This is my 3rd cruise and all 3 have been with Royal Caribbean. Unfortunately this one left a bad mark and the way things were handled more or less ruined my vacation for me and left me questioning if I’ll ever cruise with Royal again.

To start things off embarkation was delayed first reportedly because of fog. Royal Caribbean contacted us and let us know there would be another update in 2 hours. The fog was already clearing so during that time we dropped off our luggage at the port and decided to get something to eat close by. After grabbing a meal we walked around the town of Galveston a little bit and the second notification arrived- still no update on when the ship would be able to dock so we could board; another update would come in two more hours. This was odd because the fog had completely lifted. We exhausted everything that we could do with our two year old toddler close to the port pretty quickly but we just kept walking and hoping the next update would bring good news- unfortunately it didn’t. This time the story changed: the coast guard was performing a search and rescue with no further information on when we could board. We returned to port to recover some medication in my luggage. I had brought some with me but not enough for a long delay. Unfortunately our luggage was too packed in and not well organized within the port. Eventually the lack of access would lead to a medical event on board for which I was unable to get help for when the ship returned to Galveston. Luckily it wasn’t life threatening but it basically left me unable to leave the room for two days onboard. After a couple more updates we finally had a timeline but unfortunately once we boarded we sat in the port and ended up leaving 24 hours after our scheduled departure time. This would force us to miss one of our ports.

After the ship got rolling we got to our cabin which was okay. Of course small and nothing special but clean and other than losing hot water for about 6 hours during our trip we had no problems and we received truly fantastic service from the gentleman taking care of us. Read more