MrYellowDuck

its not Tokyo good, but it is one the best outside of Japan we have experienced.

My experience was very different. I've had sushi at a variety of places in Japan including at the famous sukiyabashi jiro; I think this gives me a benchmark against which I can measure good sushi. Izumi is not on the same planet as good sushi.

Compared to normal mall-counter sushi in NZ (the mass-market everyone-is-happy option) the nigiri at Izumi is inferior in terms of freshness and taste; compared to a restaurant at the same price point as Izumi the nigiri is terrible. I'm convinced the salmon roe I was served had been frozen - either that or they were the saddest looking roe I've seen in my life.

Presentation was adequate but below average for a restaurant trying to be a little bit special. Some laziness was apparent though. For example, going back to my roe example the piece of seaweed surrounding the rice and supporting the row didn't go all the way around - the gap was perhaps half a cm. The knife work was generally sloppy too with none of the fish cut to a eye-pleasing shape. The eel in particular looked unappealing with a long flap of soggy skin drooping off the end of its piece of rice onto the plate.

The ramen was bad - the soup simply lacked any real flavour (it tasted of hot water with a hint of chilli added). The noodles were of the quality you get in the fridge of any Asian shop.

The hot stone was fine but then there is no skill needed to heat a stone and then provide the guest with some slices of fillet steak to cook themselves. The fried rice that came with it was cold, stale, and tasteless.

The roll sushi was mediocre and suffered from the ingredients not being fresh.

It's the sort of Japanese food you'd not buy twice unless you had to. If compared to a land restaurant I'd give it 2 out of 5.

Compared to the buffet food Izumi was absolutely fantastic; but clearly I'm not being complementary here.

This was on Explorer.

We've cruised many times but only once on RCL. The food is abysmally low quality and despite my knowing full well that the only score that keeps jobs safe is a five I will be rating the food and in several cases the service a one.

I'd assumed those here who were complaining were the usual sorts of impossible to please that frequent all of the forums. It seems that RCL is running the equivalent of a $5 a head buffet - disgusting food frankly. The MDR food is terrible - McDonald's food is better.

At the buffet the cooks (they are not chefs) can't be bothered to butcher the meat to remove veins. At chops the food was cold and the truffled fries had no truffle added. Food scraps were left on the table between courses. At Izumi the firsh appeared to have been frozen - the worst nigiri I have ever had. The Italian was surprisingly okay.

I'd rather RCL charge another $100 a day (or more) and for them to provide restaurant grade food. Yes we can pay for specialty dining and we did for all but the one night we were caught unaware but even this doesn't really work on ships with only three options and more so given the up-sell options aren't good enough.

The suite breakfast is terrible; granted the buffet is worse. Lunch is unacceptable although the concierge sandwiches were reasonable.

Perhaps their issue is trying to accommodate the lowest possible prices to fill their ships whilst forgetting those who are paying considerably more don't want to be served pet food.

For our next cerise it's too late to get a suite on the itenarary we want with another line; after that though we're back to a proper line.

Food on P&O Australia is better and I used to think that was the worst you could get.

Remember to be culturally sensitive and to not tip - it's never required or expected. Some very cheeky restaurants in tourist areas will ask but don't do it.

I've missed Mystery Island twice, both due to ship issues. I've also missed Wala and Bay of Islands, once each, due to strong winds.

We missed a port due to a gas turbine generator failure meaning the ship's top speed was not enough to get to the end in time if it stopped for the day. There were some very upset passengers - the cruise line had engaged in bare faced lies though so I could understand their reaction.

They can only land you on one side of the island and if the swells are too big to allow the least physically mobile person you can think of to exit the tender onto the jetty then they won't stop.

We've been there twice. Most recently was two days ago as an unscheduled stop due to the programmed Island having polluted water from recent run off.

If you missed this island and went somewhere else then nothing is lost - it's a tiny island that offers nothing but somewhere to swim just like a great many other similar islands. It's nice but so are lots of other places.

