We’re a couple in our mid to late 30ies and this is only our 2nd cruise ever. We went on the Allure last year for a Eastern Caribbean cruise last year and while service and food quality were similarly bad, we weren’t put off enough to give it a second go on this brand new ship. Unfortunately, the ‘down size’ meant that even the few good features were gone and RCC showed it full ugly face- service quality close to zero but hands in your pockets wherever you go.

We boarded in Southampton which is the usual ugly British town with the usual British traffic from hell. Luckily, we’re already used to this so we left in time and the pre-booked parking was conveniently located just next to the check in terminal. With only 3 days on this special cruise, we wanted to make the most of it so we had picked the very first boarding slot just at noon. The boarding was one of the few things which actually went much MUCH better than last year in Fort Lauderdale where we had to queue for ages until getting onto the ship. Here on the Anthem, the boarding process benefits greatly from the updated technology and hence we were checked in by some ladies standing around the entrance hall of the terminal building with Ipads. They scanned the barcodes of our checkin tickets which we had printed off the internet days before, even managed to read in both of our passports (one German and one Aussie) on their Ipad and off we went through security and onto our ship. We wondered whether it would all go so smoothly if you boarded later and there were a few more people as I could well imagine that ladies-standing-around scenario to end up in utter chaos but I can’t judge on it as it was all fine when we boarded amongst the first people on the ship (‘utter chaos’ was more the rule than the exception throughout the entire cruise so I’m quite happy to not even find out in this instance!).

What we did not receive immediately was our cruise passes which we were told would be found in our stateroom. Too bad that the staterooms were still locked for service so over the first hour or so we had to fiddle around with our two loose drink stickers and the original booking slip (we later found out that various oh-so ‘polite’ Brits simply ignored the signs on the doors to the hallways and snuck into their rooms early to get the card which is was an early indicator for what lovely crowd we’d be spending the next couple of days with, but more on that later). Read more