Our last cruise together was on this ship for the presidents cruise and fiftieth anniversary of Royal Caribbean. Needless to say it was great to be back! Once we completed the necessary testing and other procedures we found things to be pretty much reassuringly the same.

There were some changes for Crown and Anchor Society members and Diamond, Diamond Plus and Pinnacle level members. Pinnacle level members were not allowed to use the Suites Lounge, the reason given being Covid distancing requirements. We had to use the Diamond Lounge during the day and had the Jazz on 4 space reserved during the happy hour. Another big change was that there was no open bar, but six drinks including barista type coffees from Cafe Promenade were loaded onto your Seapass card. A nice feature of this was that they could be used at any time of the day and there were no particular restrictions on brands available.. At first we were unsure about this, but we found that for our purposes it was preferable to the previous arrangement. We do hope that the Suites Lounge will be restored ASAP.

We were not able to dock at Coco Cay due to high winds and thunderstorms. St. Martin was much as before. Crown Bay used by Royal remains vastly inferior to Havensight, the port they previously used and the one the other cruise lines use. It makes stopping at St. Thomas a wasted day. Little hope they will ever correct this and return to Havensight as used by their competitors. Read more