Very disappointed in this cruise. Booked a last minute vacation and regret not reading more reviews before choosing this cruise line and specifically this ship.

The Epic is small for the amount of people on board. With my father using a walker, it was especially hard to navigate many of the public areas, and even getting in/out of our stateroom was challenging as he couldn't fit the walker through the doorway especially well. Deck 15, home of the pools and buffet, was ridiculously crowded and using the pools/finding a chair/walking leisurely about the deck was just about impossible. We managed to use the pools twice, once first thing in the morning, and already many of the chairs in the adult area had towels on them, and the second time while we were at a port with most people off the ship. The smell at the adult pool was disgusting as it got all of the fumes/smoke from the smokestack. One of the more pleasant areas we found was deck 7's jogging path, it was significantly less crowded although there was a bad odor there as well.

The primary reason for the poor review was the terrible service and general setup of the "Freestyle" dining experience. We didn't know that to enjoy "freestyle", it really meant you had to make reservations to eat in the main dining room if you wanted to (hopefully) eat at the time you wanted. Once we figured out that you needed to make reservations, we went ahead and did so, only to find at the Manhattan dining room, men need to wear pants and a collared shirt but ladies could wear whatever they wanted. We were turned away for the reservation we had made as we weren't aware of this and they only hold your reservation for 15 minutes following your scheduled time. We then had to go to Taste and wait for a table there instead. We had one good server (Milton) for two nights of the cruise, every other meal including both breakfast and lunch left a lot to be desired. Coffee that you ordered to have with your dessert was delivered after you had already finished your dessert and were about ready to leave. At Shanghai we arrived at opening, but waited over 50 minutes after being seated for our appetizer and over an hour for our meals. At at least two of the restaurants, our appetizers were served with our main course (Oshehans for sure and possibly Taste). The food itself was hit and miss, with mostly misses. We ordered three pina coladas at the poolside bar and received one that tasted just right and two that tasted terrible. We brought our concerns to Ivan (Restaurant Manager), and he provided us with a round of correctly made pina coladas and made our dinner reservations for the remainder of the cruise, but that hardly made up for the grumpy/slow waitstaff. When we finally had Milton as our server, we requested that he be our server for the remainder of the cruise and were assured that that wouldn't be a problem; however, the very next night, the host/hostess seated us at the wrong table (all the way across the restaurant from Milton's tables). They did get us seated correctly the last night. Read more