The cruise was primarily chosen as an add on to a week long holiday in Singapore to get away from U.K. for Christmas and New Year. My only previous cruise experience was 2 longer Med cruises with NCL, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I had always wanted to try Royal Caribbean as their ships looked slightly better than NCL. Comparisons are not easy as this was a short cruise in a different part of the world but I will try drawing a few conclusions despite this.

Embarkation is never a great experience with thousands all wanting to get on board quickly and I guess the experience is port related. In Venice I’ve sat in a big warehouse waiting for a ticket number with limited refreshments. In Singapore I joined a very long queue that moved quite quickly but there was multiple stages to get through and despite having completed everything electronically beforehand as requested, they still needed to take pictures of passport and me again and by this stage unknown to me, I was meant to have photocopied my passport too which they did there and then. They had a few people processing us but despite the IT they seemed to have to juggle taking photos and adding passport stickers - they ran out of official ones so carefully placed two blank stickers on passport, manually added a Royal Carribbean stamp before writing on cabin number. A few stages later of showing ticket and/or passport we got to a point the passport was surrendered and finally got on the ship.

(My passport is about 8 years old and maybe can’t hold biometric data - it meant despite giving thumb prints I could never get through automatic passport checking and after queuing had to go to a queue for manual checking. This is not RC’s fault). Read more