Cheapo dad’s trip report on Allure of the Seas sailing December 14, 2014

[bunzini]

But you have 10 sea days to stand in line at guest services with your newly found friends. Be sure to do the BINGO dance when you get up to the front of the line.

 

OK, for you and those folks that may never be on the ship, here is the list (and you know I am anal enough to bring it 3,000 miles back home an useless piece of paper). It has our check marks on them so you may want to get your own clean copy.

 

 

Now if you are a real anal planner at home, maybe you can come up with a route to walk around the ship to see all of them in a most efficient manner (e.g. less back tracking).

 

Thanks Harry! You rock!

[tomko2]

You do realize that you will have to keep writing this until your next cruise when you can begin again otherwise you will plunge us all into a very unhappy withdrawal. :rolleyes:

 

We love the fountains at Bellagio, when you stay at Bellagio the music is piped into your room so sometimes we just sat by our window and enjoyed the show from a different perspective.

I hadn't realized a similar show took place at the Aqua theatre. Definitely will go watch it on the Oasis in December.

 

Thank you for the info on the small wonders, etc. I took pictures when we were on the Allure however only found a few of them. Thanks to you I will ask Guest Services for a list when we are on the Oasis.

 

Have a wonderful day.

Kathy:)

[lilyhammer]

Thank you so much for explaining how the reservations system works. I'm taking the same route/ports as you, so I'm looking forward to hearing about your other ports!

 

I saw where you wrote "So when you first get onboard and check your balances and don’t see any OBC, don’t freak out. It will get there later". On my Navigator cruise, I was supposed to receive OBC and pre-paid gratuities from my TA. The OBC did show up on the 2nd day like you said, but the pre-paid grats never did.

 

I wasted much of my small internet package (60 min? 100 min? I forget) emailing her every day to check about it since the internet was so slow. She kept reassuring me it would show up, but it never did. She told me later (after I expressed my disappointment) that I could have just gone to guest services and had them call her for free. Good note for the future, if anybody has any issues they need their TA to solve.

 

Afterwards, she told me that RCCL would refund me the difference, but I am still waiting for it. I'll be really surprised when/if it shows up...it's a lot of $, otherwise I would let it go.

[harryfat1]

You do realize that you will have to keep writing this until your next cruise when you can begin again otherwise you will plunge us all into a very unhappy withdrawal. :rolleyes:

 

We love the fountains at Bellagio, when you stay at Bellagio the music is piped into your room so sometimes we just sat by our window and enjoyed the show from a different perspective.

I hadn't realized a similar show took place at the Aqua theatre. Definitely will go watch it on the Oasis in December.

 

Thank you for the info on the small wonders, etc. I took pictures when we were on the Allure however only found a few of them. Thanks to you I will ask Guest Services for a list when we are on the Oasis.

 

Have a wonderful day.

Kathy

 

Hi, Kathy,

 

Thanks for the compliment. By the end of the report, I will have run out bad family members to talk about so don’t think anyone else will want to read after that.

 

Will be interesting to see what type of art they display at the small wonders on the Oasis. Hopefully you won’t get a blank look from the worker on the other side.

 

I just glanced back at all 7 days of the daily compass and they had the water show on days 3 and 6 at 10:30 PM so pencil those time slots in for now but obviously check the time on your cruise. They couldn’t do it on days 1 & 2 because the second water show didn’t start until 10:45 so they can’t do a fountain show that night as it would be too late. Day 3’s second water show started earlier at 9:30 so they can have the fountain show not too long after that. Other nights they show a late movie at the aqua theater.

 

We stayed at the Bellagio for Christmas back in 2012. Cheapo dad was too cheap to spring for a water view room. We saw the back of the hotel/pool/freeway instead. For the holidays, Bellagio has a special set of Christmas theme music so it’s a different experience to stand there on Christmas eve to listen to the holiday music. Here are few pictures from that trip in case anyone is wondering what we are talking about – taken on my wife’s old iPhone as we didn’t want to walk around Vegas with a big SLR drapping over our necks.

