My family traveled on the 5-Day Bermuda cruise out of Cape Liberty on August 2014. We have sailed on many river and ocean cruises before and have been on 7 previous Royal Caribbean cruises prior to this voyage. Our family comes together only once a year and coordinating so many people's schedules (14 in total) made this vacation truly important. Needless to say, we were massively disappointed in the travel vacation and felt that our vacation was not worth it (spent $7000 for 6 of our party, not including on-board spending and tips).

First, the good. The service level was acceptable. Despite our cabins' worn look, our cabin attendant was very friendly and service levels for evening dining was very good. In essence, the crew members that we had the most contact with (housekeeping & dining) did a great job in cleaning and delivering their service. Their professionalism and smiles were on par with our expectations. In addition, we have to say the fitness center and sport facilities were on-par and adequate for active travelers. We liked the quality of the commercial treadmills (LifeFitness 95T) and felt the spin and bootcamp classes were good with a large studio located on the 11th Floor for classes. Did not have much interaction with the Cruise Director so have no comments there.

Now for the negatives. Embarkation was a nightmare. We arrived at Cape Liberty around 12:10pm and essentially hit rush hour for embarkation. It literally took us 2 hours and 50 minutes to get onto the ship. We spent about an hour and a half in our car because the passenger dropoff area is the main bottle neck because it is one single lane for cars to get through the passenger area. Subsequently, priority check-in, security, and check-in was another 45 minutes. Afterwards, you had to take a shuttle bus to the one single vessel entrance and then onto the vessel. Once onboard, the chaos that is Windjammer took place. Fellow travelers fighting for tables, trays, forks and elbow room. We were in in Windjammer at 3pm with food service shutting down at 3:15pm in order to get people to their muster stations for the 3:30pm drills. The bedlam and chaos in Windjammer was absolutely unnecessary had the embarkation process not been so bottlenecked. Read more