After 2 years of no vacations, decided to splurge with family of 4 to be in the yacht club experience. Overall, this was a fantastic experience and more will be below on that. Bear with the long review but want to cover a lot…

We were guided through security and on the ship by 11:30 AM day of embarking. In the yacht club itself, the food is top notch and as good as the speciality restaurants on board, if not better, than all but the steakhouse. The lounge was fantastic and the private pool deck was an oasis. Butlers got us off the boat at every stop as quickly as possible and back on just as quickly. The yacht club still has things to work out however- it’s awkward skipping lines when it’s our butler LITERALLY shoving to the front as every one else looks at us- just have separate lines. Also, they tell you to request waiters you liked but when everyone eats at 630 or 7 we could not do that. Our butler Kevin was good, not great, and maybe that’s because they hype the butler to be a 24/7 1 on 1 personal assistant and he just wasn’t that. He had “2 sections of the yacht club, more than I’ve ever had” and it Definitely showed. He added some nice touches- buckets of beer on the pool deck, reserved a cabana the 1 day we got back from St Thomas a little early, escorted us to dinner 3 nights, etc… but didn’t seem to knowledgeable about anything outside of the restaurant and lounge. Also, was not of any help when the rooms were exorbitantly hot day 1, never stocked the mini bar or brought the newspaper we wanted, and we never got the pillows either. I think this was a bigger yacht club issue and not our butler related- but after sending us the survey beforehand to not have ANY of it was weird. The yacht club lunches were FANTASTIC. Seafood extravaganza one day, fresh meats and grilled items on other days. Always pasta as well. Lunch by the pool deck every day was definitely the way to go and was by far the best lunches at sea I’ve ever had. We ate breakfast outside almost everyday as well, with just 1 sit down breakfast. Also really good. We ate dinner in yacht club 4 times- lobster night, gala night, pool party buffet night (dinner by the pool with dj which was awesome) and the first night. The dinners were really good for cruise ship fare. The lobster night being the highlight. (Also decided to add a steak to the lobster tail for a surf and turf which they did happily). Service was okay in the restaurant, again I expected better. The sommelier was great, as was Brendo night 1, but never got back to him.

We also had a 3 night speciality dining package for Ocean Cay (seafood), Hola Tacos (Mexican) and Butchers Cut (steakhouse) and we did that the final 3 nights of our trip. It was difficult to work around all of the speciality yacht club offerings to get dinner reservations- for example we didn’t want to miss lobster night or the pool buffet dj party night, but also didn’t want seafood lunch and seafood dinner on same day, etc. overall I was very underwhelmed with the speciality dining and we agreed we would not do it again on future yacht club sailings. The seafood restaurant was Good, not great, and the service was downright poor. They told us they could not push our reservations from 6 to 7 PM and I think there was a total of 3 tables in the place from 6-8 while we were there. The Hola tacos is no better than a moes or chipotle and you can’t order anything but beer from the menu for free. Every margarita and all 40 of the tequilas and mezcals (all of which are under the $15 drink price included in the yacht club package) are not included for some reason. Again service was poor and food was okay at best. The steakhouse was by far the best of the restaurants and rivaled any steakhouse on land. Our server was AWESOME and we said we’d go back in a heartbeat on future cruises. One thing to note- when doing the dining package you are restricted to a very small menu at a fixed price. Another complaint for me- if you are charging me $110 for speciality package I should have access to the menu minus maybe 1 or 2 special offerings. Read more