I hated the boarding procedures for this cruise. This is not my first cruise with Royal Caribbean. Normally there is entrance for suite guests and regular guests. Then they separate guests by Gold, Platinum, Emerald and Diamond. Giving their returning guests priority, which I appreciate. At this location there was just a huge line and I was told to get in it. When you pay extra to be treated special that was a rude awaking. So we will not be going on IOS again unless that is fixed. I do have to add that getting off the ship was the best we ever experience. This is where being a suite guest came into play. The concierge gets a elevator to take us down and gets us to the front of the line to disembark. Also the luggage valet program is awesome. Its basically like what happens when staying at Disney World or doing a Disney Cruise.
Anyways..This cruise happened during college spring break. We will not be making that mistake again. The college kids were fine. They stuck to their crowd and on the whole very respectful. One kid started swearing around my 8 year old and his friends hit him stop. My main problem with this cruise was service. Being told that there are no apple slices for dinner in the main dining room for my son as a different option instead of french fries was weird. Basically that meant no one in the kitchen was able to cut up apples. Also it took forever for someone to come around and refill my husband's glass of water. Its little things like that, that bug us. But the food was great just the service was a little lacking.
One thing that also sucked on this cruise was that someone needed medical attention so we had to go back to Florida. Which had us miss Labadee. The reason this sucked was we had 3 days at sea stuck with spring breakers taking over the pool area. I also really wanted to get the private golf cart over to the suite beach and have the special suite lunch. But also my husband really wanted to do the zip line. But since we are loyal to Royal I know he will get another shot at it. We know a cruise is what you make of it, well really any vacation is what you make of it.
The grand suite is a beautiful room. There are tons of youtube videos that does the room justice. the sofa bed is huge. At one time the 3 of us laid on it and there was plenty of room. I was told as a suite guest that the in room movies we would get for free. That did not happen. So beware.
we only walked around the little town port while here. we mostly stayed on the ship and swam because the spring breakers all got off and we could finally use the pool and hot tubs.
This was the worst cruise terminal for Royal Caribbean. Have been to this cruise port for Oasis twice and had great experiences.