This was our second Royal Caribbean cruise and our first on an Oasis-class vessel. We were pleasantly surprised by the general onboard experience: despite frequent reviews complaining of crowding, we never felt suffocated even in busy areas of the ship. There was always a variety of activities available, and staff was welcoming in every venue (even when we were out of place, not on time, or otherwise mistaken!).

Our food experience on this cruise was substantially worse than our last Royal adventure. Our last cruise was on the Navigator of the Seas, and coming from a background with Carnival, we were impressed with each daily offering both in the dining rooms and on the buffets. On the Harmony, the limitations of dealing with 6000+ passengers really showed through. I wouldn't characterize ANY cruise ship food as "bad", but the Harmony's buffet offerings were far closer to "cafeteria" than "fine dining". We experienced poor service and lackluster offerings in the dining room, and found a better experience at the Windjammer buffet for our meals. Seating was occasionally congested, but the staff was vigilant about cleaning tables as soon as they were available and helping folks looking for seating to find it. The Windjammer offered a good variety of food, but with some notable oversights. One glaring problem was cold breads - at no point on our seven day cruise were any bread products warmer than room temperature, which was a bit odd. We did try one of the specialty restaurants onboard, Jamie's Italian, for lunch. Service was good and the food was EXCELLENT, but ultimately the price was simply for the experience - we felt the food was closer to what we should have been able to expect at any other venue on the world's largest cruise ship, and not representative of the additional fee we paid. Unfortunately, as long as folks continue paying extra for dining packages, I don't know that RCCL has an incentive to improve food elsewhere. :( I'm hopeful our lukewarm dining experiences were a reflection of the volume of guests on this ship and not a downward trend in Royal's approach to food.

We really enjoyed the variety of entertainment on this ship. At any given time, there might be an aquatic show, main theater performance, comedy act, and handful of "trick acts" throughout the ship. It's impossible to be bored! Entertainment quality was good-to-excellent. Our main theater performance, "Grease", followed the unedited Broadway revival script and was well-performed. The ice shows ("1887", which might have been more accurately titled "Jules Verne on Ice", and "iSkate")were all high-budget and engaging to watch. The aqua shows ("The Fine Line" and "Hideaway Heist") were CRAZY good - we enjoyed "The Fine Line" multiple times just to catch all the action. The comedians were good but not great - we enjoyed both their adult and family sets, but we only had two comedians for the entire 7 day cruise, and it would have been nice to have a swap-out mid cruise for some more comedic variety. We did note that, other than a bit of audience jostling, the sets were almost identical at each show. We've been on cruises before with acts who changed the jokes up daily or even at every show, and we've really appreciated that additional variety in the past. Our biggest disappointment in the entertainment venues was "Columbus: The Musical". This was a Broadway-style Top 40 mash-up show (think "Rock of Ages", where songs are current radio hits loosely set to match the theme of the show). The cast and set were excellent but the story was nonexistent - it felt as though Royal had purchased an unfinished script, smashed a Spotify playlist into it, and never bothered to finish the story. We felt bad for the actors whose skills were grossly underrepresented by the material. I really hope Royal takes the time of their guests more seriously the next time they decide to put together their own production. Read more