Dinner Seating?

[emma79]

I was just curious what everyone else was doing for seating arrangements for dinner on the cruise. I'm having such a problem with this. We have 30 sailing guest including us. And I called carnival today and they said the biggest table seats 10. So at best we get three tables in the same area. The problem I have is that we have a lot of people coming from all over to cruise with us and I feel bad sitting with the same people all 3 nights. It was hard enough coming up with who is going to sit at what table now I'm not sure where we should sit. :( Help please!

[Mara4166]

We have a similar problem with 14 people. We have 2 tables booked and plan to rotate between the tables during the cruise. With 2 tables and a 7 night cruise it is not a problem for us. You will probably miss sitting with some people with only 3 nights.

 

I would recommend having 3 different seating arrangements - one for each night that allows you to sit with the most people.

 

Good luck, I hope you can work something out.

[Cattie]

We had 20 sailing including ourselves. We had 2 10 tables and DH and I switched each night to the other table. What we did was use my parents as the people to switch with since we see them all the time so it's not like they where slighted spending time with them. We couldn't rotate people since the 2 tables where had different servers, so I didn't want people to think they had to tip both. It wasn't to bad.

 

Aslong as the reservations are all linked the tables should be near each other. When you board, you can go to the dining room and check with the dining room.

[dcdiva]

We had 60 sailing guests, and for reasons that to this day are still not clear to me, we were not able to book as an official "group". We did manage to get all the reservations linked so that we could be seated together at dinner. I was very anxious about arranging at least some of the table assignments, since we had three generations and ranged in age from 11 months to 86 years, many meeting for the first time.

 

After much difficulty, I was able to contact the dining room coordinator a few weeks before the cruise to try to arrange seating assigned seating. It was incredibly challenging to get through to the right people at RCI and the not being an official "group" think made it especially complicated.

 

But here's the bottom line. We actually ended up at 9 tables ranging in size from 4 to 12. The cruise lines often seperates large tables to make it easier for the waitstaff). So you might not end up at 3 tables of ten. And they don't like it when you switch around tables each night since different waiters may be serving each table. We knew we'd be high maintenance, so on day 1 of the cruise we spoke with the Maitre D and explained our situation (and smoothed the way with a big tip.) The idea was we'd rotate within our tables, but really on a few of us swapped out every night. Mostly so that Bride & Groom could spend time with as many guests as possible.

 

I was also a sailing guest at Carnival wedding. We were seated in a room adjacent to the main dining room and our group of 40 took up most of the room. We swapped seats quite a bit, but again, we'd made arrangements to do that in advance.

[CarnivalDreamWedding]

Hola!

 

There were 48 of us sailing and we were not in a "group" but were cross referenced so were were all to be sat together for dinner. This happened for almost everone (4 guests got left out).

 

I had put my dad (a frequent cruiser) on dinner seating duty. So as soon as he boarded the ship he found the Marti D (speling?) to work out the seating arrangement. he was ready with a list of all of our 48 guests and their room numbers. This is when we found the guests who didnt make the cut somehow!

 

So, they switched some things around and made us 3 tables of ten, two tables of 6, and a booth of 4 just across. This was a total of 44 seats, which honestly was all that we needed bc with a group that big there was always someone who didnt make it to dinner (excpet the wedding night but we did that in the steakhouse). And if everyone made it we added to chairs to the end of the 6 tables.

 

Everyone rotated seats everynight excpet for the kids. We had one table of ten and kept it as the "kids table." So on our 5 day cruise we got to sit with everyone. We had 8 kids, so the last two adults down had to sit at the kids table :) hehehehe They never gave us any grief about swapping seats, i think we had two or three waiters between all of us.

 

Best of luck to you and CONGRATS!

[emma79]

These responses make me feel much better, Now just got to figure out who to swap where. It's this type of stuff that makes brides crazy :o

I love this site, it's been so helpful!

[kmarie99]

When I talked to TWE they gave me the phone number of the dinning department, I called them and they said that as long as all of the guests were a part of the same seating (early or late) I could call them back and give them the booking numbers of the sailing guest and they would be sure to seat us all together. :o

[nessa26]

We had 32 sailing, they put us at 4 tables all grouped together. We played musical chairs every night. Problem solved!

[AmyD102]

We had 89 sailing guests on our Carnival wedding cruise. Through my Travel Agent i was able to contact the dinning coordinator who gave me the number of tables and the size of the tables for our group (we had a whole corner of the dinning room). It was something like 2 - 10 ppl tables 1- 8ppl, 4 - 6ppl etc. Me and my husb created the seating arrangment, e-mailed it to the coordinator, and it was all set. Lots of guests swapped seats everynight so everyone could sit with different people, or if you didn't want to you didn't have to and it worked out just fine!

[canucme_cruisin]

Agree with all the posts. We had a small group, but some booked through my TA and others directly with Carnival. I had to go to the Matre D the first night onboard and get everyone seated in our group. They had to make some changes to other guests and move our location so we could sit together, but that was no biggie. We did have diff servers for our tables, but still switched seats. They knew we were in a big group so we kind of sat ourselves depending on what time we arrived to the table, so we did rotate quite a bit as well.

 

The bad thing about that was the servers didn't really get to "know" what we wanted/expected/drinks/etc. because we were moving around a lot. Also, one server was very rude and did not want to serve the guests at the other tables my wedding cake a-because "that was not his table" and b-because I brought it back from St. Thomas. We did speak to the Matre D about that too and he was VERY pleasant from that night forward!!