jackie101

We are doing the Liberty Thanksgiving cruise and it looks like our flight will not leave FLL until 8:30pm so we are thinking of doing an excursion. Do they hold your luggage? Anyone do one? There will be 8 of us, 4 adults and 4 children. thanks

Your 1st cruise is for 14 days?

I would have started off with something a lot shorter to see if you even liked it.

Being on a ship is not for everyone, in fact many people hate it for different reasons. I can totally understand.

I really like the cruise experience.

But after a week, I am happy to get off..

 

:confused:I was thinking the same thing

Did a shorter cruise (4 nights) and it was absolutely worth it.

:D, same here and we are over 40:)

Thinking about going on a RCL cruise. I was wondering if they have buffet dining for breakfast, lunch, and dinner?

I know for breakfast and lunch they do, not sure about dinner. You can also do sit down for breakfast, not sure about lunch though

Is there a Starbucks on Enchantment? I heard that there is but I have been seeing lots of pictures with Seattle's Best. I hope I am able to sip a Iced Carmel Machiatto on the pool deck!

 

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk. Please excuse any typographical errors.

yes, there is a real starbucks on enchantment

well I guess they are useless then. We are going on Liberty over Thanksgiving with the 3rd, 4th passenger free. This is crazy, they screw up give us money back in form of gift certificate and we cannot use it under our own terms:confused::eek:. I will have our travel agent double check to be safe and get the expiration extended.

Thanks everyone

Were these FCC issued due to the fact that your cabin arrangements were messed up? Do they have a monetary value on them as well as as expiration date? If yes, then they can be used on any ship within the time frame listed on the certificate, which is usually 1 year from issuing date.

I am assuming yes, the letter stated an apology with inconvenience on board.

yes, a monetary value on them

yes, they have an expiration date

thanks

question about Future Cruise Certificate. We went on enchantment in Feb, 6 of us. We were supposed to have connecting rooms and we didn't so I am assuming this is why we got 3 certificates today, not sure if we will get 3 more. Can this be used for Liberty or does it have to be for another Enchantment booking?

If you want good seats for Saturday Night Fever, plan on being in the theater about 1/2 hour early. During our Liberty cruise, the theater started filling up pretty early.

 

 

 

Here is a link to the Cruise Compass pictures from our January 23 Liberty cruise. Look through them and you will see the show schedules.

 

 

 

http://boards.cruisecritic.com/showthread.php?t=1984093

Thank you, so helpful...we are going in Nov. So do you have reserve the air show tickets ans when do you do that? Thanks

SO excited that Thanksgiving 2014 we'll be on the Liberty! Can you tell me what/if they do anything special? What the thanksgiving meal is like? Ours will be night 1.. if you sailed during Thanksgiving, tell me about it!!

 

Oh and will the ship be decorated for Christmas yet? ;)

we will be on this ship as well, cannot wait!

We're on the same cruise Liberty leaving Thanksgiving day, booked last week. Just got 3rd person FREE, it's up today!!! Theycancelled and rebooked us in the same room, everything stayed the same, lost $25 on board credit but saved $254!!!

Yeah, we booked this cruise too. We got the 3rd and4th person free and a free balcony upgrade :D

Great review!

 

I can't even imagine being on a ship the size of the Enchantment with 300 quinceneara girls on board :eek: On my January Allure cruise we had about 35 or so, on a ship the size of the Allure. We only noticed them when they were hogging some of the lines for photos on formal night, or walking into the MDR a half hour after late seating dinner had started :rolleyes: Their dresses on formal night were certainly :eek: I don't know how it was on the Enchantment, but if I had a 15 year old I'd never let her out of the house wearing what these girls were wearing.

 

I'm looking forward to the rest of the review. I'm hoping to take an Enchantment cruise next year sometime.

There clothing/bathing suit choices were :eek:...my 3 boys so more naked bums in 4 days then I have in my entire life:(

Call me overprotective, but there is no way in H*** that my 15 year old daughter would travel overseas with good looking male chaperones in their twenties. :eek:

100% agree. It was crazy :eek:

I agree!! :D While the cruise line isn't responsible for dressing their passengers, (if they were they might have made the guy who wore the "cops for pot legalization" tee shirt every single day of one cruise I recently took, take it off and wash it! ;)) I do agree the cruise line should not shut down venues for groups (like a whole pool on a sea day!) and I mentioned that they did a poor job managing the buffets everywhere, and that I think they should have separate buffets or buffet times for groups.

Loving your review and pictures :D

Quinceaneras tour group from Argentina

 

You may have heard about this sort of thing before. There are commonly tour groups that lead large groups of girls from South America on "United States" tours for the 15th year, known as the Quinceanera. I have in the past (such as on our Jewel Cruise in November) seen large family groups traveling together to celebrate the Quinceaneras; mothers and fathers, abuealas and abeulos traveling with all their children including a group of 15 yo's who are officially celebrating. Some are groups of family friends with the 15 yo, girls, their sullen and bored 17 yo brothers and dozens of younger siblings, others are a single multi generational family with tias and tios, and cousins in the mix.

