We booked our trip on Symphony of the Seas the day they went on sale, as I'm a big fan of big and new ships, and my wife is a big fan of cool iteneraties (non-caribbean). This cruise promised to deliver for both of us, before the new ship headed to Miami. We purposefully waited about 6 weeks to make sure they had all the kinks worked out before our trip. Our boarding on 6/10/18 went very smoothly and we were on board within about 10 minutes of arriving at port (BTW, we walked to to the port from our hotel at Plaza Catalunya. It was about a 45 minute walk but completely on sidewalks, and not a problem at all even though we each had two bags plus backpacks). Overall, our experience was amazing (shows, lazer tag, all the new features, etc. were great), however my review is going to focus more on the negative or other unique things that I think people should be aware of.

Walking on the ship - it was amazing. My only previous RCCL cruise was on Independence, and this clearly blew it away not only in size but also in available activities. We made our way to our room, and it was also amazing - much bigger than we expected for an interior room. However, for such a new boat, the couch was surprisingly gross. It was covered in glitter, and also really dusty in the corners. It seemed like it was years old, but since that can obviously not be the case, I assume it was placed on the boat before construction was done and never vacummed before passengers started sailing. Due to the low amount of storage space available, we just used the couch to hold our luggage and cover the gross-ness. Otherwise, the room was immaculate and kept that way by our amazing stateroom attendant. As always, they were exterely cheap in terms of replacing soap, so we had to 'trick' them by putting our hand soap into the shower and force them to leave a new bar of soap for us.

I'm an avid slot player, and the casino was absolutely horrible for me (yes, I lost, but it also just wasn't fun). Much to my shock, the casino was filled with off-brand slot machines, and the few on-brand machines played differently than I'm used to. Normally I like playing IGT or WMS machines, but even on land casinos, these horrible off-brand machines like Bally and Aristocrat are taking over - they must be much cheaper to purchase. But, they are not fun to play and have worse graphics than IGT and WMS have been presenting since the 2000's. Anyways, I avoided those machines and stuck to the IGT or WMS, of which there were only a very small number (