We will be in 8188 on the Dream in September, it looks like that will be before your cruise, so check back with me after 9/12.
I am a "cruise detective" trying to hunt down rooms with big balconies, and after much research I landed on this room. I hope it lives up to expectations.
The balcony is HUGE. HUGE. By way of comparison, when we've sailed in a balcony room on Carnival, the balcony is so shallow that if one person is sitting on a chair (not a lounger, just a regular chair), you have to basically climb in their lap to get over them to the other chair on the balcony. On RCCL's Freedom, the balcony was about 1.5 times deeper, and that was nice.
The balcony on 8188 is big enough to host a dance party. It's not just very deep, it's also extra wide for this category. Basically, to the port side (right) of this room, there's a linen closet. So the balcony extends beyond where the linen closet is to the start of the next stateroom's more normal width balcony. You get about 50% more balcony than normal for this category because of its location. Now,
DCL has bumped up the price category of this room from the 6A it started at, but it still has way more balcony than other 5Es. I'm going to post some links to illustrate.
This is a construction yard photo, so it doesn't have the balcony walls up yet.
http://www.disboards.com/showpost.php?p=38776242&postcount=5 A bit left of the group of folks in front of 8188 is the left balcony wall. If you go over to the right, the right-side balcony wall is about where the first guy in the yellow hat is in front of 8684. You can see it a bit more clearly when you look at the floor below, and 7194 and 7690.
While the 6th and 7th floor rooms at that same "point" in the aft have huge balconies, there is sometimes a huge flag displayed from the pole you can see coming up from 6192. We also looked at 10166, but it's just under Cabanas, and some people have complained about the noise. I want to say there was something different with the bathroom on the 9th floor version of this room, and that's why we didn't pick it.
I will also say, and it's just kind of my gripe, that the staterooms off to the "corners" of the aft area (e.g., 8184 and 8682) are ocean view only, not balcony rooms. Still, the balcony rooms next to them only have a "normal sized" balcony, DCL did not extend those balconies out further toward the windows of those corner cabins. So there's a bunch of wasted, unused balcony space, which breaks my heart. I think the balcony rooms next to those corner rooms could have had extended balconies.
But, for getting a HUGE balcony, I think 8188 is pretty much the ideal cabin in that price category.
http://photopost.wdwinfo.com/disney-dream/p63418-stateroom-8188.html
http://www.disboards.com/showthread.php?t=2960712
Just Kidding
