Scenic Ruby Review

5.0 / 5.0
107 reviews

Not great unless you are elderly

Review for Europe River Cruise on Scenic Ruby
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tompc
First Time Cruiser • Age 50s

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Sail Date: Jul 2019

Most people on the ship were fairly elderly. I would guess that the average age was 68 and scewed a bit toward the higher side than the lower. I think that it is because of this that my experience was not that great. Don't take this the wrong way, the other guess were quite nice people and I did have some nice conversations with many of them. However, everything is geared toward that age group. Let me give some examples. Please note that I am far from young, 50's. I use the term "elderly folks" only in the most respectful way. Very nice people and, to me, seem like the vast majority were in pretty good shape. I have the feeling that this will come across as pejorative, but I couldn't think of a better term.

The Dining: I went absolutely nuts. Every supper is a many course mean that take hours to get through. In my opinion, the food wasn't that great either. I had to wait just for these lengthy ordeals just to be able to get some food. I could order room service, but the there wasn't much of a selection. I could get a burger, but it was awful. It was obviously a frozen patty, overcooked and some nauseating sauce that neither me nor my wife could stomach. The breakfasts buffet was awesome and we ate as much as we could to hold us over. Lunch was also a buffet, but we mostly struggled to find something that appealed to us. They also have two special meals; I skipped the one that was supposed to be a degustation experience. I am glad that I did as I would have probably hated the food and it would have taken even longer to eat. The other was supposed to be an Italian restaurant experience. Well, nothing like an Italian restaurant that I have experienced. I didn't recognize one thing from the menu. What I did order didn't appeal to me. I am not sure that this food is gear toward someone from the US. The dining experience seems to be geared at more elderly folks. The best meals we had were the one German lunch and the couple meals that we had off-ship.

The Excursions: I was very happy with the quality of the excursions and the guides pretty good. However, they were extremely short. In the neighborhood of an hour and a half and sometime not even that. I had at least one that was well short of the 1.5 hours it was supposed to take. Although there were multiple excursion choices on any day, you could only pick one. What do you do with the rest of your day? I didn't expect that the excursion would be so short. Sometimes we were able to ad-lib and find something else to do, but it was hard without being prepared for this situation. It would have been nice to be prepared for this so that I could have planned better. I am just guessing, but assume they do this because this is what appeals to the elderly folks.

Cabin Review

Cabin Jr. Balcony Suite

This is a pretty nice room. It had a shower and bath. My wife appreciated the bath. The balcony was nice. The bed was comfortable. The AC in my room would work about half of the time. It made it hard to sleep, but they gave me a fan, which helped a bit. I wish that there would have been two chairs to go with the table in the room, but we could steal a chair from the balcony or move the table to the balcony. In the picture I was given for the room it did show it with a table and two chairs. In the only video I could find of a Scenic room they showed an electron glass and screen on the balcony. The glass windows was there, but no screen. We were told that we should make sure to keep our window up if we were not around to make sure that we didn't let in mosquitoes.

There were some things mentioned in the description of the room that never happened in my experience. It said that there were fruit skewers delivered in the afternoon and daily delivery of canapes and petit fours. Although there were some pieces of fruit in my room, these two never happened.

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