No More RC for us: Liberty Review

[gambler]

Leaving on the Liberty on Sunday, can't wait to hear more.

[George C]

I'm genuinely curious because I've not sailed Freedom class, only Voyager class. Since Galveston is so close, I'm likely to sail Liberty in the future :)

 

I promise not to bash anyone for their opinion, even if you say Florida Georgia Line is good music ;)

 

We had done Voyager class a few times (Navigator twice) and did Liberty a couple of weeks ago, very similar ships, but I just liked Navigator a little more, Liberty seemed to have more noise and was more crowded, but I did book her for next year . Did like having the Broadway play on Liberty

[Robin7]

We're boarding on Sunday. Following this!

 

Robin

[tomahawk246]

Lerin is going to be sorry she did this review. The Royal faithful are going to kill her for weeks. Mark my words on that.

[wolfganghowell]

I had heard about the Mystery dinner fiasco, that was ridiculous. But then, I would consider myself lucky to have missed it. Traveling companions railroaded me into one a few years ago and it's 3 hours of my life I will never get back. It doesn't help matters that I work in entertainment and I would have fired all the "performers" - a group of 2nd graders would have been better. UGH. Different strokes.

 

I'm actually surprised that some of the kids were able to board without their parents.

 

I was joking about the cliffhanger - I get that real life gets in the way.

 

I saw that you posted on the Carnival board that you considered Royal to be a rip off so I look forward to hearing more on that. Sure, some things are overpriced but so is just about any vacation these days.

 

And I think so far you are being very even keeled on mentioning good and bad. Very worthwhile to share all views.

Edited May 19, 2016 by wolfganghowell

[tserface]

So far there is nothing to "kill her" for... she seems to have had a pretty good cruise. :)

 

Tom

 

Lerin is going to be sorry she did this review. The Royal faithful are going to kill her for weeks. Mark my words on that.

[Denversail]

Following. We were on Liberty a few months ago. We had a good time but for various reasons it is not a trip I'd repeat.

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Forums mobile app

[Lerin]

My age is showing. I can't get over someone not being familiar with the plot of Saturday Night Fever.

 

LOL, but not sure it's an age thing. Of our group it was the people over 60 who were offended. We observed others in this age category leaving at a few select sections.

 

My husband and I are in our 40s and were familiar with the show. Though I believe it came out in the mid-70s, so it's about as old as we are. Yikes! We honestly had forgotten about parts of it.

[matj2000]

Lerin is going to be sorry she did this review. The Royal faithful are going to kill her for weeks. Mark my words on that.

 

I was thinking the same thing.

 

They are probably going back, scouring through all the OP's pasts posts looking for evidence which will cause doubt on credibility.

 

Also, if the OP started the posts with all the negative things.

 

Everyone would be hammering her because she didn't say anything positive to say.

 

Can't win...

 

 

 

Edited May 19, 2016 by matj2000

[Lerin]

I've been on CC long enough to know that regardless of what you say, someone else will tell you it is wrong.

Just posting my thoughts, people can take or leave it.

 

In a perfect world I'd just link to my blog. It is much easier to follow and includes tons of photos. However, it contains tons of personal info so I'm having to edit and re-type here. In re-reading some of what I've already written I'm afraid it's coming across a bit confusing, but I hope people are able to get the main idea. :/

 

So anyway...

 

Ice skating

This is an interesting section of the ship. Strangely difficult to find, though much of the ship layout was.

Some members had done ice skating on an NCL ship some years back and didn't like it, but we still wanted to give this a try.

We had filled out permission type forms online ahead of time but for some reason we had to fill out forms again when we arrived at the scheduled skating time. It was offered about 3 times during the cruise in 30 minute intervals by the way. Long pants and socks are required, though they had loner pants for people who didn't have them. A group of young girls all came in shorts and ended up in loner pants, they were ill-fitting and looked quite silly. I'd suggest packing pants if you are planning to skate.

We didn't skate long. The rink is much too small and crowded for any sort of enjoyment.

Speaking of small, on 1 day we watched the ice show. It was very well done but we found ourselves cringing for the skaters. The rink is really not big enough for them to get enough speed to do jumps and tricks. Considering the space, they were lucky to have only about 3 falls. But it did take away from the show.

[Big_G]

 

Ice skating

This is an interesting section of the ship. Strangely difficult to find, though much of the ship layout was.

Some members had done ice skating on an NCL ship some years back and didn't like it, but we still wanted to give this a try.

 

I didn't know NCL had ice rinks. :confused:

[dcgrumpy]

I didn't know NCL had ice rinks. :confused:

 

Epic used to have a temporary outdoor rink. I saw it on Undercover Boss, the CEO got rid of it after that episode.

