Anthem of the Seas - Mini Review 11/4 Sailing

[steveknj]

I am not the type to do full day to day reviews as I'm on vacation and ignore the internet as much as possible!! So I'll just give my two cents about the overall experience. We were fairly local (30 minute drive from our house in Central NJ) and I traveled with my DW and our 29 year old son. We are in our 50s and have cruised 5 other times on either NCL or Carnival. First cruise on Royal.

 

Embarkation/ Debarkations: Outside of Coast Guard inspection, which delayed things, pretty easy. One caveat is that when we approached the terminal we were at a standstill for about 15 minutes at around 11AM. We were on the ship by around 11:45. Debarkation was a little hectic, but went smoothly. We did self checkout and had to wait on a line to get off the ship. Took about 15-20 minutes but we were done with customs and drove home, were greeted by our dogs by 10AM.

 

Cabin: We had a balcony cabin, which was fairly large on the 12th floor. The balcony was a bit smaller than the one we had on Carnival, but this being a cold weather cruise, we only used it for a few days. The cabin itself had plenty of storage space, and even included a couple of USB ports for charging. The beds were a bit hard but the pillows a bit soft. My son ended up using the throw pillows a a base, and slept on the trundle. Cabin was cleaned to our satisfaction. We gave the Cabin steward $20 ahead of time to make sure everything was good and it was.

 

The Ship: We didn't find it dirty as mentioned in a previous thread. There was an outbreak of Noro, so they stepped up the washy washy stations and we took advantage and didn't get sick. I know people complained that it was crowded and there were too many kids, but we don't mind the kids and most were well behaved and fun to have on board. We don't use the pools really but the couple of times we did sit by the pools we were able to get loungers without too much issue. Having three pools on the ship helps and we didn't have to squeeze into a hot tub or anything like that. Most of the cruise was smooth except the last day or so when I could feel the ship rock a bit. Again nothing crazy that threw us off balance, but they did close off the sports deck for safety reasons. The public areas especially the shopping areas were the most crowded, and again, not really much worse than any other cruise I've been on. My wife did have some issues with pushy passengers on one of the sale days (I think for handbags) and on the tshirt sale day (last day at sea) there was a huge line and it took us 45 minutes to get to the table to buy a Tshirt. I figure there has to be a better way. We enjoyed the weird animal pictures in the elevators and some of the art on the staircases. Only a few times did we have to wait for elevators. Again, not any worse than any other ship I've been on. We did iFly (which I was terrible at, but it was fun), and we tried to do the NorthStar but when we got on it, it wouldn't go up and was stuck. They told us to get off, but we had to meet my son for something else so we had to leave and unfortunately we couldn't reschedule so that will be for a future cruse. I would have liked to try the bumper cars but every time I checked it out, the line was long. It's not like I've never been in bumper cars before (having grown up 10 minutes from Coney Island, been on them many times), so I just passed. We found other things to do. Another observation is that we didn't feel like they nickel and dimed us on everything. There were few announcements for this and that extra cost things that you get on Carnival or NCL. We appreciated that. We also don't really drink much so I can't speak about the bar staff or how the drinks were (we did have 2 for 1 margaritas the last day at Bolaros and they gave out free Memosas at the meet and greet.

 

