cruise-andy
Earning My Ears
- Joined
- Mar 7, 2009
- Messages
- 2
I just returned from my first Disney cruise today and decided I would contribute my experiences. Little background: this was my 8th cruise, but first Disney. I have two children 3 and 5 and also brought along my mother (who is temporarily in a wheelchair) and father. I've largely cruised on Princess and Celebrity in the past, I've been to most islands several times over and have a pretty solid expectation of what a cruise can be. Disney fell far short of this.
As a summary, I'll say that unless talking about a tip-based crew member, I generally felt like I had to accommodate Disney a fair bit and also detected and had consistently reinforced an attitude by the rest of the crew that we should be so lucky to be on board. It's a classic story of death by a thousand cuts. Largely I find that when people make negative posts about a trip or company, it's largely due to something they brought upon themselves or somehow didn't follow the rules and found the end result not to their liking. There wasn't any one instance that led to this being my most disappointing cruise to date though. Aside from my mother being in a wheelchair, there wasn't anything out of the ordinary for our party and I think it's fair to say that handling mild handicaps comes under the normal umbrella of responsibilities.
Our room was 7110 - great location actually. Also, in between the time of booking and cruise time was when my mother started using the wheelchair, so to Disney's credit, they painlessly moved them into 7138, which is a large handicap room. Unfortunately, as they learned, handicap rooms, while larger, really aren't equipped for the task. Namely the lack of handrails in key areas (like around the toilet or near the bed) and large raised areas in the entry ways making transition onto the balcony impossible to do without help.
One of the themes I noticed from scanning some of the other trip reports below is the consistent mention of bad weather and boat motion. This was the worst boat motion I've ever felt on a cruise. There are several reasons; first, the path of the cruise seems to cut across well established crosswinds. Second, I believe the Magic was the smallest cruise boat I've been on. You notice this especially in certain areas such as Topsiders, which is far too small, crowded and poorly designed. One night, I literally was rocked out of bed onto the floor. That coupled with the squeaking of every fixture on the ship lead to some pretty poor sleep. Fortunately, I don't get motion sick. It is also worth noting that the weather in Castaway Cay (my favorite part of the cruise by the way) is pretty consistent and yes, the water is always damn cold.
Probably the biggest letdown of the cruise was food quality. I travel a fair bit and I eat pretty well. The food we received consistently on the magic was mass produced, tasteless cafeteria food that was often overcooked or simply not using quality ingredients. The wait staff seemed to realize this. Even though I never once made a negative comment about the food, they would always make sure that we separated the food quality from their service and reinforce even though we may not like the food, they were at least good at bringing it to us.
The attitude of the kid's club staff was hit or miss. Sometimes they would give you a hard time about dropping off or picking up, sometimes they would be really helpful. It goes back to the overwhelming Disney attitude that we were intruding into their world and they would handle us as it was convienent to us. We did decide that while the kid's program is unmatched in the industry, locking our kids in a windowless dark room for hours didn't really fit our family dynamic, so that negated the one real redeeming benefit of Disney. To those that appreciate ditching their kids for long periods, there isn't any better opportunity to do so. Have at.
For excursions, it was similar, aside from the excursion director, Adam. One day, we received a message asking us to contact the excursion desk. There isn't a direct extension to them, so I called down to guest services and I kid you not, they refused to transfer me (or even yell across the room) to excursions insisting they didn't have a phone and if I wanted to contact them, I was welcome to physically walk over and do so (these kind of bush mistakes really happened all week). After walking down (and confirming they did in fact have phones), they informed me that they had overbooked the morning deep sea fishing excursion and would be canceling the afternoon one unless they could get enough people to switch since there was only one person signed up. Again, us accommodating Disney. We said we would and the trip went down fine in the end.
The entertainment was disappointing also. I can see where folks that are big Disney fans really can put a lot of value in the characters. For me, standing in line for over an hour so someone in a suit can hug my kid and pose for a picture for them to sell me is pretty poor entertainment. The shows are tired retelling of the original stories that Disney originally ripped off from Grimm. Every show consists of some convoluted method to get appearances by "princesses" which in the end are devoid of any real talent under their lip syncing, wig-wearing, out of shape personas. There are exceptions to the rule of course including the prince from cinderella and the fantastic black women that belted it out for the Lion King reference. The individual acts were hit or miss and frankly at any given time, there is basically one or two things going on at most. John Charles is a fantastic talent and Rootberry delivers well while the hip-hop act, even the family part, I thought was pretty poor. They reinforced negative black stereotypes by making jokes about stealing things from your room and so forth (and that's from someone who's young and white). It's a shame. They are talented guys, their material just sucks. Midtown really worked hard as a lounge act also.
