I have cruised several times when younger with my family and it seems like cruising has gone way downhill from my memories. I was very excited about this trip, and though overall it was ok, I was hoping to have a spectacular or even excellent or good cruise. I would say fair or ok was my overall experience. I did massive amounts of research but didn't anticipate to be so underwhelmed.

FOOD: The food really was the biggest disappointment. If you are vegetarian or even pescitarian there really aren't many options. Most nights the menu had little variety, the starters changed but the main entrees, maybe 8 of them were often repeated or similar with a different fish, also almost always in cream sauce, yuck. There were also 6 standard things you could always get on the menu too, which I never ordered once. The addition of so much pasta also left little to be desired for me in the MDRs. Many of our meals were boring, or overdone, or sometimes lukewarm, or chewy fish. On the average the starter was the best part of the meal and the soups were always well crafted. The desserts were also very blah- i'm a baker and I, hands down had the worst apple pie ever on this boat. All in all the food was like cafeteria quality in the MDRs. I was also told by a few people who did the dining packages that food was the same in those restaurants.

My one saving grace was that I luckily was on a cruise with 600 indian passengers so, in the Garden Buffet there was ALWAYS excellent indian food options, which were 80-90% vegetarian. They were always the best meals I had on the boat. We had every breakfast in the Garden Buffet and that was always pretty consistant, with hot good food prepared well. The only fault was the scrambled eggs, STEAR CLEAR! Worst scrambled eggs I have had in my life. They were hard, obviously from powder and I don't understand how one person ate them. Read more