 

For those who thinks the Allure is too big & too crowded, wait until you got to Vegas during the holiday season. The long line to get into the Bellagio buffet was estimated to be 2.5 hours just to stand and wait. I much prefer the Allure experience.

 

Have a great cruise in December.

 

 

 

 

 

[harryfat1]

Thank you so much for explaining how the reservations system works. I'm taking the same route/ports as you, so I'm looking forward to hearing about your other ports!

 

I saw where you wrote "So when you first get onboard and check your balances and don’t see any OBC, don’t freak out. It will get there later". On my Navigator cruise, I was supposed to receive OBC and pre-paid gratuities from my TA. The OBC did show up on the 2nd day like you said, but the pre-paid grats never did.

 

I wasted much of my small internet package (60 min? 100 min? I forget) emailing her every day to check about it since the internet was so slow. She kept reassuring me it would show up, but it never did. She told me later (after I expressed my disappointment) that I could have just gone to guest services and had them call her for free. Good note for the future, if anybody has any issues they need their TA to solve.

 

Afterwards, she told me that RCCL would refund me the difference, but I am still waiting for it. I'll be really surprised when/if it shows up...it's a lot of $, otherwise I would let it go.

 

Wow, sorry to hear about the problems you encountered with the OBC on the ship. I don’t remember where I read that the OBC shows up on day 2, it was somewhere “official” while on the ship/watching TV so I know not to worry when I checked the TV on night 1 and saw no OBC. By end of day 2, all the OBC showed up. Your TA should have told you to go to guest services in the beginning instead of having you work through them to get to RCI. Hope everything gets resolved soon.

 

Speaking of tours, I need to go into the RCI web site and give a review of the Cozumel tour on there so others can read about it as they decide on what to do while in port.

[harryfat1]

Day 4 – Falmouth

 

Actually I forgot to mention in previous post that before going to sleep on day 3, the kids wanted to have breakfast in the balcony as it’s their first experience in having a balcony on a cruise and they wanted to eat there. So we placed the order on the breakfast request card and placed it outside our door before going to sleep.

 

We requested breakfast to be delivered between 8:30 and 9 and about 8:15, received the phone call from the guy saying he is on his way soon to deliver the food. Got up, made sure I have $ to tip him. Sure enough, right after 8:30, there was knock on the door and in came a whole lot of food.

 

 

 

Then came the frantic activity of trying to set up everything in the balcony. In theory each balcony isn’t really set up for 4 people to sit in a small table and but hey, we are family so we squeeze in.

 

Certain things looks better on TV/pictures than in real life and in my opinion, eating breakfast in the balcony is one of them. Maybe part of the problem is we tried to be “green” and not use 4 different breakfast menu cards ordering for each of us as we just placed all the orders on one card thinking we save paper as the card does ask you how many guests are using this and we put down "4" right on the front of the card.

 

The first problem we encountered was the “plating” of food isn’t what each person wants in that person “A” only wants scrambled eggs and bacon but no sausage but when the order came, they combined scrambled eggs with sausage instead of bacon. So part of the work is trying to figure out who ordered what (as if I remembered what I ordered the night before?) from our original list. That took a while to sort out and rearrange all the food. Then we realized they only gave us 2 sets of utensils even though we put down 4 people will be dining. Arrrgh. So if you have a big family eating in the balcony, be sure to check that before the deliver person leaves. So that’s why you see my wife and I ended up using spoons. Next time, if there’s a next time, we are using 4 separate menus ordering for 4 of us.

 

As the small table isn’t big enough to hold everything, the other table from the kid’s balcony gets to have whatever won’t fit and guess which cheapo dad had to constantly get up and go there to get whatever from the other side? Bingo!

 

At certain point, even a dumb person like myself realized this isn’t as glamorous r as I have seen on TV or in the travel brochures. First of all, I have to tip someone extra on top of whatever tips I am already paying for the cruise. Then I have to do a lot more work to get everything right that I wouldn’t have to do if I was in the MDR right now being served. Finally, it’s butt hot and humid out in the balcony in Jamaica. I rather be in the AC room inside. So in summary, I have to pay more, work more and be in the heat to do this? Dang, these pictures better turn out well.