I'll go ahead and wrap this up and summarize while adding in some additional points I may have missed above:
1. The ship is very small, at times cramped and subject to react very poorly in any sort of wind or weather. This seems to be coupled with the fact that the route they take to the Caribbean is less then ideal and promotes a heavy crosswind.
2. You had better like Disney...a lot. I had no idea it went so deep. You can't expect any non-Disney entertainment and while the kids will like it, the adults will feel the power of the Disney marketing machine. There is no such thing as an activity, there is only an opportunity for Disney to sell you something. For instance, the "scrapbooking" session is simply an act of passing out paper and crayons to the kids while the parents sit through an infomercial to by Disney photo albums.
3. The attitude of much of the crew is pretty poor and mixed. You will cross a variety of situations you will never find on another cruise line. It definitely isn't a "what can I do for you to make your vacation great" attitude as much as it's a what is the minimum I can do to make you go away so I can go back to what I was doing. It's pretty standard that maintenance will act as if you aren't there and do things like start a high power wash on the deck you and 4 other people are on when they are all taking pictures of parasailing off the side of the boat. All the people had pretty high end cameras and video equipment that was covered in water in about 3 seconds. The guy just kept on until we left.
4. The food is simply terrible, cheap and not quality at all in most cases. There are always exceptions, but, for the most part.
5. The details that make a cruise great are missing. This includes original talent, characters (in the human sense) and variety. If you've done other cruises where you continually walk around noticing cool little things, you will be disappointed here.
6. The entertainment is narrow, tired and basically the same theme over and over. I can't recall if there were two or three unique shows in the theater and I couldn't tell them apart.
Overall, my opinion is that Disney puts far too much value in their brand and characters and let's every other aspect of what makes a great cruise lag far behind. This has been my first interaction with Disney as an adult and for someone with young kids, I'm pretty comfortable with the idea that my family is completely done with all Disney based vacations. In the end, get a vacation with some integrity. If you want beach, sun and fun, get a nice house on the beach in St. Thomas and let the kids play outside of a high pressure situation or pick a cruise that actually has to try hard to please you since they don't have a brand to take for granted that is pimped to the kids like crack.
As a summary, I'll say that unless talking about a tip-based crew member, I generally felt like I had to accommodate Disney a fair bit and also detected and had consistently reinforced an attitude by the rest of the crew that we should be so lucky to be on board. It's a classic story of death by a thousand cuts. Largely I find that when people make negative posts about a trip or company, it's largely due to something they brought upon themselves or somehow didn't follow the rules and found the end result not to their liking. There wasn't any one instance that led to this being my most disappointing cruise to date though. Aside from my mother being in a wheelchair, there wasn't anything out of the ordinary for our party and I think it's fair to say that handling mild handicaps comes under the normal umbrella of responsibilities.
Our room was 7110 - great location actually. Also, in between the time of booking and cruise time was when my mother started using the wheelchair, so to Disney's credit, they painlessly moved them into 7138, which is a large handicap room. Unfortunately, as they learned, handicap rooms, while larger, really aren't equipped for the task. Namely the lack of handrails in key areas (like around the toilet or near the bed) and large raised areas in the entry ways making transition onto the balcony impossible to do without help.
One of the themes I noticed from scanning some of the other trip reports below is the consistent mention of bad weather and boat motion. This was the worst boat motion I've ever felt on a cruise. There are several reasons; first, the path of the cruise seems to cut across well established crosswinds. Second, I believe the Magic was the smallest cruise boat I've been on. You notice this especially in certain areas such as Topsiders, which is far too small, crowded and poorly designed. One night, I literally was rocked out of bed onto the floor. That coupled with the squeaking of every fixture on the ship lead to some pretty poor sleep. Fortunately, I don't get motion sick. It is also worth noting that the weather in Castaway Cay (my favorite part of the cruise by the way) is pretty consistent and yes, the water is always damn cold.
Probably the biggest letdown of the cruise was food quality. I travel a fair bit and I eat pretty well. The food we received consistently on the magic was mass produced, tasteless cafeteria food that was often overcooked or simply not using quality ingredients. The wait staff seemed to realize this. Even though I never once made a negative comment about the food, they would always make sure that we separated the food quality from their service and reinforce even though we may not like the food, they were at least good at bringing it to us.
