Next up: Stateroom
Anthem of the Seas is a newer ship, so I was expecting modern, fresh decor.
Still, I was a bit worried as we absolutely loved our Disney staterooms, especially the last one category 4b - a larger verandah room.
First walking to our stateroom, I thought... oh oh.. no decorated doors. No cute little portholes on the doors. No Disney music in the hallway... the doors were solid dark wood tones, nothing nautical about them. It's a very clean look, but also a bit dark for my taste. The odd door had a single door magnet on it, be it Happy Birthday or Bonne Voyage - you could order these before sailing from in-room gifts, similar to DCL. You use your SeaPass (KTTW) to open the door, or you could buy a wow band. Sort of similar to a magic band, I believe they were $4.95 to buy. We didn't as I didn't like the design.
Once inside the stateroom, I was relieved as it was actually very nice. We had a verandah stateroom, category D2. It was 198 sq feet plus 55 sq foot balcony. I would say length-wise it was like Disney but it seemed more narrow.
Immediately I noticed a couple of hairs on the bathroom floor and being the OCD nerd I am, I wiped down all surfaces with disinfectant wipes. They were still clean after so our stateroom was clean, but like I said.. couple hairs.. some dust on the glasses by the fridge. It was little things like this that told me.. ok this is NOT DCL.
I'm sure others would never notice this, but after cruising with the Mouse what can I say.. my expectations were high. I also checked out the toiletries they had in the bathroom. Seemed like some were half-full! There was shower gel, lotion, shampoo and conditioner. Smelled good but I didn't use any of it.
What else about the bathroom.. it was a single bathroom with a nice glass shower, pretty good size, very modern clean lines. Towels were nice and white but not nearly the quality of DCL towels. No Royal Caribbean logo on them. It's ok, but despite myself I was looking for the little details that would make me say... wow Royal..
Oh and the mini-bar was not stocked, it was emptied which was great for us. I did find the previous passenger's sushi in the fridge though... yuck.
Our stateroom attendant came around and introduced himself, very nice man. But clearly NID- not into details
What I really loved about our stateroom. I loved the closet storage. Instead of being in a narrow hallway by the door like on DCL there were 2 closets on either side of the bed. There was also overhead storage. I took one closet and my DH and DS the other.
One of the closets had the safe in it, it was exactly the same as DCL.
In addition to the storage around the bed, there were several drawers near the desk. Above the desk there were several outlets and 2 USB ports.
We found the storage design and capacity very smart and efficient. Even more so than on DCL.
The other thing that is nice about Royal's stateroom is that the bed separates if you have two people that want to sleep apart. We had ours together and it was very comfortable with good quality linens.
My DS was bummed there was no bunk bed, he slept on the sofa bed which actually turned into a double bed.
Finally, the TV is much bigger than on DCL and it also swivels out of the wall.
There were on demand movies, but most had a charge.
We mainly watched the same things as at home..CNN, NBC etc. Even on DCL we don't watch much TV but my DS would watch movies sometimes.
Here are some photos of our stateroom. If I had to give edge to either line, it's a very slight one to DCL. Mostly because of the little details. But very very slight edge. Many things like closets and tv was better on Anthem.
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I really loved these too. So often we didn't have a time on us either and these screens provided that. I felt like those screens were very helpful.