 

Like any large family group (including mine!) these groups are loud, get in the way, while they dither about who is going where, and when, and taking which kids with them. Like most families, some keep careful tabs on their kids and their behaviors and some, unfortunately, don't.:( We haven't encountered any specific issues with these kinds of groups on board beyond what we experience from any large family cruising together.

 

The group we had on board was different. This was an organized tour of just girls. There were more than 300 of them, 380 in the whole party, but some fraction of that was chaperones. The girls leave Argentina as a group with a tour company called "Fun Time", and they visited a variety of places in the US, including Disney World and New York City. The cruise appeared to be in the later part of their tour. They carried pink and purple striped "Fun Time" bags.

 

Much of what we learned about the group, DD and I learned because she speaks and we both understand and read Spanish. We understand enough Spanish to know that none of the girls we encountered were ever "talking about us" or "making fun" of people around them. Like most 15 yo's they mostly talked about themselves :rolleyes: We heard far more of that sort of thing in English from other passengers, and we met girls who in fact could speak English, so they may have heard it too. Here is what I heard and experienced about this group.

 

They did have chaperones, and while my mother swears she saw some women with the group, I only saw gorgeous 20-30 something males escorting them on and off and around the ship. (I joked that it looked more like a trafficking operation than a tour group!;)) Mom thought maybe some of the female chaperones were so youthful looking themselves that it was hard to discern which were tour girls and which were chaperones. They appeared to be organized into groups of about 15-20 girls with a chaperone when moving around the ship or the islands. I also think that it's big money for the cruise line and they don't want to discourage the business by insisting that the girls are chaperoned in more reasonable sized groups, as they would be for any other group (such as TX Staceys group, which is probably 3:1)

 

We noticed that the girls were in cabins spread all around the ship, not all in one place, and that the chaperone would walk them to their cabin at night and stayed till the door was shut. I cannot say I saw enough chaperones to have any possibility of an adult over 21 in every cabin of 3. I am not sure if they get special permission to "break" the rule about having one person over 21 in each cabin, but based on what I saw, I can't see how they could, if they had 300 girls then they would need 100 adults, we did not see 100 adults.

 

As a group, they would leave the ship and go to dinner. They had late seating and took up most of the middle of the MDR in various size tables. The had their own lounge set aside for almost the entire week. The Spotlight Lounge was off limits most of the week, and DD was jealous because from our balcony we could hear their music and they had the best DJ all week for current music...DD found the rest of the music around the ship "dated", except the Viking Crown Lounge late night, which is off limits to under 18 after 10 PM (Which is just about when she's getting started;))

 

The group appeared to have some very strict rules and some may have been made to be more culturally sensitive to the place where they were the visitors. They had a very tightly and strictly structured tour. The girls were not wandering around the ship on their own much at all. I noticed on Cococay, that when they had a sport activity (volley ball and some kind of contests with the DJ), the chaperones insisted all the girls get up and participate; you'd hear "chicas, chicas... " being called out through out the area. They weren't allowed to choose to stay in their lounge chairs. Also, every time the girls got up to use the rest room, go to play sports or get lunch, they all had to put their shorts on. Now, I will point out that their shorts are not so much longer than my bikini bottom, but the rule was...they had to wear their shorts (which were a lot MORE than THEIR bikini bottoms!;))

 

My own opinion was that the girls were over all, really well behaved. I am a preschool teacher and have worked with children, including many GS troops in my town for the last 14 years. I work with teens in Girl Scouts now, and I felt they behaved not unlike any group of 15 yo's would, but in some ways were far more mature than their counterparts in the US. They appeared more like 17 YO's in our country in terms of developmentally being able to manage their behavior and their stuff and instructions etc. No doubt they giggle, and they talk fast and if one gets left behind she rushes to catch up to her pals, even if it means occasionally blowing by some older person. (frankly, I get impatient with the pace of some of the folks cruising, but I have more years of learning to wait patiently for them move, or make up their minds than the 15 yo chicas do. I certainly found them over all more polite than similar aged large groups of US teens I've encountered on board)

 

They also have some cultural differences, such as the cut of their clothing, and a different "line" culture than we have in the US (though even this was recently debated on a "buffet line" thread on Cruise Critic). But the challenges they presented were mostly related to them being such a large group on board. They usually boarded and left the ship as a group, and while I noticed they tried to time these departures for "non peak" times, (for instance they arrived on Cococay after 11 AM and left before 2 PM to avoid the "peak", and seemed to have their own tenders.) But, if you happened to be leaving and ended up behind the group; it was a real inconvenience!

