Service isn't so "Magical" right now...

[disney11fan]

not putting a damper on anything. but if your paying big bucks things should be made right. i guess when i hear about bad dinning experience,slow service it doesn't make me happy. i expect enough people avaialable to do the job right the first time.

cruises are expensive and not to be treated right would make me never want to come back or even try it.


when services are great you will come back. i wish i could use this board to tell about a great experience i had on swa that makes me come back time and time again.

 

[disney11fan]

did a good thing. she opened my eyes to dcl and shared some great stories . i wish she had never gone thru what she went thru. posting she helped all of us. i thank her for that.

 

[disney11fan]

That leaves more room for the people that LOVE the Magic!!
Sorry that some had not so great experiences, but I have also talked to MANY that had a wonderful time. I've had worse things on other vacations & they were still great. Life isn't perfect & no one is perfect, life is what we make it.
My family made it the best, most wonderful vacation ever & I hope others have one like it soon.

i'm glad you had a great experience. i only wish i was laid back and could let water run off my back. i know i would jump down the cruise directors throat and wouldn't let him or her get away with it. but then again it would destoy the vacation. if there were more peole like you it would be a better place. i need to relax but i know i couldn't. by the way i like your post. and your right it does leave more room for people that like the majic. the last thing you need is to hear some loud mouth person (Me) yelling and taking away from your vacation. i would be better off staying off the ship.

 

[Loriekins]

i'm glad you had a great experience. i only wish i was laid back and could let water run off my back. i know i would jump down the cruise directors throat and wouldn't let him or her get away with it. but then again it would destoy the vacation. if there were more peole like you it would be a better place. i need to relax but i know i couldn't. by the way i like your post. and your right it does leave more room for people that like the majic. the last thing you need is to hear some loud mouth person (Me) yelling and taking away from your vacation. i would be better off staying off the ship.

LMAO!
I am usually really uptight but decided I wasn't going to let anything bother me & was determined to have a good time. But to be fair, we had WONDERFUL service & nothing happened to us like others have been mentioning. We were out of hot water for a while, I just waited to take a shower no biggy. It was a great place to unwind & relax.

 

[disney11fan]

LMAO!
I am usually really uptight but decided I wasn't going to let anything bother me & was determined to have a good time. But to be fair, we had WONDERFUL service & nothing happened to us like others have been mentioning. We were out of hot water for a while, I just waited to take a shower no biggy. It was a great place to unwind & relax.

glad you had a great time on your cruise. when you hear stories like the orginal poster it made me cringe. i wouldn't have let them get away it. but then again it would have destroyed my cruise. i would not be a good person to sail with.

 

[MAGICFOR2]

not putting a damper on anything. but if your paying big bucks things should be made right. i guess when i hear about bad dinning experience,slow service it doesn't make me happy. i expect enough people avaialable to do the job right the first time.

cruises are expensive and not to be treated right would make me never want to come back or even try it.


when services are great you will come back. i wish i could use this board to tell about a great experience i had on swa that makes me come back time and time again.

as in SW airliines? You could put it on the Transportation board and share something positive - that would be fun to read!

 

[disney11fan]

as in SW airliines? You could put it on the Transportation board and share something positive - that would be fun to read!

swa did a great job and its not the first time they have gone over and above. makes you want to come back again and again and again.

 

[CasaMartinez]

Didn't they dry dock The Wonder recently? That's usually when they paint and fix many of the problems. I went to the Med last May and had a wonderful cruise. I can't wait for my next cruise to MR over Easter. I'm hoping things have really improved by then.

 

[woody73]

Didn't they dry dock The Wonder recently? That's usually when they paint and fix many of the problems.

The Wonder will be in dry dock later this year.

Woody

 

[ClaireinTN]

The Wonder will be in dry dock later this year.

Woody

I thought I read somewhere that the Wonder had been in dry dock in order to prepare it to go to Alaska. But maybe it was not dry dock . . . or maybe they didn't fix things like chipped paint . . .

 

[noladave]

The Magic was in dry dock in October, and there are/were many reports immediately after, that not everything was "done"..