The challenge for some is that they cruise at a time of the year where tendering to any island is going to be a problem. If you take this type of cruise then you risk getting an extra sea day rather than an alternative stop. The cruise fare will be attractive though...

There are more security staff on itineraries that attract a good number of Australians. Passengers who don't stay up all night drinking won't see them.

As you move into the core Asian market the shops start selling much higher quality merchandise. On a Princess cruise we did Singapore to Japan the main shop that normally sells junk had been converted to sell mid-range designer goods from brands like Burberry; prices were very good at around 30% less than shore prices.

Splurge on a speacialty restaurant; they will probably have an offer to pay half price on the first night (if you buy in advance). The Italian has the best food and service, the steak house is next best (the service is not as good and the side dishes aren't fantastic), and the Japanese is the worst (the ingredients aren't fresh).

I wish you people would not make statements like that. While many people have mentioned how smooth their cruise was there are quite a few reports about less than smooth sailings. For me personally, the roughest cruise I have been on was Oasis. So rough that many of the crew booked off their shifts.

You're talking about an abnormal worst case scenario; to get much worse than this you'd be painting a picture of needing to enter the life rafts - this does happen of course but not very often.

On a large modern ship and on a normal itenarary the motion is likely to be close to not noticeable. Cruise ships usually have days of warning of poor conditions and sail around problems, skip ports, adjust speed to lessen motion and so on.

I've been in very rough seas to the point that virtually no passengers were to be seen for a couple of days. It was on a south pacific cruise in winter where bad weather was not unexpected and on an old ship with broken stabilisers. I was 100% fine since I anticipated the inevitable and was drugged up before it was too late.

The analogy by the other poster with the grain of sand is a terrible one since their simulation involves waves at scale that are hundreds of meters high and those don't occur on Earth out at sea.

Cruise lines try very hard to suck money from the wallets of passengers 24/7; most of their strategies to achieve this require they are operating a steady platform.

Insurance against a freak scenario runs at $10 for 300 pills from Amazon.

RCL is very cheap for us. Two in a row we've got a GS for much less than the equivalent on the other lines we use; thousands cheaper even after the upsell needed to get acceptable food.

They don't scan your card if it's gold colored; I guess RCL realises we don't need a free secondhand towel nor are we too lazy to return the ones we borrow.

The attribution here to water that does not taste even slightly salty is astonishing. As is the same suggestion for pure water in a diet also containing food. I have read that education standards in the US are very poor and so perhaps this is a factor. In the absence of a basic education all sort of thing become believable.

The lunch I had on Explorer today had an amazing amount of salt. The chicken curry I had at lunch a couple of days ago tasted primarily of salt. The vast majority of the salt I'm consuming on this ship is coming from the food and the quantity is considerably more than I normally consume; at home at this level of salt I'd throw the dish away and start cooking again.

Freestyle are only on ships that stay I. the US any ships that goes back and forth to Europe will not have them.

There's quite a bit more of the World than you've mentioned; arguably the majority of the best bits were missed :-)

Explorer is based out of Australia at the moment and I refilled at a freestyle machine ten minutes ago.

I certainly would not ever ask anyone to do something without first researching it.

A suggestion to a cruise line riddled with hyperbole and posted to a public cruise forum will achieve nothing I'm afraid.

It's possible but extremely unlikely that your idea is novel in the sense RCL hasn't considered this already when determining where their ships are currently deployed. Given the capital upon which they must make a return you can be sure they think very hard about what itineraries to offer. We also see that they engage is price optimisation activities and this parallel shows they're serious about making money for their shareholders.

If you believe your idea is special then rewrite your letter properly and then send it to the cruise line.

Seriously. It's a life lesson. Sometimes there are family things and sometimes there are parent things.

 

A four year old can learn.

