Fantasy 5/14 to 5/21 follow up

Sleepyluke

DIS Veteran
Joined
Jul 17, 2008
Cruise notes from eastern fantasy 5/14-21 in no particular order.

DCL bus is now transitioning to the academy buses. Our going bus was grey and not very nice but worth it not to have to deal with the PAT mess. Now we arrived at 9:45 unlike in the past we were some of the first through testing but that meant we had to wait almost 2 hours in the terminal. Not sure this was a great plan. At least in the hotel you could run/eat/drink. In the terminal it is trying to control crazy kids.
Testing is a mess but not sure how they could do it any better. If they are going to keep doing it at the port it works.


Nursery reopened Thursday. Did not look like any masks but not 100% sure. Weird they did not require it but kids club still did for the unvaccinated. It is what it is.

Palo brunch - it is different but food was incredible as usual. Probably our favorite server we have had in 7 cruises. Marcea. He spent 10 years on the Dream and not looking to go back to short cruises. Is it worth it? Not sure but it was great.

Per guest services 2436 on board. Never had any issues with chairs or too many people. Not sure how long they can keep up the lower capacity but it was nice.


Tortola - took a cab to cane garden beach. Incredible. Hardly anyone there. Q was our taxi driver and made arrangements to come back and get us. He had another pickup before us and came to check on us on the beach to see if we wanted to leave with them or change time. Highly recommend. Everyone was nice here. Side note. I walked to the oldest rum distillery in the Caribbean at the far end of the beach. Should have stopped as you cross a sewage ditch but kept going. It is neat but rum is not incredible and was not much there. Took a picture drank a few samples and went back to the beach.

Posting from the airport and will continue later. Ask whatever you want and sorry if someone else is already reporting but I appreciated all the info from here so trying to return the favor.
 
Both islands we cancelled excursions due to the price and gambled with an under 5 we could get off. It worked out well this time.



St Thomas - took a cab to Megan’s bay. Much more rude taxi driver. Wanted us to call him when we were ready to leave. We did not. Just took another cab. $5 each to get in over 12 years old. We had 2 kids and they still tried to change $20 u til I pointed out the sign and they reluctantly took $10. Once in it was not much better. Once you rent beach chairs you go to the drunk/high attendants that won’t move until you agree on a price to tip them. I carried our chairs myself. They carried for a couple that was next to us and they tried to tip them too little and guy would not leave until he gave him $10. He may have drug the chair 50 yards. There was one guy working his butt off but the other 2-4 we’re sharing drinks and not moving until they got enough money. Cab back fairly uneventful but they did not want to leave until we had more people so waited 20 min for 2 more folks.



Dining team - I am not sure if it is a result of staggered entry times or if we had an off crew but they could not get it together, like 20 min for drinks was our shortest wait and 30 plus for appetizers. They were very nice but not with it on the timing. Once it starred it went better but they would come by fairly quick but then never come back. Some nights we had appetizers while others were finishing entrees. Asked for coffee with dessert every night but did. It get it 3x. I am not asking more than once because by the time they would have come back we would be gone. Head server was there to give us the excellent speech the first night and then never saw him again other than at a distance until the last night again with the excellent speech. Not sure if he would have helped but at least he should have pretended to. They had 4 tables for a total of 12 people.



Under 5 covid test last day. This is dumb. You have to get back onboard from castaway an hour early for them to come to your room to test. They come to your room give you the swab and you do the test for the kids while they watch. This was 4:30 the last night. I guess it is still to show the protocols work, but we are there only about 12 more hours. Quarantining at this point is just goofy to me. They have been sharing germs and ice cream for the last week so what is 12 more hours at this point.



We ate enough ice cream to last 5 years. Food was good. Some better than others, but I Lao tried a few new things so that may be part of it too.



Characters were everywhere. Honestly o was worried about the no hugging and stuff but my kids did great with it. Not sure if everyone had the same kick but most of what we saw was good. Makes for weird pictures but i guess I understand.



By the way Damion with shutters is incredible. He and my son had a great time all week.



Stores. This is my biggest gripe I think. It has been almost 5 years since we were in the fantasy. The stores now suck for OUR family. I am sure someone has run the numbers on the profit per cruise but I 100% think more families would spend money without 3 separate high end shops. Yes it was fun to look through for about 15 min but they can’t keep the selection that the islands can. I know some people bought things and some of the watch prices were pretty good but if I am spending that much money (only speaking watches for myself) I probably know what I want.



I wanted a mens t shirt or 3 like I have always bought in the past. Well now there may have been 3-5 total options. I get it, it is about money but we would have spent a couple hundred more if the selection was better for stuff.



What questions do you have?
 
Was the ice cream machine staffed? I always get a 'float' - prefer root beer but coke will do. And I encountered just plain old stupidity with kids and that machine. LIke putting their mouths under the spigot? So I'd be happy if they were staffed. Sorry for all the kids who do it right.

This (not until December) will be my first time on the Fantasy. Is it a bit like the Dream? Any complaints of noise in the aft section?

Was Cabanas buffet back to having a lot of choices? Did it change from day to day? I took a trans Atlantic cruise on the Magic a few years back and each day they did a different "foreign" food section - like Chinese, Mexican, Italian . . . just a couple of dishes but I always looked forward to it.

No paper menus? Did the App work well? Happen to notice if iMessage was working for anyone? How long were the fireworks????

Thanks for the mini review!
 
Was the ice cream machine staffed? I always get a 'float' - prefer root beer but coke will do. And I encountered just plain old stupidity with kids and that machine. LIke putting their mouths under the spigot? So I'd be happy if they were staffed. Sorry for all the kids who do it right.

