The night of 22 January, 2015, the Serenade of the Seas experienced an electrical malfunction and subsequent flooding of 199 cabins. The damage was not repairable in time for our sailing on 24 January. (Later, 119 more cabins were added to the unavailable list.)

What we experienced on January 24, 2015

We faced locked doors when we arrived at the New Orleans RCI terminal for a 7 day cruise on the Serenade of the Seas. No official from Royal Caribbean was telling us what was going on. One person who directed car traffic told us to go to Door Three. There we found no chairs, no representative. We found no help. We have been on over fifty cruises. Eleven have been with Royal Caribbean. We arrived before 11:00 AM. We were denied any communication. We waited and waited. There were no chairs, no food, no water, and no help. We were promised help with wheelchairs when we booked our cruise. I have arthritis and so does my husband. My husband also has diabetes. We needed wheel chairs. We needed something to drink. My husband fortunately brought some energy bars. With diabetes you can get into health problems when you do not eat regularly. We got on the ship at 5:30 PM. It took hours before we found out if we were affected by electrical problems. This is not acceptable. We were never shown a complete list of rooms affected. Even when we finally got our Sea Passes; we knew very little about what would happen. All of this left us in a poor, exhausted condition. I never was able to feel less stressed and able to ease my arthritic pain the entire cruise. I know I felt a lot better before we got to the cruise terminal on Saturday where I stood and waited and waited. I also should mention the bathroom facilities were extremely poor. Read more