The Stateroom
We had an E1 Balcony Stateroom that ended up having a large oversized balcony. The balcony was great, the Stateroom, however, was noticeably smaller than what we have come accustomed to on DCL. I also think that it was a bit smaller than what we had on Princess. As my Daughter had a Medical condition that requires specialized medication that needs to be refrigerated, I had filled out a special needs form for a fridge to be put in the room and had received a nice e-mail confirmation that this would be ready for me when I got on the ship. So when we get to our stateroom: no fridge. I go to guest services to ask about the fridge. There is already a very long line, so I get in and wait. After a few minutes I notice that there is only 1 person working the guest services desk (but 3 at the adjacent Shore Excursions desk (??) ). I eventually get up to the woman at the GS desk and explain my situation and show her my e-mail.
Her: "I am sorry, but we only have refrigerators for guest that fill out special needs forms"
Me: "That is what I am showing you in this e-mail. It is my confirmation from the special needs department letting me know that it will be in the room"
Her: "I am sorry, but all of the fridges have been given out to those who filled out the form that had a need for it, not just to keep food cold" (exact quote)
Me: "Um, you mean like the form I filled out and got this confirmation on?"
Her: "We are not showing this in our system, Did you request the correct sailing?"
Me: "You mean the one listed here with today's date and this ship on it?"
Her: "I am sorry, but we do not have a record of that and we do not have any more refrigerators. You can give your medicine to the medical staff and they will keep it for you"
At that point, I just left and went back upstairs, explained the situation to my better half, who promptly sent me back down. When I got back down, there was another staff member "screening" people in the line. I explained that I was coming back to check on the fridge. She looked at my e-mail, went over to the GS desk, made a call, and 2 minutes later came over and told me I'd have a fridge by 4pm. Go figure...
So, get back to the stateroom and start to put stuff away. Open the cabinets over the TV. There are half empty water bottles in there. Great... Head to muster drill and come back to hopefully find the fridge. Not there. I call, and the person tells me it is on the way. OK, not a problem. This is when I looked out and notice, hey, they are still boarding people on the ship (I don't know how they did muster
.) I walked the ship a bit and then we got ready to go to dinner around 7-ish. We had 10 of us and walked up to the Matre'd.
Them: "Do you have a reservation?"
Me: "No"
Them: "Here is a buzzer. Should be about 15 minutes"
We ended up in the Card Room (which is adjacent to the dining room on deck 4) with our eventual servers Claudiu and Francisco, who proved to be one of the highlights of the ship. I'll discuss food later...;
Anyway, we get back to our room around 9pm. No fridge. Our room steward comes up and introduces herself. I asked about the fridge. She said she had not heard, but would check. About 20 minutes later, she says it should be coming shortly, it "had to wait until the watertight doors were shut" (??). OK... So, about 9:30, here comes the fridge!.. First, they want to put it on the small little table in the room, but I point out that is not really stable. Then (and this was more funny than bad), the maintenance guy suggests we put it on the loveseat! Um, no. At any rate, we took the chair out from the desk and put it on our balcony and put the fridge under there.
This was sort of the story of the cruise. We all started calling it the Excuses of the Seas because it seemed like whenever we would ask about something, it wasn't "Yes, I'll see what we can do to fix that", it was "Well, that is because..." The worst was the next night at dinner, but I'll get to that in a bit. We only held on to the fridge for a few days because I had heard from a cabin in our group that had an infant and had also pre-registered for a fridge and had not gotten one. In addition, the crib/pack-n-play that they had confirmed had not been put in the room. They requested it around 4. They finally got one into their stateroom at 9pm. It was one of the big square ones and since the loveseat was too big to move out of the stateroom, they had about a foot to get by between the pack-n-play and the desk. They ended up finding them a rectangular pack-n-play the next day.
I then heard from another in our party that RCCL had no record of their pre-paid shore excursions (which had been charged on their card). Once again, the ship had no record of items that had been confirmed on the RCCL website. I don't know if the issue was at RCCL IT or at the ship, but they need to get that fixed. They went ahead and got them tickets. I haven't heard if they got charged multiple times.
Other Service issues
On Day 1, I went to the main pool bar to purchase the Diet Coke drink package for myself and the "Royal Refreshment" package for my daughter. There was only 1 person working the bar (this was the same for the first 2 sea days). When he finally got to me I asked about the package. He told me "we are out of the package here". I think that he meant that he didn't have the plastic coke cups. I said I didn't really need them, and could get them later. He told me to check the bar up a deck and then went to another customer. I walked up to the other bar (who also only had 1 person working a full bar) and they did finally get me the drink packages.
On night 2, we only had 4 of us and sat in a different part of the dining room. We sat and waited, and waited, and waited. After 20 minutes, someone finally came up and poured us waters. After another few minutes, a head waiter came over to take our order. A different person brought us our food, and yet a different person came over to take our dessert order. After a few minutes, the other 3 at our table had their desserts brought out. I had ordered the Banana Baileys Creme Brûlée, and it was not out. After a few minutes, I asked what I think was the assistant waiter about it. He said that he was going to check. Another 10 minutes pass. No dessert. Everyone else done. Ask the first head waiter about the dessert. He goes to check. Comes back a few minutes later with dessert.
Well, what really took the cake was that I mentioned this to the maitre'd as we are leaving to let them know the issues in that section. His exact quote to me was "Well, that waiter in that section had waited on 52 people that night". What I really wanted to say was "well, he didn't wait on numbers 53-56". He then told me that I needed to understand that he was busy with a number of tables and was doing me a favor by waiting on us in this section. Now, I am pretty accommodating of things, but I have to say, I was speechless as I was listening to this. Isn't it RCCL's job to make sure they have enough waiters to cover their Dining Room?
Later that night, we got a call from one of the GS folks to ask about the fridge. My wife detailed our discussions with the maitre'd and the GS person said "He said WHAT?" and told us to hold on. We were then connected to the head of Food and Beverage. We explained our conversation and he wanted to look into it. We got a call back profusely apologizing. We had a nice conversation and mentioned how much we enjoyed our first night's wait staff. He set up for us to have them every night for up to 16 people and to just show up. I have to say, this gentleman was extremely nice and accommodating. He went on to tell us that the ship would be picking up a number of staff when we made our first stop in Jamaica.
I came to find out a few days later that the rumor was that RCCL had changed pay scales between contracts and that a number of staff had walked off of the boat as this was in between the Europe and Caribbean contracts. I also heard a rumor that RCCL couldn't bring on the new staff in the US and had to wait until the first international port. Whatever the reason, we sure enough picked up a bunch of staff in Falmouth, Jamaica.
I just wish they'd have told us that up front.
Next: General Observations between the lines
. The Allure looks fabulous though but we have a 10 year old son who I'm not sure if he will do his own thing or stick with us as we have never cruised before......so we might not have gotten to do all the great sounding adult activities on the Allure. 
