This was my first cruise with RCL, but my 10th overall. I will make a concerted effort to go in timeline order here, and to also point out good things.

First, the port of Seattle was probably the easiest port I have ever embarked from, we practically walked onto the boat from our drop point, so well done here! I booked our family of three a junior suite with an extra large balcony for our Alaska cruise - it was expensive but I wanted it to be a great experience! Our cabin was not that - from embarkation, our bathroom smelled like a skunk had crawled into it and died. We tried to give it some time to air out, our room attendant cleaned it again, but nothing helped. So we went to guest services, where they kindly informed me no one else had complained about the smell, and asked us to meet the floor supervisor at our room. He arrived, took a good sniff, then got two more people to clean the bathroom again. This dampened the smell enough for my husband to figure out is was mold/mildew and not chemicals/the drain. We were told that the boat was full and they could not move us. The next morning, we went back to guest services because none of us could stand to be in the bathroom long enough to brush our teeth. The assistant manager was able to split us into two rooms, a junior sweet with a smaller balcony and an inside cabin for my son. Not exactly the family vacation I had pictured but at least we would be able to shower over the next six days so we said yes and moved all of our belongings.

Two days later, and we had to go back to guest services because no one was cleaning my son's room. They forgot they put someone it. We also had to visit guest services on day 4 because we had booked a shore excursion on board, and they delivered the tickets as promised to my husband and I in our room... But we never received my son's. When the ship was getting ready to leave Sitka, we had a catastrophic engine failure that shook the entire ship and made us lose main power for about an hour. Then in Juneau, we went to the Royal Theater like our shore excursion tickets told us to, and they had a staff member from RCL checking everyone's tickets. She looked at our excursion and told us that ours was delayed by an hour, so we should go ashore and enjoy Juneau and meet our excursion on the pier at 2pm instead of 1pm. So we did, and arrived back at the pier at 1:45 - but we didn't see anyone with our group number anywhere. We checked in with an RCL person at an information booth, who told us that we missed our excursion, it wasn't delayed, and that it left on time. After a lot of blaming us and yelling back and forth, they got us onto a later excursion. Read more