The attitude of the kid's club staff was hit or miss. Sometimes they would give you a hard time about dropping off or picking up, sometimes they would be really helpful. It goes back to the overwhelming Disney attitude that we were intruding into their world and they would handle us as it was convienent to us. We did decide that while the kid's program is unmatched in the industry, locking our kids in a windowless dark room for hours didn't really fit our family dynamic, so that negated the one real redeeming benefit of Disney. To those that appreciate ditching their kids for long periods, there isn't any better opportunity to do so. Have at.
For excursions, it was similar, aside from the excursion director, Adam. One day, we received a message asking us to contact the excursion desk. There isn't a direct extension to them, so I called down to guest services and I kid you not, they refused to transfer me (or even yell across the room) to excursions insisting they didn't have a phone and if I wanted to contact them, I was welcome to physically walk over and do so (these kind of bush mistakes really happened all week). After walking down (and confirming they did in fact have phones), they informed me that they had overbooked the morning deep sea fishing excursion and would be canceling the afternoon one unless they could get enough people to switch since there was only one person signed up. Again, us accommodating Disney. We said we would and the trip went down fine in the end.
The entertainment was disappointing also. I can see where folks that are big Disney fans really can put a lot of value in the characters. For me, standing in line for over an hour so someone in a suit can hug my kid and pose for a picture for them to sell me is pretty poor entertainment. The shows are tired retelling of the original stories that Disney originally ripped off from Grimm. Every show consists of some convoluted method to get appearances by "princesses" which in the end are devoid of any real talent under their lip syncing, wig-wearing, out of shape personas. There are exceptions to the rule of course including the prince from cinderella and the fantastic black women that belted it out for the Lion King reference. The individual acts were hit or miss and frankly at any given time, there is basically one or two things going on at most. John Charles is a fantastic talent and Rootberry delivers well while the hip-hop act, even the family part, I thought was pretty poor. They reinforced negative black stereotypes by making jokes about stealing things from your room and so forth (and that's from someone who's young and white). It's a shame. They are talented guys, their material just sucks. Midtown really worked hard as a lounge act also.
I'll go ahead and wrap this up and summarize while adding in some additional points I may have missed above:
1. The ship is very small, at times cramped and subject to react very poorly in any sort of wind or weather. This seems to be coupled with the fact that the route they take to the Caribbean is less then ideal and promotes a heavy crosswind.
2. You had better like Disney...a lot. I had no idea it went so deep. You can't expect any non-Disney entertainment and while the kids will like it, the adults will feel the power of the Disney marketing machine. There is no such thing as an activity, there is only an opportunity for Disney to sell you something. For instance, the "scrapbooking" session is simply an act of passing out paper and crayons to the kids while the parents sit through an infomercial to by Disney photo albums.
3. The attitude of much of the crew is pretty poor and mixed. You will cross a variety of situations you will never find on another cruise line. It definitely isn't a "what can I do for you to make your vacation great" attitude as much as it's a what is the minimum I can do to make you go away so I can go back to what I was doing. It's pretty standard that maintenance will act as if you aren't there and do things like start a high power wash on the deck you and 4 other people are on when they are all taking pictures of parasailing off the side of the boat. All the people had pretty high end cameras and video equipment that was covered in water in about 3 seconds. The guy just kept on until we left.
4. The food is simply terrible, cheap and not quality at all in most cases. There are always exceptions, but, for the most part.
5. The details that make a cruise great are missing. This includes original talent, characters (in the human sense) and variety. If you've done other cruises where you continually walk around noticing cool little things, you will be disappointed here.
6. The entertainment is narrow, tired and basically the same theme over and over. I can't recall if there were two or three unique shows in the theater and I couldn't tell them apart.
Overall, my opinion is that Disney puts far too much value in their brand and characters and let's every other aspect of what makes a great cruise lag far behind. This has been my first interaction with Disney as an adult and for someone with young kids, I'm pretty comfortable with the idea that my family is completely done with all Disney based vacations. In the end, get a vacation with some integrity. If you want beach, sun and fun, get a nice house on the beach in St. Thomas and let the kids play outside of a high pressure situation or pick a cruise that actually has to try hard to please you since they don't have a brand to take for granted that is pimped to the kids like crack.
) and that's part of the fun.