[packedandready]

On the same cruise as the OP. Had a great time. So far it almost sounds like we were on different ships.

[akcruz]

I've been on CC long enough to know that regardless of what you say, someone else will tell you it is wrong.

Just posting my thoughts, people can take or leave it.

 

In a perfect world I'd just link to my blog. It is much easier to follow and includes tons of photos. However, it contains tons of personal info so I'm having to edit and re-type here. In re-reading some of what I've already written I'm afraid it's coming across a bit confusing, but I hope people are able to get the main idea. :/

 

So anyway...

 

Ice skating

We didn't skate long. The rink is much too small and crowded for any sort of enjoyment.

Speaking of small, on 1 day we watched the ice show. It was very well done but we found ourselves cringing for the skaters. The rink is really not big enough for them to get enough speed to do jumps and tricks. Considering the space, they were lucky to have only about 3 falls. But it did take away from the show.

 

Please don't take this as criticism at all, just a different perspective. We were amazed at what the skaters could do on such a small rink that I am sure the movement of the seas impacted. Maybe we just dont have the ice skating background to see the other perspective?

 

As for skating ourselves agree, our kids did it on the first cruise with the rink and have never felt the need after.

 

Please continue on with your review. I know how this crowd can get sometimes and give you kudos for coming on here to do your report. We are all different and what one likes another doesn't. Great to read differing perspectives.

[OCruisers]

Confused about your title "No More RC for us: Liberty Review"????

Seems you and your group really enjoyed the cruise! :confused:

[Lerin]

I didn't know NCL had ice rinks. :confused:

 

That's what they said, it wasn't a cruise I was on. They said it was outdoors or something. :confused: Maybe I have the wrong line.

 

Anyway, back to liberty of the Seas

 

MDR

As mentioned earlier, we were not fans of the MDR for any meal. By the 3rd day we stopped eating there altogether.

We had arranged early dining, which at 5:30 was much too early. However, since we traveled with kids, 8pm was past bedtime so not an option. With a large group we didn't want to risk the freestyle dining.

 

There were issues with the children's dinner.

RC website says there was some sort of adventure dining where if we were at early dining, after a set period of time the counselors would get the kids and adults could finish their meals. This was not the case, twice we asked on board about this and everyone acted like they'd never heard of it.

 

On night 2 we signed 2 of the kids up for kid's dining. It was to begin at 5:45 with the location being listed as both in the Windjammer and in the Adventure Ocean. No one seemed to know where the kids were to go.

I took the kids to the dinner and by the time I found it, got them all signed in and returned to the MDR our entire party(both tables) were sitting there with bread and drinks. It was 6pm! I asked it the appitizers had already come out only to find they were told they couldn't be served unless the entire party was present! Because I was not there, everybody else had to sit for 30 minutes! Absurd!

I did speak to our wait staff and let them know what was going on. I asked them to serve the party even if 1 person was dropping off the kids. The staff was not too happy (read: very impolite) to oblige to this request.

I understand meals run better if everyone is served at once, but it's not like I was just saying, "Hey I'm going to be late for dinner because I need more time to catch some rays by the pool." I was late because of how RC has scheduled their own children's programming. I did not want to be late, it wasn't my choice.

 

Food is subjective so I won't comment on it much. 1 night I had chicken cordon bleu which looked and tasted like it was from the frozen food section and zapped in the microwave. Several nights members of our party sent food back(some people did eat there every night).

 

It's telling when the buffet is better than the MDR, which is was. MUCH better.

 

We also tried the MDR for 1 breakfast, 1 lunch, and the DreamWorks breakfast. Very unimpressed with all. The food and service were poor. One of the biggest problems we had was cleanliness!

Several times we received silverware with food stuck to it, twice I got wine glasses with lipstick on the rim, twice the tablecloth had visible stains, and one time I was given a napkin that was all wrinkled and had food wiped in the corner! Unacceptable! I can't think of a single time in my life that I've been given an obviously used napkin at a restaurant.

 

The DreamWorks breakfast was the last sea day, we found out about it the night before in the Compass which we read about 11pm. In it is said you needed reservations for the DreamWorks meal and to call. Call who? It did not say. We decided to go to the dining room early the next morning and figure out how to participate.

The next morning we(along with 4 other families) arrived 20 minutes before the breakfast was listed. All of us were treated VERY rudely by the reception who informed us we did not have reservations. All of us were in the same situation where we had found out about it less than 12 hours prior and didn't know who to call so had come early. There was lots of eye rolling and annoyed sighs by ship staff and they begrudgingly(and I quote), "fit you all in the corner where you won't see"

[Lerin]

Oh I almost forgot: Sabor

 

This place was good, very good. And I'm not even a fan of Mexican food.

