Cruise of nightmares
We took 2 cruises (back-to-back) on Symphony of the Seas from 29 January 2022 and from 5 February 2022.
On the cruise we encountered three major problems:
1) We were not informed that the cruise itinerary changed
We found out on board our second cruise that San Juan was dropped as a port of call and another sea day was added instead. Our main reason to book the second cruise was to go to San Juan (it is our favorite port). Had we received a timely notification about the change of ports, we would have cancelled and booked an (otherwise cheaper) MSC cruise with better ports of call instead (we had a plan B).
We brought up this issue on board, only to encounter the worst cruise line employee we have encountered so far. Daniel from guest services accused my wife with lying about not receiving a notification from the itinerary change in an elevated and lecturing voice. He even refused to give us an e-mail address where we can send our complaint.
Later we complained about this to the head office - they also lied to us about having sent an e-mail about the itinary change, but when we asked to send us proof (as it did not happen), they rudely refused and closed the conversation.
2) We got severe food poisoning
On day 2 of the second cruise, both my wife and myself got severe food poisoning in the main dining room, we were vomiting for 10 hours and endured massive pain. At one point of the following night, we were lying on the bathroom floor cramped from pain. This completely ruined our already damaged second voyage.
I understand that food poisoning can occur anywhere, but it was our first time to become sick on a cruise ship – and the sole reason was that the kitchen crew was not handling a delicate seafood material careful enough.
3) Reboarding took 2,5 hours + 1 hour to leave the ship
Before the end of our first cruise we were told reboarding will take appr. 40 minutes. This was in line with our experience of previous cruises – we took multiple back-to-back cruises with other cruise lines, reboarding always took between 30-45 minutes.
This time it took 2,5 hours. It was horribly organized, there were more than 150 back-to-back cruisers (this was no news from the crew as I was told this by the guest services the day before the reboarding), but only 2 people to check documents. Not to into details, the whole process was a chaos, and we were waiting at every checkpoint extremely long for the whole group, and we (with our 1-year-old baby) were pushed into a crowded group where no social distancing was possible (I took photos). Cruisers who did not know each other beforehand were chatting about how Royal is unable to organize even the simplest thing. When we got through immigration, we still had to wait in port because as they said the ship was not ready to receive us.
After we finally boarded, it took us another 1 hour to get off the ship. The security officer was rude and bossy, and we had to arrange a leader for ourselves from guest services to finally get off the ship.
Because of this mess, we missed our prepaid shore excursion to the Everglades for which I paid USD 500 (4 adults+1 baby). Royal denied any compensation for this too - onboard and head office too.
This ship and Royal as a whole has the worst employees and attitudes we have ever encountered on a cruise ship.