 

 

 

 

[harryfat1]

For this cruise, I ordered from eBay a “selfie stick” for few dollars to take the selfies. I am old school. I don’t have Facebook account where I take pictures of food daily to upload or take selfies every week. So this is a new experience for us. Here are the first few selfie stick pictures taken from my HTC phone.

 

My son wanted to try it first

 

 

My turn

 

 

As we were playing this, the in-laws came over after their breakfast at windjammer and their usual walk around the ship at the solarium and we took few more selfies

 

 

 

That was the extent we used the selfie stick. Could have/should have used more of it. I don’t have the nerve to do it but in theory you can put your cell phone on the selfie and stick it way out of the balcony 5 plus feet toward the middle of the boardwalk and take a picture. I don’t trust my grip or the grip on the cell phone not to drop 80 feet below – smash. Not a pretty sight.

 

Speaking of selfie stick, interestingly enough on today’s Sunday newspaper (yes, I am still old school in wanting to read a hard copy paper instead of the tablet version), they have an article from AP on the usage of selfie sticks. Guess they are more popular overseas than is US with many vendors selling them in Europe at the tourist sites and Asian tourists use them constantly as well. Some people dislike them immensely and call them “narcissist sticks”. Interesting article to read if you are looking to get one of this for your next travel.

[landartist]

Thanks for this great report! In all of my cruising (7 so far and 2 more coming up in a week) I have never tipped room service, figuring it was included in the daily total. Am I in error on this?

[Coralc]

Am I in error on this?

 

I think you are. :) A bartender gets 15% for taking a few steps to bring you a beer. A room server takes thousands of steps, carrying trays to bring you food. I think they should be tipped.

Edited January 18, 2015 by Coralc

[travelgoddess1]

Thanks for this great report! In all of my cruising (7 so far and 2 more coming up in a week) I have never tipped room service, figuring it was included in the daily total. Am I in error on this?

 

Yes, you are. Many hotels shoreside now include the tip in the price, it's listed at the bottom of the menu as a service charge, or delivery charge. Since there is no charge for (breakfast) Room Service, they can't do that on the ship, so you should tip the person delivering your food and beverage.

 

My personal philosophy is, when in doubt, tip. :) But that is a discussion for another thread.

[harryfat1]

Thanks for this great report! In all of my cruising (7 so far and 2 more coming up in a week) I have never tipped room service, figuring it was included in the daily total. Am I in error on this?

 

Hi,

 

Thanks for the praise.

 

Tipping is such personal thing that there are many posts debating this on the forum that would require a separate thread just for this discussion. I am old school cruiser in that I still remember the old days where we tip each person in cash on last day with envelopes given by the cruise ship (having to count the cash in the cabins and making sure we don’t mis-count) so I always associate my “suggested” tips are to the specific wait staff that have helped me. So when a new person brings me food into my cabin, I feel the right thing to do is tipping him as I won’t see him again to tip him as I would with my regular service people.

 

Now with the “pooled” tips and tips being charged to credit card automatically and you are not giving it to a specific individual, it’s harder to distinguish whether part of your $12/day tip goes to anyone bringing you breakfast in the cabin or not. As Karen said, when in doubt, I just have it out.

[harryfat1]

Looking at the bridge web cam, we have still a little bit further before we arrive at Falmouth. The targeted arrival time is 10:30 AM. You can see Indy way off on the left side already docked as they got there earlier coming from the other direction on their counter clockwise tour of the Caribbean (we were going clockwise).

 

 

Soon the ship was docking and we went out to the secret balcony once more to take some pictures of the port area

 

 

The plaza area already filled with passengers from Indy s they were there couple hours before us

 

 

 

 

[harryfat1]

More pics of Falmouth from high up

 

 

You see the coconut man down there in the plaza – we will be down there later up close

 

 

More shops with the Indy’s lifeboats in the back

 

 

After taken enough pics from above and in no hurry to get off the ship since we don’t have any tours planned, we decided to explore the ship for a bit as to avoid the first big wave of cruisers rushing to get off to make their tour schedules. So we decided to go down to deck 5 and walk around the jogging track that is on the perimeter of the ship.

