We have sailed with Royal Caribbean quite a few times now and have also booked a cruise in July 2018 so it is evident that we are generally happy with Royal Caribbean but definitely not so on this occasion. We arrived at Venice Marco Polo Airport just after 11am on 14th October where were informed that Rhapsody of the Seas had not yet docked due to foggy conditions so our luggage would be taken directly to the port and we were to be taken for lunch at a hotel and then transported to the port. We were brought to the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Padua where we were given a basic, but welcome, meal. The staff of the hotel are to be commended for the outstanding and methodical way that they handled the extremely high volume of passengers they received.

We were then taken to the port where we found that the ship had still not docked but were given no other information. Apparently Royal Caribbean thought that it would be a good idea to send out email updates to passengers informing them of the situation which was ill advised as I, like many other passengers, had no access to emails. The ground staff appeared to be very disorganised with no contingency plan for dealing with the imminent arrival of almost 2500 passengers en masse. By chance we learned that they were handing out health declaration forms and allocating letters of the alphabet with the intention that this would be used to control embarkation. We were allocated letter J. Bags containing a baguette, piece of fruit, and bottled water were being randomly distributed but we felt that as we had been given food, it would not be fair to take any as there did not seem to be enough to go round. Bottles of water were also distributed and we managed to obtain one of these between the two of us.

When check-in finally opened we waited patiently in anticipation that the filtered embarkation would be methodical and orderly but it was clear from the outset that this was not the case; as a result people were not abiding by the letters and were joining queues completely at random. It soon became very apparent that many of the ground staff had gone off duty, leaving the desk staff to deal with the passengers and an announcement was made that the filtered embarkation system was being abandoned. It was now a free for all with insufficient staff dealing with check-in, more than half the desks remained empty. Also priority embarkation queues appeared to be exceptionally long. I suspect that one reason for this was that there were too few desks dealing with the priority lines and loyalty members from Platinum to Diamond Plus were being channelled through one line. The priority check-in system broke down completely and became totally haphazard. Read more