin our day.We also really thought the bathroom in the Minisuites would be great. Expectations not met on this one. The shower, while big and impressive looking, is just bad. The jets hurt and are just weird to use. The overhead shower has such little pressure and is so close to the wall that you basically had to pin yourself against the wall to get any water on you. Renders 60% of the shower space useless. Nice idea, but poor execution in my opinion. So my reco is if you’re upgrading to the MiniSuite because you think the bathroom is something spectacular, you might want to save a few bucks. Having the dual sink was cool, but ironically the water was not. It was HOT. Like scalding HOT. If you moved the handle to the cold side you got lukewarm water, and the pressure was bad. Now since this is my first cruise, maybe the BA water pressure is good for ships…but I didn’t expect it to be like it was. So there you go. The cabin had ample storage space for my wife and me. We are overpackers. We each took a large suitcase and a rollaboard size suitcase. The suitcases fit under the bed great, and all our clothes into the closet or other storage spaces. Despite hearing that you couldn’t make it fit, we fit our iPad2 into the safe in the closet. You had to angle it a bit, but it fit.One last think about the M6…half of them were still unsold up to a few weeks before our sailing. While other cabin prices dropped significantly in price, ours never fell below what I paid all those months earlier. A couple weeks before sailing they had all disappeared. I suspect they were handed out as up-sells. We loved this cabin location and would easily book it again, especially if we were travelling with our kids (big balcony) despite the disappointing shower.