 

One criticism from some folks of the Oasis class ship is that the ship is too much “inward” looking and less access to the outside ocean such that if you are on the ship, you need to make more of an effort to look out/seek out the water than your average cruise ship. Obviously if you have ocean view cabin or ocean view balcony, that is easy to do as you can just look out but while you are inside the promenade/central park, it doesn’t have as much of a ship feel to it unless you make an effort (however small) to make it feel more like a cruise ship.

 

First of all, access points to the jogging track isn’t well displayed. In some ways it reminds me of being inside a Vegas hotel where they don’t really want you to look outside much to see the real world. I always have problem finding an exit out of the Vegas hotels. Allure isn’t as bad but you do need to keep an eye out on where you want to go.

 

Here is one of many access points to the jogging track from the Royal Promenade. It’s not very obvious that you are walking outside to the jogging track other than if you look down, you can see the track but if you just walk by quickly at the area, you just see the silver aluminum siding of the back wall and thinks this is some sort of maintenance area and not for guests to use. So keep an eye out for these access points if going outside is important to you.

 

 

Here is the picture from the outside looking back into the promenade and if you look past the sliding glass, you can see the staircases up and down each deck so you have an idea more or less where these access points are located. And if you look way deep in the background, you will see the other sliding door for the other side of the ship so that you can cut over to the other side quickly.

 

[harryfat1]

OK, so now we made it out to the walking jogging tracks. For those that have cruised before on the other large cruise ships, the first thing that stands out about the Allure’s outside Promenade deck is how narrow it is. You almost feel claustrophobic walking in the area since they have all the metal siding and the life boats by the sides and you have to walk pretty far to even see the outside light. In some parts, it’s as if you are walking inside a metal tube.

 

 

Obviously I didn’t bring a tape measure with me (remember, not a professional reviewer) to quantify that another ship’s Promenade deck walkway is 77.2 inches wider but if you compare just visually the width of the Allure promenade walkway versus the RCI’s own Mariner of the Seas that I was on back in 2010, you can easily tell the difference in size/feel to it. Whereas the Mariner’s Promenade walkway is wider and more open, the Allure is cramped and more enclosed. Obviously the ship designers had to “steal” space from the Oasis class ship’s outside Promenade walking area in order to make the inside Promenade looks and feel bigger.

 

 

Given that the modern cruise ships and guests more or less abandon the usage of the outside Promenade deck in favor of the sun/pool deck above, it’s probably not a bad design move as you take space from a less used space to give to a more used space inside the Promenade shopping area. But every cruise I ever been on, I always make it a point to be out on the Promenade deck to see the ocean closer up than from the top deck above and I do miss the open feeling of the more open space Promenade walkway.

 

Finally, one last smart move is that by moving the jogging track down to deck 5 from the typical top deck as with other cruise ships, they at least make more uses of the area that otherwise would be underutilized. I would venture to bet that on the other ships (such as the Mariner) with the traditional Promenade walk way, a decent % of cruisers never made it to that Promenade deck other than embarkation/muster drill/glacier viewing in Alaska. Seldom do I see people out there when I was on the other ships but at least with the Allure making it a running/walking track, it brings the people down to outside of deck 5.

 

Yeah, yeah, I know, too much blah blah. Just look at the pictures.

 

They have encouraging signs above every few steps to keep you moving along

 

 

 

Hoping no cruiser will ever need to be inside of one of these guys

 

 

[Coralc]

Do you have any idea what the yellow spots in the lifeboat are for, Harry?

[harryfat1]

Do you have any idea what the yellow spots in the lifeboat are for, Harry?

 

Sorry, no idea. Maybe other cruisers might know. I also see red spots in the lifeboats. From the outside, the yellow ones looks like they are circles and red ones are diamond shapes?

[#4'smom]

Harry, I have enjoyed your review. Could you post a copy of the Compass onboard daytime activities for Falmouth, please. We are sailing next Sunday and haven't decided whether to book a beach day or just stay onboard. Knowing in advance what activities are offered will hopefully help with the decision making. Thank you in advance....Cindy

[harryfat1]

Do you have any idea what the yellow spots in the lifeboat are for, Harry?