Food: We mostly ate at the MDR for breakfast and dinner. For lunch we ate at various venues such as Sorrentos (eh, but I'm from the NYC area and have high standards for pizza!), 270 (good grilled cheese on a panini), Windjammer (don't really like the crowds at buffets so we tried to avoid this, but ate there on sail away day, it was no better or worse than other buffets), and the Solarium Bistro, which was decent. For breakfast we ate in the MDR, and outside of lack of variety the food was pretty good, especially the French Toast. Loved the mini buffet to grab some extras which we did frequently (boxed cereal, fresh fruit and extra bacon and sausage). One of our pleasures is sitting down and eating breakfast. Outside of them trying to sit us at a big table with strangers, I thought the service here was OK. They did forget to offer us juice one morning. For dinner, we ate at the MDR all nights but the last night which we ate at Jamie's. I thought the food was really good, especially the Lobster Tails and Steak Diane. The only complaint with the actual food was I had Red Snapper one night that was overcooked and dried out. My wife had to return the eggplant parm which just was how she liked it and got something she enjoyed better. We had MTD and didn't make a reservation so we ended up waiting 5-10 minutes most nights for dinner (which is not a big deal to us). We ate in Silk which was the no reservation dining room which as fine, but they need some improvement on how to handle this. Because we liked our "assigned" waiter, Roche, we wanted him for the remainder of the trip, but we only got him 4 of the 6 nights we ate there. But, if we had reserved a table, we would have been put in American Icon dining room and wouldn't have gotten him, so we took our chances. Roche was great and kept giving us extra this or that for stuff he wanted us to try, and offered us more and more food (I commented to my wife he felt like my Jewish Grandmother.....eat, eat more :) ). I liked that he did that. Service was acceptable to me (around 90 minutes to eat dinner), and I know people complained that it was slow, to me it was relaxed and no slower than going to any higher end restaurant on land. Our other two waiters (we couldn't get Roche 2 nights for whatever reason) were either ok or bad. The first one was pretty good, but he just served us our food and left. The second was bad. We sat in a corner and couldn't see the waiter's little "show" and he never offered us coffee at the end of dinner. Overall I felt the food was a slight step up from what we've eaten on NCL or Carnival.

 

Entertainment: This is where I felt that the Anthem was a step below the other two lines I've sailed on. They had three "main" shows. The Gift to me was just boring and had a hard to follow plot. So much so that m son and I just looked at each other afterwards and said....what the heck did we just watch? To be honest I was so bored, I fell asleep during it. The Spectra's Cabaret in the Two-Seventy, had really great effects which I spent most of the time watching, but the show itself was just blah. We liked We Will Rock You as we like Queen, but the show was OK, but entertaining. Best of the three. They had an ABBA tribute band which was interesting, but their play fighting that they actually hated each other was stupid. The other shows were a juggler who was very good, and DWTS type show which we didn't bother with and the usual cruise type shows such as The Quest, the Newlywed Show type game and a few more. What they really lacked in my opinion were decent comedy and dance parties. NCL excels on this type of thing, with parties on deck and in their clubs pretty much every night (and Carnival is well known for this as well). NCL also has SCTV which we love. The Anthem had two Comedians that did only late night shows that I can see so they were adult oriented. They were both just OK. The Anthem parties were just short themed parties and very late night dancing. They also had Wanted, a Bon Jovi tribute band which were very good, that played a couple of times. The CD Dru was very good and showed up at a lot of the various functions (was impressed by his knowledge of Seinfeld at the Seinfeld trivia). We did a lot of trivia as it's something we enjoy on all cruises.

 

Ports: We did these ports already on another cruise so really nothing new for us (other than Coco Cay their private Island). At Port Canaveral we did KSC, which I have done before but son hadn't. We enjoyed it and we had a really great tour guide. At Coco Cay we just tendered to the beach and hung out there. Food was pretty good and they have lots of beach to sit at and the food was well distributed so that where ever you sat the food stations were pretty close. I know some people complained about tenders, but if you paid attention to the announcements (and we were reminded by our waiter), they started giving out tender tickets the day before so we got an early one. We waited about 45 minutes in Bolaros until our tender was called, got on the tender and were at the beach. I don't think there's a better way to do it and it seemed to work pretty efficiently for us anyway. Lastly in Nassau we went to Atlantis and did a tour there as we have never seen it. This was our third time in Nassau and really not all that enthused with it anymore. The port area feels pretty depressed and every three feet someone is trying to sell something to you, from sightseeing to taxis to hair braiding to just junk. I'm sure if you walk away from the port area it can be nicer. I'm not sure we'll do this itinerary again though.

 

Overall we had a great time. We enjoyed the ship and would definitely do it again, but a different itinerary.

[easyboy]

Sounds like a relaxing yet enjoyable cruise! Thanks for the feedback!

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Forums

[Tin can]

Thank you for that, 2019 is the next time we are on Anthem :)