We went twice for lunch and once for dinner.

My favorite was the shrimp dish, very flavorful. The margaritas were strong and dessert was to die for :)

[Big_G]

Epic used to have a temporary outdoor rink. I saw it on Undercover Boss, the CEO got rid of it after that episode.

 

Just found a picture. The things you learn on CC. :D

[Lerin]

Lack of information, confusion seemed to be the theme of this cruise.

 

The day we were in Grand Cayman the Compass read that the evening was to be the second formal night. I've been on enough cruises to know there is no way they were going to have formal night when people are rushing back from the beach.

At 7am I went to guest services to confirm this was printed wrong and they said they didn't know and would call my room with the information. I suggested they make an announcement as people may rush back early from the beach in order to get changed. The woman ant guest services laughed at this. Not in a lol you're silly way, but in a rude but didn't want to roll her eyes way.

They did call my cabin and said that it was "changed" and formal night would be the next sea day.

That evening 1 person in our party said they heard an announcement that "formal night was changed". No one else in our party heard this announcement. Judging from the numbers of people I saw quite dressed up, I'm thinking it was made when many were off the ship.

I understand that some ships don't want to make too many announcements, but sometimes they do have a purpose. And if they didn't want to announce, they could've hung a sign in the elevators, by where people were disembarking or told the crew to casually mention it.

 

 

 

In Jamaica 3 of us(all in our 30s, 40s) participated in a zip line and river tubing excursion. Our tickets arrived in the cabin which stated we were to be at the bus by 8:30, the compass said they would not begin to disembark until 8:30.

We heard no announcements and at 8:25 needed to walk to a cabin on deck 2. That was when we heard the distinctive 'ding' of cards being scanned to disembark and realized they were already letting people off the ship. We literally RAN from the ship to the furthest excursion bus stop just as they were shutting the doors on our bus. We told them we had heard no announcement and didn't even know the ship was letting anyone off. The lady said-and I quote, "Yeah, a lot of people aren't here yet." We asked her to hold the bus a few more minutes as others were possibly as confused as us, though not as able to run. To which she replied, "too bad." The bus was only half full.

The excursion was fine though I probably wouldn't do it again. The river was very slow moving and we nearly fell asleep(this is a good thing) except for 4 others tied to us that continually told dirty and racist jokes.

[riclop]

I keep a personal blog and wrote many pages about our recent Liberty cruise (May1-8). The following "review" is a cut/paste of some portions of it. A lot of it is in list format or may seem somewhat "choppy" as I have to cut out all personal details from my blog. Hopefully the main idea will come across.

 

Long story short, we were very dissatisfied with our LOtS cruise and will not be back to RC.

 

Very quick background:

Sailed with a group of 15 family and friends. 4 on their first cruise and half of us(including me) on our first RC cruise. 4 kids ages 1-9 and the next youngest person in their 30s with the age going up to above 70. Between the group we had sailed around 16 different lines on over 40 cruises.

When choosing this cruise we original were planning on a Carnival cruise which was over half price less, but for reasons that we now can't remember, we went with LotS.

 

Totally agree , they are very $$$ and cut backs every where.

[Lerin]

Other confusions/ misinformation

 

-No onboard credit. We originally were to have onboard credit but changed cabins. When I called to change cabins I was NOT told that the credit would be lost, this should be standard company policy as I would not have moved cabins had I known ahead of time.

 

Yes, I know I should've read the fine print. When we've changed cabins on other lines they have always told us if we are going to lose credit And once on Carnival they even let us keep ours even though the policy is to lose it.

 

 

 

-Cabin amenities: We had to ask twice for wine glasses and robes-neither of which ever arrived. We ended up just taking wine glasses off a cart as we didn't want to wait an hour(which was quoted by room service) for 4 glasses to arrive to drink our pre-dinner wine. Our room steward was none too happy, but what were we supposed to do? We'd already asked twice and called room service(which he'd told us to do). We're not going to drink wine from the bottle!

 

Speaking of room service, what a joke. While the menu looks nice, on the 3 occasions we tried to order, they told us it would be at least an hour to arrive. This has never been the case with any cruise, and we tried ordering at various times of day so it's not like we just happened to call at all the busy times.

 

Breakfast room service was goo however. It arrived when we'd asked and was always hot and only once missing an item.

 

 

Laundry

-We sent away a bag to get laundry done for $30, it took over 2 days! On other lines we have always received out laundry within 24 hours, sometimes as little as 6. Our laundry came back just in time for us to pack it. Pretty unimpressive.

