crowleycruiser

Does the Carnival Freedom offer cake or cupcake decorating classes like RCCL? I wanted to do it on our last cruises but they were sold out way before I could even get to the line to register. Wondered IF it was offered on Carnival and HOW one can get it booked (ahead of time would be even better)?!

Great photos, it actually wasn't your post I was perusing before our cruise! It was another cruiser who had gone the week before us and had a nice time, also. I really wanted to have the experience you posted...lol. Too bad, oh well!

I'm sorry to hear you did not enjoy your trip, especially when it was your honeymoon. Some of the things you mention are definitely unacceptable and not, in my experience, normal. For example the poor wait service - we have only had bad wait service once, in Chops, and we spoke to the manager straight away who sorted things out for us. You being billed in Chops seems like an oversight/mistake, which does happen, but it should have been able to be sorted out straight away. I don't see why you had to go to guest services to get the amounts credited. Anyway, with things like that my advice is speak up straight away to a supervisor. It's better to get the issue resolved than to stew on it and have it colour the rest of your trip.

 

Food is a subjective topic, what I like you might not like and so on. DH and I are coming from a viewpoint of young professionals who eat out a lot. We are lucky to go to very nice places but also sometimes we go to ethnic food places with plastic tables :) I will say that I have never had what I consider a bad meal on RCI. It is mass produced obviously, so I would compare it to wedding food or similar, but it has always been at least pleasant and some things have been very good. Certainly I have not found things to be particularly greasy unless they are deep fried, even then not more greasy than I would expect.

 

If you did take a future credit I hope your next cruise is a better experience. We cruised on Oasis for our honeymoon and it got us hooked. Being younger we do feel RCI meets our needs at the moment but will probably switch to Celebrity as we get older. There might be a line out there that meets your needs better.

We are a young couple also, but maybe our needs are different. My husband likes to work out and body-build and eats a lot of 'clean' foods, such as grilled meats, rice, veggies -- and likes to have cottage cheese before bed (slow-digesting protein). We could've worked around that; however, between the rude and unhelpful room service personnel and the limited menu and the fact that the food was extremely greasy (like I mentioned, the 'grilled' chicken and 'baked' fish left a film on the plate) and luke-warm at the 'hottest' we were severely disappointed. We really wanted to love RCI and were looking forward to becoming long-time members of their loyalty program because we really believe(d) cruising was for us. We'd had good experiences elsewhere, but maybe the Carnival Princess cruise ships are more our style. We probably should have complained louder and sooner, but we were never really able to get anyone to listen when we would call or go to the desk - I had a fit over the excursion and they simply blew it off like it was my fault and dismissed me. So we kind of felt like, well, we paid our money so we're screwed. I don't get it.

Oh and Paula (Ladysilver): I think maybe the strawberries also suffered under the heat -- the chocolate was kind of soft and had a sweat on it (wish I'd taken a picture) but I know berries don't just 'go bad' in a few hours. At least not that I'm aware of. :)

So sorry you had such a bad cruise. And I'm sorry it had to happen on your honeymoon. I wish there was something I could say to make things better. Unfortunately, what's done is done.

 

In answer to your question.....No, it's NOT normal, even if the ship if full. Whether it was bad luck or something else, I'm sorry it happened to you.

 

I was on the Navigator the week before you. Our service was exceptional, our cabin very comfortable and plenty cool, the food was very good both in the MDR and the Windjammer, and I thought the Christmas decorations were beautiful throughout the ship. We had no problems with room service the two days we used it, we enjoyed the hot tubs in the Solarium everyday but one. Can't comment on the strawberries (sounds horrible) although we did have them delivered to our room on the Navigator last May and they were delicious then.

 

I hope your next cruise is much better, if you ever decide to go again. :)

 

I posted a picture review a couple of day ago. :)

Maybe my expectations of 'decked out for Christmas' were just too high, but besides the tree (which was lovely) and the poinsettias placed around various places, there were little other decorations and our travel agent had said it would be 'insane' as far as decor. They did put out a gingerbread house display (I think this was put out either Christmas day, or the day after lol) and then at the end, they put out Christmas trees made out of soda cans and playing cards, but that was it. I think if that were the only issue, it would have been overlooked but it just added insult to injury. We basically only left our room to eat the last 2 days of the cruise, we were pretty miserable. :(

Oh and by the way, I looked at your post prior to our cruise and it had me really pumped up! LOL

What was so bad?

I posted our experience here.

Hello all!

