This was our 5th cruise on Royal Caribbean, the first on Explorer of the Seas. Last year we sailed out of Fort Lauderdale on Navigator of the Seas, which is in the same class as Explorer. We found that although they are in the same class, Explorer seemed to be run much better and maintained much better than Navigator. My husband could not stop talking about all the maintenance and repair work that was done on a daily basis aboard the ship.

Embarkation: Cape Liberty is not the most attractive place I have ever seen. I really think Royal Caribbean should invest some money in upgrading their facilities here. Converting or expanding a building closer to the ship, thus avoiding the tram ride would be a good place to start. We arrived around 1 PM and waited in a long line of traffic for about 1/2 an hour. When we finally got to the luggage drop off, I was surprised to see it was a heavy duty "tent". The employees seemed "grumpy" and in quite a rush. As we waited to go through security, we witnessed drivers losing luggage out of their carts as they made their way down the road. We checked in three suitcases. We made the mistake of allowing the porter to place the Royal Caribbean tags on our luggage. This was not done earlier as we drove ourselves to the pier. Needless to say the tags fell off before making it on to the ship and only one of the three was delivered to our state room. The ship sailed at 4 PM. We waited until 6:30 PM before we started becoming concerned as to the whereabouts of our luggage. Finally, after three requests to our cabin steward, Ernest, our suitcases were located and brought to our cabin. Ernest was great about the whole thing. His partner however, (a female cabin attendant on Deck 9) was rude and told me "Just wait, all the unclaimed bags will be taken to Guest Relations by tomorrow." I wouldn't have cared so much, but we had made reservations to go to Portofino for their wine dinner series at 7 PM and really did not want to go wearing our travel clothes. On the positive side, the convenience of Cape Liberty in location to where we live was great. The negatives were not enough to make me not want to sail out of Cape Liberty again. In fact, we think we will sail out of Cape Liberty again next year.

Ship: As I said before, we witnessed much maintenance and repair work being done. This included balcony and window washing, carpet replacement, as well as the every day cleaning, etc. We felt the ship was in very good shape. Our cabin was very well taken care of everyday. My only complaint in this area was that Ernest did not start making us our towel animals each night, until probably about Day 7 of the cruise. Not sure what that was about, and it certainly was not life or death, just one of the extra special touches that make for a great time. Also, no more mints left on your pillow at turn down. Guess this is a cost saving measure. Read more