 

I found one more picture on the life boats. This one you can clearly see the red and yellow markers. No idea on what those are.

 

Maybe someone can ask at the next captain's corners Q & A session

 

[harryfat1]

Harry' date=' I have enjoyed your review. Could you post a copy of the Compass onboard daytime activities for Falmouth, please. We are sailing next Sunday and haven't decided whether to book a beach day or just stay onboard. Knowing in advance what activities are offered will hopefully help with the decision making. Thank you in advance....Cindy[/quote']

 

Hi, Cindy,

 

Here you go. Day 4 daily compass, first four pages. Once again, we see Karen being honored on the top of the page.

 

There are typically less activities planned back on the ship during port days as the ship assumes many passengers are off the ship. The shops/casino are closed. If you want a pool day all by yourself, that is a good time to be on the ship.

 

 

 

 

[Coralc]

I found one more picture on the life boats. This one you can clearly see the red and yellow markers. No idea on what those are.

 

Maybe someone can ask at the next captain's corners Q & A session

 

 

I would guess it is probably where someone plants their butt. (Should this be a real emergency :D) But I wonder what the different symbols mean?

 

Thanks! We are really enjoying your review. Please pardon the interruption. :)

[harryfat1]

I would guess it is probably where someone plants their butt. (Should this be a real emergency :D) But I wonder what the different symbols mean?

 

Thanks! We are really enjoying your review. Please pardon the interruption. :)

 

You know, that was my original thought too. Thinking it’s like kindergarten kids at recess time, everybody lines up and hold hands kind of activity but if you look at the pictures inside, they have seats that goes up and down and some have high pointed edges – God forbid my flat butt has to on that pointy area!

 

This will be sardine time trying to cram 370 people in there wearing life vests if you see how tight the circles are next to each other – that will be a challenge even before people got fat from the cruise. Would be U-G-L-Y trying to fit them in by day 7…

 

[harryfat1]

So we are at the jogging track:

 

Rules of the traffic lane - slow people keep to the right

 

 

Map of the track

 

 

Here is what some people are criticizing in that you note the large window to the Promenade deck but it’s all closed up and the people from the inside can’t see out to the ocean (but not sure what they would be able to see anyway if it was opened up as there are many metal panels on the other side)

 

 

However, it’s not all enclosed as you do see some openings at various spots (some toward the front and a wide area in the back that people can sit and watch the ship's wake) and people like myself do stop by to look outside to see Falmouth

 

[harryfat1]

Here is what some of the views are from the various openings throughout the Promenade deck

 

 

 

 

 

 

[harryfat1]

Here is the view of Falmouth from the back as the previous post has pictures from the front

 

 

Hey, tow lines. Did I mention I like tow lines?

 

 

You can also go to the back of the Aqua theater from the jogging tracks. Just go up the stairs from this area. Also note the chairs in the back of the ship. You can just sit here forever and chill out and watch the ship's wake and be mesmerized.

 

 

As we were walking around the track, I looked up in the air and noticed something flying around. Hmmm, what could that be? Wait, it looks like water. As in rain? RAIN? It can’t rain on our vacation. I only seen nice sunny pictures on Falmouth from cruise reviews. But I guess you expect it in the Caribbean islands, just never think it would happen on our vacation. But as quickly as it started, the rain stopped.

 

Here is a series of 3 pictures taken from the back of the ship overlooking Falmouth. First one is taken at 1X zoom. Second one at 35X regular optical zoom looking at the center of the picture to see what the alley way of Falmouth looks like. The last picture is digitally enhanced 4X zoom on top of the 35X to make it effectively a 140X zoom camera to see someone walking into the store with an umbrella as it was raining. Scary spy cam stuff from a cheapo 4 year old camera - the current ones have even better zoom. No cropping or any post production work on these 3 pictures.

 

 

 

[JamesEM]

Will be interesting to see what type of art they display at the small wonders on the Oasis. Hopefully you won’t get a blank look from the worker on the other side.

 

[/img]

 

Harry, on the Oasis there are 37 Small Wonders, 18 of which are View Finders, took a little over 2 hours to find them all, well worth the effort to find them all.

 

Jim,