The February cruise:

You know how excited I was for my first cruise with my husband. I don't know if I ever told you how that cruise went. It might just be about the third worst vacation behind having to go back to port for damage to the ship from an act of G-d or illness quarantine. It was pretty bad.

So, you know, I got a special offer the week before the cruise to upgrade us to a balcony room for $125, I agreed to it and was quite excited. The lady assured me I would receive my luggage at the new room and told me I would receive new luggage tags via email. I was told even if I did not receive the new luggage tags, or did not put them on my luggage, it would still be brought to our room because they would be able to scan my passenger info and it would come to the right room, that the information would pop up when the luggage ticket was scanned. So we went to our room when the state rooms were opened to the passengers. The luggage wasn't there and we knew to give it a few hours for the luggage to get there, so we waited 2 hours or so and asked a porter we saw in the hallway outside our stateroom and we were brushed off. We waited another hour or so, probably 90 minutes and asked again. At this point, it was getting close to dinner time and I needed something nicer than my shorts and T-shirt. I don't think I had packed anything fancy in my carry-on. Maybe something smart-looking, but not a nice evening dress. We got brushed off again, an answer along the lines of "we're too busy to go look for your luggage." My husband was the one who asked about the luggage from the porters. We had been brushed off twice. So my wonderful husband went to get the luggage for us, he went up to where our old room was supposed to be and found it in the hallway up there. It took him less than 15 minutes to leave and return with it. I think I had also mentioned to you that someone else probably got our champagne and strawberries that you were so kind to have offered to us. We asked about it and they were brought to our room a little later. No big deal. It would have been impressive if it had been waiting for us. So, you also arranged a surprise for us in the cabin, I didn't know what the surprise was, but it wasn't there. I didn't know if the room would be decorated or what... but I did ask about room decorating while I was on board... Almost everyone at the customer service desk swore up and down that state-room decorations were not done by Royal Caribbean and they had no answer when I would pull out my phone and show them that I could purchase the decorations online to have my stateroom decorated. Eventually, they did deliver a souvenir bag to our stateroom, that was pretty nice of them- that was quite after the fact, though and after a while at the guest services counter. We often got the wrong passenger day planner in our state room, I suppose for the passengers that had been booked to our stateroom prior to my buying the upgrade. I don't know who was putting the schedule in the door, but they didn't get familiar enough with their passengers traveling with them for a week to put the correct schedule in the door. We just threw it away, no big deal. Read more