Anyone hear back from the re-route of last week?!

[cjnix29]

Just wondering how it worked out for people that had to change their plans at the last minute due to the weather.

 

[Lilbunnyk]

I just got back from the Fantasy 8/4 sailing, it was supposed to be western Carribean but ended up being changed to eastern because of Ernesto. The cruise was great, weather was perfect the whole time. The captain kept apologizing for changing the itinerary but I did not care where we went as long as I was on the ship! When boarding they gave us a guide to our new stops with port excursions. Port excursions desk was crazy busy for the first two sea days and not everyone got the excursions they wanted. We did not get the one we wanted for St. Thomas but again we did not care, the ship was our destination! We were also very excited that we still got to go to Castaway Cay! It was a great cruise and the Fantasy is beautiful.

 

[texasgirl73]

It was a little nervous at the beginning when I realized that my dining rotation was AERAERA (I had requested AERAEER under the Western Itinerary) because I had Remy on night 7 and I didn't want to miss Animator's on night 7. But it was super easy to change my Palo and Remy reservations and I was even able to get Palo Brunch and Remy Brunch (the extra sea day made for a lot more possibilities for brunch.) That rotation ended up being perfect!

As for excursions, that was tough. I had spent a year planning my cruise and loved all my excursion plans. I made some requests in St. Maarten and St. Thomas and all my preferred choices were booked, I was even placed on the waitlist for one but had no luck. Having 6 people in my party made it more difficult. We still had a good time and I'm very happy to have visited St. Maarten and St. Thomas (I wanted to do an Eastern but the Western worked better for our schedule.) I do wish I had more time to plan excursions though.

 

[sue412]

We were also on the 8/4 Fantasy that got re-routed. I had spent 6+ months planning our excursions for the Western route (and I had really fun things planned!) so I was a little disappointed when we got switched.

Overall, it did not take away at all from the cruise. We LOVED every minute! Wow- what an awesome trip and fun vacation!!

We ended up doing the Golden Catamaran snorkel trip in St. Marteen. It was great. We had the 1 pm time and in the morning my husband and I used our rainforest pass at the spa. We had the whole place to ourselves and it was really nice! (kids hit the kids club and loved it!)

We had spent a week's vacation on St. Thomas in 2009 so when we found out that was one of our new ports we decided to go on our own to Magan's Bay. It was great and a lot less expensive than going with DCL.

Overall, it was a really great time. We all fell in love with DCL (this was our
2nd DCL cruise after being on the Dream in '12 for a 4 night). We are hoping to take another one sometime in the future!

 

[sue]

It was a little nervous at the beginning when I realized that my dining rotation was AERAERA (I had requested AERAEER under the Western Itinerary) because I had Remy on night 7 and I didn't want to miss Animator's on night 7. But it was super easy to change my Palo and Remy reservations and I was even able to get Palo Brunch and Remy Brunch (the extra sea day made for a lot more possibilities for brunch.) That rotation ended up being perfect!

As for excursions, that was tough. I had spent a year planning my cruise and loved all my excursion plans. I made some requests in St. Maarten and St. Thomas and all my preferred choices were booked, I was even placed on the waitlist for one but had no luck. Having 6 people in my party made it more difficult. We still had a good time and I'm very happy to have visited St. Maarten and St. Thomas (I wanted to do an Eastern but the Western worked better for our schedule.) I do wish I had more time to plan excursions though.

Why is Animator's so important on night 7 ?

 

[momto2redheadgirls]

We were on it too. We had done the Western a few years back, but had to do it again because it was the only one, schedule wise, that we could do this year. We were VERY excited to be changed to the Eastern. We had a toddler in our group and so that drastically limited our excursions we could do (we also aren't beach people, so that limited it even more), but we put 2 excursions down for each port and got one of those in each one. So not at all bad. I was slightly bummed about not seeing the ruins in Costa Maya (but that leaves us something to do in case we HAVE to do another Western in the future). We did the See and Sea in St Maarten and that was similar to what we had booked in Cozumel. We did the St John Tour in St Thomas and that was fantastic, such a beautiful place!!! The only snafu we had was I had booked YDD into the nursery for formal night dinner and I showed up with her and they said they didn't have her on the schedule, but did for the following night. After some conversation, it came out that formal night on the Western Itinerary would have been that following night, so at least I knew I wasn't going crazy when I booked it. They were able to keep her while we did dinner on our formal night, so that worked out. The other thing was we were planning on not leaving the boat in Grand Cayman so we could do some stuff onboard without a lot of people around, and that didn't happen because that was a sea day. But we rolled with the punches and overall we were VERY happy to have the itinerary changed. I told everyone I was on vacation and I would have been happy if we had done 7 days at sea and never really went anywhere!

 

[Sunshineminnie]

I was on that cruise too. I like everyone else had booked our excursions (dives) 6 months ago. When I got the news, I was really bummed as I knew we didn't want to dive with DCL and 40 other people. DH and I stayed up late doing some research on dive shops and called first thing Saturday morning. We were very lucky to get private dives at both islands. Although I still would have preferred the Western and three islands, we enjoyed St. Maarten and St. Thomas. I probably never would have gone there on my own, so it was a great way to see a different part of the Caribbean! Rolling with the punches was the way to go!

The extra sea day did give us more time to explore the ship too. I hope to get back on someday and go to the islands that we wanted to. Who knows? Maybe it will happen again someday!

All in all, I think that DCL handled things wonderfully. I really expected to see grumpy guests, but really, everyone seemed great!

As for why Animators Palate is important on the last night, it's because it has a sweet little show!

 

[sue412]

LOVED that show in Animator's. I had heard about it, but thought "how good can that be??" Boy, was I wrong!! Disney does it again. That was SOOO cute!

Sue

 

[texasgirl73]

Why is Animator's so important on night 7 ?

Because that was the night we got to see the Animation Magic Show on the AERAERA rotation. My other option was to change my dining rotation but since I had to go and ask for brunch reservations I figured it was easiest to change my Remy dinner reservation.

 

[jetsandmets]

Did castaway members get first call on the excursions?

 

[Lilbunnyk]

Did castaway members get first call on the excursions?

We are gold castaway members and we got a form to fill out for excursions that said gold/platinum member on the top. I do not know if this meant we got first call since we got wait listed for all the excursions we wanted and eventually only got one excursion that we wanted.

 

[Goofy559]

Why is Animator's so important on night 7 ?

If you have the rotation where you are in animators three times, there are 3 shows - turtle talk with crush, the pirate night theming and the interactive show where your art is part of the show...you really don't want to miss it. If you only have animators twice, the second show will be the interactive one.

 

[WhenUWishUponA5tar]

We were on the 8/4 cruise as well. Though we like many others were disappointed about loosing their desired excursions and long time planning only to be switched to the unknown We were truly happy just to be onboard. While in St. Maarten we didn't get to do anything except walk around and shop a little. I must say that I was not impressed with the Dutch side of the island, we tried to go to the French side but wqas unable due to traffic and fear of missing cast off. We managed to get a snokeling excursion on St. Thomas with castawaycat, they were great we had a fun time. Castaway for us was a wash out. We hung out on the island for a bit, then rented snorkeling equip. DD didn't wear her contacts and had to go back to the ship which by the time she got back it started to rain. It rained for a while and when I checked it was 2 so I quick grabbed lunch. We decided to just turn everything in and go back to the ship. Well low and behold after we get dressed and look out on the balcony the sun is out. Maybe we will have better luck in April. All the fun we had on the ship makes up for it though.