I am new to this site and to cruising but wanted to share my experience to see if this is normal for RCI -- maybe I was expecting too much? I had browsed the forums prior to our sail date and based on that and my husband's high reviews of his previous cruises with different lines (the last on the Princess to Alaska), I was SO excited....only to be let down in a major way, with RCI.

There were things that went wrong that were not RCI's fault, and many more that were. This is my entire review.

First and foremost, we arrived in Galveston around 11 am - embarkation was extremely stressful and chaotic with lots of long lines and super rude people. But, once we got on the ship I thought the worst was behind us: I was so wrong!

We got to our room to have chocolate covered strawberries waiting for us from our travel agent to celebrate our honeymoon. Yes, this was not just our Christmas trip, but our honeymoon as well. :rolleyes:

I was super happy and bit into one, only to be disappointed because they were....mushy! They had that rancid strawberry taste and were sweating because it was so hot in the room. We tried to turn the a/c down and set it almost all the way to the max, but no more air came out than when we had it at the neutral position. The room was extremely warm but we had hoped that it would cool down. Eventually, hours later (after dinner), when it was still extremely warm in the room, we called maintenance who said the water was dirty (I don't know what this means really) but that it should cool down. And it seemed to be blowing cooler air (it was 76* when they came) but not very much or strong. It never cooled down really the whole trip. In fact, all of the common areas including the dining halls, hallways and ESPECIALLY the elevators (which have no AC) were exceptionally warm. We didn't know if this was due to them saving costs, or if it was just 'as good as it gets' but it sucked.

Next, the food. We went to formal dinner the first night and met our sever, Bryan. He was from Jamaica. It took quite a long time (more than 15 minutes) to be greeted and get water, but we chalked this up to being the first night and it being so busy and full (the cruise was fully booked). But Bryan never spoke to us about the menu, never made suggestions or even really checked on us and in fact, to take our order, he simply walked up, pointed at me and said, "you?"

We went without water quite a few times throughout out meal and we were NOT guzzling it.

The few times he did speak to us, he would not look directly at us and would mumble replies in a monotone voice like we were bothering him. We did not go back until Thursday (Christmas) and only because I insisted we try it again since they had a 'special' Christmas menu. We were in Jamaica that day and apparently Bryan got off the ship that day not to return. We had no server when we arrived but eventually someone came to greet us and he (Henry) was very friendly. He talked to us about the menu and kept our water glasses full, so that was nice, though the portions were tiny and semi-bland and tasteless.

The food in the Windjammer was sub par. Very bland/tasteless and repetitive. It was also extremely greasy. There were very few healthy options. I don't know what I was expecting, but this was NOT what I had envisioned based on my husband's previous descriptions of cruise buffets. It was so greasy that even with just getting "grilled chicken," broccoli and steamed rice, the plate was covered in grease at the end of the meal.

They served the same foods over and over again with the only variation being on Friday evening when they did a 'make your own' wok option, which was good...oh, and the 2 days they offered boiled eggs at the salad bar instead of...no boiled eggs. LOL

We tried to eat at Johnny Rockets one night but were told that they were out of chicken so we had to get burgers instead. That was very disappointing. This was on Tuesday I believe, so they ran out of chicken really fast!

Our in-room TV service didn't work right, which caused us to not be able to go on the excursion we wanted in Grand Cayman, because it showed that we had booked the trip but it in fact did NOT, which caused us to miss the glass-bottom boat excursion we wanted because all of the good tours had sold out by the time we realized we never received our tickets and called the front desk. It wound up raining in GC when we were there, so that was a bummer but not RCI's fault and once we realized that the ONLY crappy tour that was left (the turtle farm) was stupid, they did give us our money back (after giving us a hard time about it at first). When I called the front desk to inquire about the tickets they lady was very rude and snippy to me, and then put me on hold because she was 'too busy right now' with whomever was in front of her, which I found very unprofessional.

We wound up finding a local 'non-approved' company to tour with and paid $20 for a decent tour. Couldn't go to the beach though because it took so long for this dude to fill up his bus that we didn't have enough time...not that it really mattered though since it was raining, but still. Very disappointing because I was looking forward to GC the most.

