You may wonder why I only gave this a 4 star review, when for all the sub-items below I have rated them as 5 stars. The answer is because the ship had just come out of a two week dry dock, and as a result, many cabins, and some hallways had been flooded, and had no hot water or HVAC. One is always warned never to take the first cruise after a refit, and fortunately, I was not significantly inconvenienced, suffering just 3 days without hot water,(and in the Caribbean, that is not really an issue).

However, what was of concern was the lines of 40+ people every day for three days at the front desk trying to get new cabins, and the complete indifference of the staff, and captain, to their plight.

I am a management consultant, and while every customer expects everything to be perfect, sometimes things go wrong. When this happens, the company should acknowledge their mistake and try to make amends (although a number of customers will never be satisfied). In the case of the burst water pipes, the captain should have had all of his engineering staff working flat out to fix them, instead of just putting buckets out to catch the water, and should have put all of his administrative staff on front desk duties to relieve the load on the three regular staff. He should have instructed those staff to acknowledge that there was an issue rather than trying to minimize it, and given out free drink vouchers to affected passengers. An announcement of apologies might have helped as well. Read more