My family of 4 (two adults, 15 and 12 year old) and my in-laws from Texas just came back from a holiday cruise on the Mariner of the Sea out of Galveston (sail date Dec 18th - 26th). Overall, the vacation was okay, but it was seriously marred by poor management of the ship and crew.

The trouble started when we tried to board on Dec 18th. As mentioned in a previous post, the ship had a high rate of flu-like disease in the previous sailing. Unbeknown to us, this virus onboard meant that the ship needed to thoroughly cleaned before boarding could start with new passengers. Boarding was supposed to be between noon and 4 pm. Our group of 6 arrived at the terminal at 1:30 pm and stood in a line that didn't move for over 2 hours! During this time, we got ZERO information from RC personnel, and only had some hearsay from the luggage porters about the virus cleaning situation. As we moved forward in the line after waiting, we realized that everyone was being loaded onto buses and being taken to the Galveston Convention Center for check-in. Fortunately, my in-laws are RC Platinum members so we averted a very long line at the convention center and checked in quickly. We then were given a bad cold sack lunch (it was around 4:30 pm at the time), and a number for a return bus. Our bus number was 48 and they were currently only loading bus 14, so we paid $20 to take a cab back to the ship and were able to board without further delay.

The poor communication didn't stop there though. There was no posted or circulated updates to the ship's schedule for the first day. This lack of communication meant that the mandatory lifeboat drill happened right as our dinner was being served during our dinner. There was no update posted or distributed about revised activities and the kids clubs were closed but no notices were posted (the staff cleaning inside simply shooed us away). Read more