The TV also would not let us order room service...which we found the need to order because the WJ closed at 9pm each night and my husband eats each 3-4 hours due to his bodybuilding, in addition to trying to eat a slower-digesting protein at night. Anyway, each time we would get the order set up, it would just go back and change the dressings, or quantities, etc. So I called Room Service and the woman on the phone was extremely rude and argued with me that they had no salad with chicken on it (the Mediterranean chicken salad) and told us to go to Johnny Rockets -- we argued for a minute until she understood (finally) what I was saying...then she finished our order and tried to hang up without getting our room number, so I said "wait, do you need our room number?" and she said, "what is it?" and sighed. I gave it to her and she said "alriiiight then...." and signed again and hung up.

After that, I lost it and called the front desk to complain. The room service menu was extremely limited (the Princess cruise ships is not) and I said "how hard is it to take our order -- it's not like you have ANYTHING healthy. Why can't we get some cottage cheese around here?" and the woman on the phone said she would look into it and call me back. The RS manager called me back after that and said he would put in a standing order for the rest of the cruise for cottage cheese and fruit for us each night. Very nice.

They got it right one night after that....they kept sending condiment cups of cottage cheese instead of the cereal bowls I had requested. LOL but hey, he tried and would always fix it once I called at least.

The hot tubs (of which there are six) were in a constant rotation of maintenance so at any given time there was 3-4 open. Since the pools close at midnight I felt they should have spent their cleaning time during those hours rather than the middle of the day or early evening at peak times.

The whole time schedule of closings was really inconvenient overall, I felt -- the gym closing at ten (though it wasn't monitored?) - which also had one of the 6 hot tubs lol - and the WJ closing at 9, pools and hot tubs at midnight - it felt like we were constantly on some kind of time-table.

All of their headliners (except for the dancers, etc) were the first 4 days of the cruise, once we headed home and had nothing to look forward to, there was virtually no adult entertainment unless you wanted to shop the overpriced promenade some more.

The only real bright spot in the cruise was that we loved the omelette bar in the mornings in the WJ. The lady who ran it, Kelly, was fantastic - she remembered our names, our orders, and was generally awesome. We wanted to give her a WOW card that we'd heard about so I asked the food service manager we found wandering the floor of the WJ one night. He said that we should get the card from the front desk. We went to the front desk the next day and they had none and said that we should have gotten them at check-in [later we find out that they are for the loyalty members which we obviously, as first time cruisers with RCI, were not, but they never bothered to tell us this]. I was pretty irritated at this point (Saturday) and asked the next crew-member I saw for an address to send a letter to. I didn't know it, but it happened to be the guest relations manager, Ana. She pulled me into her office and I explained to her through tears what all had gone on. She offered us an onboard credit (no thanks) or a credit toward our next cruise (bleh) so I told her I needed to talk it over with my husband and would get back to her. At this point we have no intentions of cruising with RCI again.

So we talked and went back and the guest services attendant 'went to find her' and never came back. We waited for 40 minutes. We finally got ahold of the front desk manager, Joel, who informed us that she was in a meeting, but he offered to send me to the spa and us to a nice dinner at Chops, in addition to the credit toward another cruise. Since there was nothing we could do at that point, we accepted. The spa was nice (I had been there earlier in the week also) and I had no issues there. But after dinner, we were asked for our Seapass card and the server brought back a receipt for us to sign, with a $70 charge on it. This was AFTER Joel had personally made the reservations for us and come to greet us at our table and wish us well. I was pretty furious so we went to the front desk, which was a madhouse since it was the night before disembarkation, and they credited the charge, but seriously? Ridiculous. :mad:

I'm sure there are other things that happened that I've left out, but suffice it to say, the best experience we had was disembarkation where, since we had US Passports, we got to get out of there a little faster (we did self-serve and schlepped our bags off ourselves so we could get out of there).

My question is: Is this a normal experience? Was it just because it was so busy due to Christmas? Were we just 'unlucky'? What?! :confused:

EDIT: Another thing: this was the CHRISTMAS cruise...and we were under the impression that it would be decked out for Christmas. This is why we opted for a promenade suite rather than a balcony (no, not due to cost - I insisted on the promenade view because I LOVE Christmas) and it was HARDLY decorated beyond the tree, a few poinsettias and some garland in random places (not all railings, just some). Oh and they changed the promenade lights to red/orange and green 2 nights instead of the blue. :(

We were on this ship last week (the Christmas Cruise) and had quite a disappointing experience. Not only was it Christmas, but it was out honeymoon. Totally a bummer as we'd heard great things and couldn't wait to be loyal RCI cruisers. They gave us a nice 'try us again' refund toward our next cruise with them (no money back, unfortunately), but we had such a bad experience that we don't know that we will ever use it. :(

Glad someone else is having a better experience!