 

Pool Towels

So RC has a check out type system that we were never able to make any sense out of. We would get towels and they'd scan our card. When we returned the towel, they scanned again. This sounds simple, right?

However, our room steward sometimes took our towels and when we went to get a new one we were told we already had one. A few times 1 person in our party would take back several towels and they were told they had to bring the original cards the towels were checked out from. At the end of the week 1 person in our party said he'd just been taking towels off some cart and didn't even realize there was a towel check-out. Sheesh! I'm not sure what the purpose of this towel check out program is.

It's not like anyone is going to steal the towels. They are threadbare and small. Nobody wants these towels in their home.

[Lerin]

Photos

 

I know people have strong feeling about ship photographers, but cruises are the only time we take family photos and 99% of the time we are very happy with them.

 

Photographers: They are quite skilled. They somehow got even our youngest child looking at the camera and smiling.

 

Backdrops: Quite plain, nice for the adult and family photos, would've liked something more "fun" for the photos of the kids.

There was one photo we took on the little "bridge" leading to the Royal Promenade. In the background you see people on the other side of the bridge getting their photo taken. It makes a professional photo look like an I Phone shot.

 

Package: They told us to pick up the photos on a flash drive the last night after about 10pm. The photo area was a zoo, but they were polite and helped us quickly. Of course Royal Caribbean's incompetencies continued on. We got the drive back to our cabin and several photos were missing, 4 were of strangers and another 4 had "Roatan" written across the top (we did not said to Roatan)

Back to the photo area to get things sorted out and 45 minutes later we had what we'd paid for.

[KristieB]

LOL, but not sure it's an age thing. Of our group it was the people over 60 who were offended. We observed others in this age category leaving at a few select sections.

 

My husband and I are in our 40s and were familiar with the show. Though I believe it came out in the mid-70s, so it's about as old as we are. Yikes! We honestly had forgotten about parts of it.

 

I am also mid 40's and, after reading this, have apparently forgotten some details also. Note to self: don't take the kids. What age do you think is okay?

[Lerin]

So aside from what I've already written nothing TERRIBLE happened on this cruise, but enough things went wrong that we simply have no reason to cruise RC again.

We did not in any way, shape or form get our monies worth. Each day it became a joke of I-wonder-what-will-go-wrong-today?

Little things add up, you know? Dirty dishes, rude staff, having to ask several times for the same thing, lack of information... There were some good things, but they were no better than on other lines. No better than what we could've gotten on the cheaper Carnival cruise that we decided against.

 

Previously the only cruise we had an issue with was Celebrity. That was due to them changing our cabin when we checked in at the pier. They stated it was an upgrade, but we found the location to be quite undesirable. It was by the atrium which was VERY noisy. Because we travel with young children, they were unable to sleep so we would take them out which was met with rude stares and comments from passengers. We didn't 100% write off Celebrity, but find it ironic that now the only other cruise we've had an issue with is RC which owns Celebrity.

 

We've sailed on lines that cost much more than RC, but always felt you get what you pay for. Not only did we not get what we paid for, we were overcharged...

 

We prepaid gratuities as we almost always do when we sail.

On about day 4 we checked our bill and saw that they had added gratuities to it. I went to guest services not once, not twice but FOUR times to get this taken care of. The final time just so happned to be on Saturday where I was rudely informed that there was nothing they could do because their office in Miami was closed.

As I'm speaking with them about the gratuities I overhear people in line mocking me because, "I was removing my tips."

If those people happen to be here on CC I'll have you know, no I was not removing my tips, RC charged me TWICE for tips. I was removing their added tips.

 

Since returning home, I've had to call twice and write once to RC main office about these additional charges. We still have not received confirmation from the credit card company that the additional tips have been rightfully returned.

 

We left this cruise feeling like we'd been ripped off. In fact if they do not return the double tips, we have.

Yes, we liked Sabor, we liked SNF, we liked Adventure Ocean(even with the dining confusion). Were those couple things so much better than an NCL or Carnival cruise to justify the added cost. Not at all. Plus there were so many things that went wrong and added stress that we have not experienced on even the lower budget lines.

 

We have no reason to return to RC, they simply didn't sell us a good product as other lines have.

[royalfan1]

 

MDR

 

Food is subjective so I won' comment on it much. 1 night I had chicken cordon bleu which looked and tasted like it was from the frozen food section and zapped in the microwave. "

 

We ate in the MDR and thought the food was fine, I loved the Ceviche! But I agree, the Chicken Cordon Bleu was pretty bad. My waiter made sure that I received something else. And RC, please don't add so much salt to steamed veggies.