This (not until December) will be my first time on the Fantasy. Is it a bit like the Dream? Any complaints of noise in the aft section?

Was Cabanas buffet back to having a lot of choices? Did it change from day to day? I took a trans Atlantic cruise on the Magic a few years back and each day they did a different "foreign" food section - like Chinese, Mexican, Italian . . . just a couple of dishes but I always looked forward to it.

No paper menus? Did the App work well? Happen to notice if iMessage was working for anyone? How long were the fireworks????

Thanks for the mini review!
Machine was never staffed as in someone dispensing for you, but there was pretty much always someone there. I never saw anyone being stupid, but may have been a few less than ideal dispensing methods.

Fantasy and Dream are essentially the same. The designs are the same but theming is different. There are a few subtle changes but not a lot.

Cabanas had a decent selection, but not 100% I don't think. It had a few changes daily, but I never saw a true "foreign" change in the entire section like they do on the TA cruises. We did have sushi one day and falafel, and a few other things like that added to the normals.

We did have paper menus.

iMessage was hit or miss. I realized it was working because I got a few messages from people off the ship, however, my wife and I could never text the way and we both could send and receive from off the ship.

The app SUCKS!!!! I spent the entire first day and part of the second without access to anything or knowing what was going on. The answer was always it never works right in port, so give it a little while. Well, 4-5 app close outs, a free internet package and a reinstall completely and they were able to get me running on day 2, but it is literally a single source of failure. One cabin was down at GS one of my trips and they had been called due to not completing the muster drill. Basically they told them the app did not work so they could not do anything. They had been to the station, took a regular picture and showed them at GS.

Fireworks were different if you expect like they were before. The navigator showed the pirate party at 10:30, but they start at 10 and the fireworks ended it at 10:30, so if you showed up at 10:20 or so you missed Jack Sparrow and that show. The fireworks were not quite as long as I remember, but I think definitely longer than recent cruises have been. It was 5 min maybe?
 


Are you all good since coming back? Anyone test positive in your party (if you don't mind me asking?)

Thanks!
 
I noticed service was very slow on the fantasy 4/30-5/7. Some nights it would be quick others we were waiting a long time. Our server had a lot of tables seemed to be two sections but our drink server only had one. It was definitely different then when we were on the magic in December and even the dream in March. You could tell on the fantasy they were struggling to keep up.

With the ice cream we noticed a huge difference between the soft serve on the ship and the deck. I’m guessing it has to do with the ones at castaway have more time to set possibly? I’m not sure. Not sure if you noticed any difference if you tried it at castaway. Regardless we also ate enough ice cream. Also watched a women one night try 4 empty machines that hand no handles it was special for sure, it took her a good 3 minutes to realize they were already shut off.
 
Oh and t shirts in Palo and swimsuits in main dining. I get you don’t want to dress up but come on DCL, stick to your guns on something!!! You can say something about that. Most people were actually more dressed up than I figured based on previous reports but some folks take casual to the extremes!
 


Are you all good since coming back? Anyone test positive in your party (if you don't mind me asking?)

Thanks!
We are all good. Not sure if we are going to test or not. Both of us have never missed a day of work over the last couple years working in healthcare and first responder and have had numerous tests so not sure if we are immune or lucky or both. We have literally been around it daily since 2020 so who knows. Everyone still feels fine at the moment. Fingers crossed.
 
Does iMessage work without any sort of internet package or do you have to purchase a wifi package to use iMessage even on the ship between folks in your party? I know we used the app for messages before but it was always hit or miss and many times the messages didn't go through for hours after i hit send.
 
Does iMessage work without any sort of internet package or do you have to purchase a wifi package to use iMessage even on the ship between folks in your party? I know we used the app for messages before but it was always hit or miss and many times the messages didn't go through for hours after i hit send.
iMessage is hit and miss. Typically it does work without any internet package. It worked perfectly on the magic for us in December and on the dream in March. But zero luck on the fantasy as soon as we left the port it stopped.
 
We have relied on iMessage on the Fantasy our last two cruises to keep up with our teen. How did you keep in contact with your party since it wasn’t working? I need ideas bc we go in a couple of weeks. Thank you!
 
We have relied on iMessage on the Fantasy our last two cruises to keep up with our teen. How did you keep in contact with your party since it wasn’t working? I need ideas bc we go in a couple of weeks. Thank you!
We use a whiteboard magnet on the back of the door that allows our teens to at least tell us some semblance of where they plan to be and we can use it to tell them where we are planning to be. We also have set check-in times in the past also knowing that we all meet in some location to touch base.
 
Was your dinning table just your group or were you matched?
We were first seating, so usually the more crowded. It was just our family. I did not see any combined tables yet. There were 2 empty tables in our servers section. There were lots of 2 and 4s seated at larger tables.
 
We have relied on iMessage on the Fantasy our last two cruises to keep up with our teen. How did you keep in contact with your party since it wasn’t working? I need ideas bc we go in a couple of weeks. Thank you!
We used the chat in the navigator once it finally started working. My complaint with that is that I never got a notification that there were new messages until I actually opened the messages. Once opened I would magically get each message as a notification also.
 
My complaint with that is that I never got a notification that there were new messages until I actually opened the messages. Once opened I would magically get each message as a notification also.
That caught us off guard last cruise also. I was trying to get in touch with my son and not understanding why he wasn't responding until we figured out that there was no notification of a waiting message.
 
They really need to allow for calls via the app. I had bad luck with the notifications
 

GET A DISNEY VACATION QUOTE

Dreams Unlimited Travel is committed to providing you with the very best vacation planning experience possible. Our Vacation Planners are experts and will share their honest advice to help you have a magical vacation.

Let us help you with your next Disney Vacation!














Top