 

When they arrived at shows, usually about 5-10 minutes before show time, they certainly were chattery and took up a lot of seats. But those seats would normally be taken by 400 people; they just would have arrived at different times and if you entered the theater it wouldn't appear that the "group was taking all the seats" . And they hooted and hollered their appreciation of the performers (especially the good looking male dancers) That's not behavior that the usual cruisers exhibit, but the performers sure seemed to appreciate it more than sitting like a stone in your seat and golf-clapping after the show.

 

A major challenge was the buffets, especially in the WJ and on Cococay. There is the line culture; that they are more likely to just walk up and take what they need than wait in line to wend their way through the whole line with some things they want and some they don't. Then there is the normal 15 yo culture of herd mentality where one girl is "in line" and her 10 friends have to be with her, so now you have not one girl but 11 to wait behind. This *might* be solved by better chaperoning numbers...reminders of the importance of trying to behave like the folks in the place you where you are visiting. I don't think these challenges were created just because they were from Argentina or just because they are a large group of teenagers but if you asked a hundred people, "would you like to cruise with a group or 400 teenagers?", 99.9 would say no (all except for the very, very happy 14-17 yo boys:p)

 

I think the cruise line generally did a good job of giving them their own entertainment venues and organizing the departure times around peak times, so most days, unless you were unlucky, you weren't affected by the group.

 

One area where the cruise line really fell short was anticipating how many sweets they eat. The Cafe Lattetudes crew person, said they would come and take 6 pastries a piece and he knew would not be getting a delivery soon, so he had to finally make them take one each visit. The buffet at Cococay was out of dessert except fruit by 1:30 PM (despite being advertised as open till 2PM for lunch). The desserts on the WJ buffet were decimated and the ice cream machine on the pool deck was either empty or had a line of dozens of girls at any given time. The cruise line should know that with that many "young" girls that the sweets need to be increased, and/or they need to create a secondary buffet location for the group, or an after regular hours buffet.

 

The group who most disappointed me was the people from the United States who made derogatory remarks, judged people on their dress or differences and generally behaved badly whenever the girls were around, eye rolling and/or making snarky comments. I understand that plenty of people would opt not to travel with nearly 400 teenagers on any cruise, and that any group of any people that big is going to create some challenges, but in general, I really loved their energy and so no reason to be negative about the group, especially around the girls themselves. In my opinion, they have paid their fare on the cruise ship and have every right to enjoy the food and venues on the ship they paid for. I feel the cruise line has a responsibility to ensure that the groups they solicit should not negatively impact other fare paying customers by ensuring they properly chaperoned, understand the culture of the ship, and ensuring that other passengers have access to venues or foods that they paid for and expect to be available.

 

So those are my thoughts...I hope this doesn't devolve this thread into something ugly, but I think passengers have every right to be upset when their cruise is negatively impacted by a group. The tour group has a responsibility to educate the girls about cultural norms, and chaperone them adequately, the cruise line has a responsibility to make sure every passenger gets access to what they paid for and non tour passengers have to recognize that they don't get to dictate who sails with them and that all people, despite how they dress, or talk, or where they come from have as much right to enjoy their cruise as they do!

 

 

OK, so that was a lot of words again!!! Back to the rest of Day 1!!

We saw 2 female chaperones. My experience by the pool at the day at the day at sea was way different. They were allowed to freely walk around pool deck in their g-strings to the bar and icrecream machine. Then they took over one of the pools dancing for over an hour. I do not think that is how 15yr old girls normally act. The buffet at Coca Cay was crazy, they cut the line and were spoken to numerous times. We ended up foregoing lunch at the island. At the WJ they were picking up desserst with bare hands and putting the food back down. Many people were upset. We still had a blast. I think RC should have done a better job with keeping them in control.

I just that baked goods are free at Ben and Jerry, but a charge for icream:confused:. Is that true? Also, is baked goods at starbucks free too?

we were on the same cruise as you. I did not know the baked goods were free at Ben ans Jerrys :mad:

That group from argentina was wild:eek:

Thanks everyone

Are the total gratuities more per person for mytime or do you just have to prepay?

Your review is great! Fun to read. We are considering this ship for the 3 day itinerary in Oct for the entire family. There are 12 of us including DH, myself 6 adult kids/in-laws & 4 grandsons ages 1-9 at the time. Good cruise for a family? Or should I continue saving my pennies and hope to afford Disney at some point???:o

we went last month with 4 children ages 10-13 and we had a blast and it was about 1/2 of a disney cruise

what about on Liberty, deck 7?

thanks everyone, I will give them a call tmr

13,12,10 & 10. @ want the balcony and 2 want the pullman beds :confused:.

so can you make a reservation for the whole week or on a daily basis? Thanks!!