What a very costly mistake choosing independence of the seas, we always go with P & O but family was going with Royal Caribbean so thought we would give it a try, where shall I begin ?? Started queueing at Southampton and never stopped queueing from that moment on until we arrived back at Southampton, queued for breakfast, dinner, tea, lifts, drinks, tables, excursions,shows, well almost everything, evening meal in the main dinning room Romeo and Juliet took us 2 hours service very slow, so some of the nights we would eat in the Windjammer OMG the food was something you would expect from a very poor holiday Camp, stew, cottage pie, under cooked and very often cold, the deserts every night was rice pudding or bread and butter pudding, all the food was very salty, you would have to wonder round with your food in hand trying to find a table, total chaos.

On the Nice embarkation you had to get tickets and wait for your ticket number to be called, this again was chaos, after waiting about 1 hour for our number to be called we was taken down to deck 1 and again had to queue in a small corridor but was told it would only be for 10 mins thank god as there was no where to sit and it was very hot, lots of older people was with us, well 45 mins later and we was still queuing, no staff around to inform us what was happening, we was treated just like cattle, only to get on the small boat and again had to wait 20 mins.

But worst of all ! we had decided to have the drinks package before we sailed, so after going on the website to choose which one to choose, only to be told once on board that the price had gone up by 5 dollars a day plus 18 % service charge, Royal Caribbean it seems is only interested in extracting every last penny out of there passages, deck 5 is shopping shopping and more shopping selling expensive watches, Jewellery, handbags, The bars are very adequate as we could never find a table to sit at in any of the bars, while there is a very large art gallery which had art auctions on a few days,this would have been better used for entertaining not selling, very often lots of trestle tables would appear down the middle of the all ready over crowed & busy deck 5 selling cheap rubbish. The bars are by far to small to cope with the amount of passengers, you would have to queue up at the bars waiting to by served, sometimes only one bar staff on. Read more