We chose Royal Caribbean because we thought they had a good reputation but we definitely should have investigated ahead of time on Trip Advisor. We wanted a great trip with our university-aged children as a last chance at a family vacation with "just us". We booked nice staterooms with balconies and prepared for a great experience. We even booked business-class airline seats as a surprise and decided to really go all out.

The only good thing about the RC experience was that the boat was new and clean and the staterooms were great. Beyond that, it was SHOCKINGLY BAD!!

The absolute worst part of the cruise was the food, if you could even call it food. We were shocked at how poor the quality was. For example, they served FAKE scrambled eggs!!! You could find fried eggs but they were dry and rubbery. The bacon was a sticky big pile of fat and was of super low quality. When you'd get a salad served to you in the main dining room, it had a pool of water in the bottom and no flavour. One night, they had "salmon tartare" on the menu. When it came, it was made of low-quality SMOKED salmon!? The french onion soup was ok tasting actually but had a paper-thin layer of cheese on top, that was about 2 inches in diameter. And there was absolutely NO flavour in anything. We joked about getting the chef a salt and pepper shaker as a gift! We began to suspect their business model is to make the main dining room food so bad that you are forced to go to the speciality restaurants ... which we did. They were definitely better but crazy pricey! We paid $16,000 for the 4 of us for the cruise (not cheap!) and spent another 3000 on the boat. Read more