It disgusts me that a minority of parents consider that it's okay to go off on a holiday of this type leaving their inconvenient children to the care of others. You can be sure this young child will learn the lesson that their not important enough in their parent's lives to have been included.

I've caught the train lots of times on business trips and I think only once have I been on a service where a change at Central was needed.

The train is pretty fast and reasonably priced for one traveller. We're doing the trip in a week's time and I'll being using Uber Black rather than the train since for the four of us the higher price for the extra comfort becomes easier to justify compared to the train.

Broadly the complaint is that there's an opportunity to elect to make optional purchases where the poster believes that everyone should have paid a cruise fare such that these are no longer options but included benefits. The rest is just picking fault over some very minor issues.

As can be seen from the endless posts on price for this cruise line the headline price does matter a lot to the demographic that cruises of RCL. It's actually rather customer focused of RCL to acquiesce to the demands of this audience and unbundle pricing but by doing so you always find others who will complain. The question I guess is whether they would be happy with the cruise fare if they moved to a fuller service provider? Using the sliders of low cost, vast choice and best quality it's not possible to set all three to maximum.

Thanks....this is why we only do RCCL excursions so this can never happen.

Why do you think that can never happen? I am guessing because you suppose that the ship will wait for you. If so then this is not correct. If you care to read what RCCL actually says beyond their attention grabbing big-fonted headline promise then you'll know that there is no guarantee that they will wait until an RCCL excursions returns; what they actually say is that once they get sick of waiting for you they'll arrange to transport you to the next port of call at no charge.

You know that you can calculate how special a parent you are by observing about how many kids are on the ship while cruising and then using that to determine the percentage of parents that leave their kids to the care of others during shore time. You'll likely be in the 1% club.

Kokomo91165, all non Australian citizens will require a visa to enter Australia.

Yep, although for citizens of some countries this visa is issued automatically at the point you hand your passport over while entering Australia; as is the case for an NZ citizen.

FYI: new iPhone 7 and 7 plus can be purchased "Sim Free" (I.e., unlocked for exchangeable SIM cards on both GSM and CDMA networks worldwide). However they're only sold directly by Apple (online or Apple Store).

In this part of the world it has always been possible to buy iPhones unlocked including from telcos. What hasn't happened here is the very low upfront costs you see in the US.

It's a matter of perspective and choice of ship too. On a large modern ship unless the seas is extremely rough it will be pleasant enough. When we crossed the swells were large but the ship coped and there was just gentle pitching.

The only truly rough experience we've had was on an end-of-life P&O rust bucket (with broken stabilisers too) going out to some Pacific Islands. The only people at breakfast in the buffet one morning were those taking the right type of drugs - I joke not but there were perhaps ten people at peak breakfast time.

I believe they want accommodation near Central railway station as they are returning home by train.....

It's only a few minutes on the train from say Circular Quay to Central and the fare is peanuts; it wouldn't make hardly any difference in terms of time to stay nearer the OPT and there are advantages of doing so such access to a wider range of nice hotels.

Te Papa is controversial because it contains so many New Zealand cultural treasures, yet it sits on land reclaimed after it was uplifted from the harbor by an earthquake.

This building is seismically isolated to the extreme. The exhibits of note are all on upper floors and the lower floors (where things like the conference facilities are located) are designed to allow a tsunami to just wash through. The design expectation of this building is that it will survive anything that a building could possibly survive.

We used "Play A Round in Tassie Day Tours" for a private bespoke excursion in and around Bernie. This was 100% perfect from the planning stage where we shared the sorts of things we'd want to do through to the tour itself. The price was very reasonable (a few hundred dollars for the four of us). This operator has only five-star reviews over at the usual place for reviews.

It's possible but there's no margin for something going wrong. It's a pity you can't take the train. I'd opt to stay an extra day.

Virtually everywhere takes credit cards. There are also ubundant ATM machines should you actually need some cash. You'll probably need close to zero cash.