Prior to embarking on Empress of The Seas, I took pride in favoring Royal Caribbean as my #1 cruise line that has undoubtedly exceeded my vacation expectations from beginning to end so it was truly a "no-brainer" when I chose to spend a week on Empress of The Seas to celebrate my 24th birthday. To my dismay, Empress of The Seas was the absolute WORST experience I have ever endured on any ship. I have sailed numerous times on Carnival, Norwegian, Disney, and (prior to my most recent experience) Royal Caribbean.

To start, the shower's were extremely filthy and filled with a plethora of stains and mold between the grout. This was my first experience encountering a shower in which I felt less clean coming out of the shower than going in! In addition, the entire staff onboard Empress of The Seas are an embarrassment and extremely poor representation of everything Royal Caribbean prides themselves to be. The housekeeping staff repeatedly left used/empty cups in the cabin (even after I tried to make things easier by stacking all the dirty cups on top of one another), re-folded the same dirty towels that had the same old stains on them instead of replacing the cabin with fresh towels, and completely disregarded cleaning our cabin after placing the "Please make up room" sign on the door for 7 hours!

The cabin was a complete disappointment between the paper thin walls, poor filtrated air conditioning, and tangible crack between the beds after being pushed together to make a full sized bed. To make the cabin experience increasingly escalate for the worst, the water stopped working suddenly for "maintenance" for over 5 hours which provided extreme discomfort after returning from an excursion. The overall staff was a complete disgrace to say the very least. Read more