I'm wring after just returning a couple of days ago from a 5 night cruise on Independence of the Seas. This was our 2nd cruise this year on this ship and our 3rd cruise this year with your cruise lines.  We choose Independence because we had a remarkably great time in February and it was not the same experience at all this time, which was sad because we choose to book 3 rooms and bring our children and grandchildren.  There were several instances that were disturbing and one in particular that caused my adult daughter to file a formal complaint because of comments made by a very unprofessional bartender to her. 

Getting on the ship was difficult and chaotic even with expedited arrival but getting off was ridiculous and took almost 2 hours.  We had a much better experience on the Allure in September which was a much larger ship. 

It seemed like many of the crew we encountered on this ship were disengaging from the guests.  We had problems in the dining room the first evening and dinner took over 2 hours. My daughter and her 3 children never returned to dinner with us because of this.  We did talk to guest services about this and tried to have our dining time switched to anytime dining but they refused to allow us to do that.   The remaining 4 dinners were served more efficiently (usually 1 to 1/2 hours) but it was too much for my daughter to not know how long we'd be sitting so sadly she ate in Windjammer every night (with her 3 kids) which was not well run and was very hard to get service for drinks in this venue (or anything else you might need after sitting down with your plate). We also had difficulty at breakfast getting service in the Windjammer and in the main dining room (which took over an hour for 2 people - so we didn't go back to that dining room for breakfast again.) If we wanted fresh squeezed orange juice which we paid for with our package, we had to literally flag down a waiter.  The only one of the 9 of us who seemed to get good service was our beautiful tattooed body builder daughter who had waiters tripping over each other to serve her. Read more