If I had to do it all over again, I'm not sure that I would be cruising in a couple of weeks - on ANY of the DCL ships. I think this fall, or maybe next spring, they will have it all worked out, but right now it doesn't look so good. We had a choice of 4 night Dream, or 7 night Magic, so we went with the Magic.

Since we are paid in full, we can't make any changes now. We will still have fun, and if dinner service is as bad as the OP had it, we will complain, and move on. Maybe have dinner somewhere else. I'm not going to sit for 2 - 3 hours, dealing with bad service, and someone that doesn't know what he/she is doing. That doesn't mean that I'm ok with it, as I said, I will complain loudly (but also nicely), to the appropriate people.

 

[denas]

The Magic was in dry dock in October, and there are/were many reports immediately after, that not everything was "done"..

If I had to do it all over again, I'm not sure that I would be cruising in a couple of weeks - on ANY of the DCL ships. I think this fall, or maybe next spring, they will have it all worked out, but right now it doesn't look so good. We had a choice of 4 night Dream, or 7 night Magic, so we went with the Magic.

Since we are paid in full, we can't make any changes now. We will still have fun, and if dinner service is as bad as the OP had it, we will complain, and move on. Maybe have dinner somewhere else. I'm not going to sit for 2 - 3 hours, dealing with bad service, and someone that doesn't know what he/she is doing. That doesn't mean that I'm ok with it, as I said, I will complain loudly (but also nicely), to the appropriate people.

Please don't let my comments put a damper on your cruise. I almost hesitated to post because, while I wanted people who were stil PLANNING, to have a chance to re-look their dates, I didn't want people to think their upcoming cruses would be awful. there really were some great servers - I just didn't get one. But I did complain to the food service manager and he relayed my concerns to the restaurant manager and my assistant server was replaced. I think if he hadn't have been so awful, I might not have noticed the rest of the inconsistent service, but you spend a lot of time with your wait team and that really does impact your view. Ithink I finally found and complained to Tristan from Indonesia?? I am sure some DISer who knows everyone on board can correct me. He was in an officers uniform and noticed him the first day all over the place at Topsiders making corrections and helping out where lines were backing up. When I saw him on Deck nine on Day 4, I flagged him down and he really did listen and take my complaint seriously and it must have filtered down because the restaurant manager came over to me that evening.

I would recommend not waiting past the first nght like we did. By night 2 it was painfully obvious that our assistant waiter was beyond just new and learning to the point where he was ruining dinner. We still gave him another night - but I found him setting the table with dirty silverware too much for even me to keep my mouth quiet. By then I was so frustrated, that I don't know if Disney could have fixed the problem in any way that I would have not felt that my overall cruise was just "good". Although, I was so surprised that the CM was so untrained, I guess I just couldn't believe I would have to bring it up to someone - I thought that the waiter and head waiter should have fired him on their own without waiting to see if I complained.

My recommendations - tell your server the first night that you want to be out of there by 7:15 every day and want dessert by 7. In hindsight, I suppose telling our waiter that we wanted to go to the 7:30 show led him to believe that as long as he delivered dessert by 7:30, he was fine. However to make the show that starts at 7:30, you need to leave by 7:20 and be served your last course around 7. Do a better job of being clear and assume that they may not be totally familiar with what is happening on the rest of your ship and that English is a second language. Raise your concerns immediately.

And don't expect the CMs to be familiar with everything that may or may not happen on future days - if you want to see a character, assume he/she will never be present again the remainder of the cruise,regardless of what the CMs tell you, and visit that character. If in doubt, go to guest services and if you ask a few times, they will call the official character person and verify upcoming visits (we did this for formal-wear Mickey but didn't do this for the Princesses)

I apparently screwed up by calling maintenance when I didn't have hot water. I assumed something wrong in my room was a maintenance issue and pressed the maintenance button on my phone. It appears that the people who called guest services were actually told about the water outage and that it would be back on at 5, so call guest services first for everything - again assume that the CMs may not know the answer to your question.

Also, if the CM looks at you a little blankly regarding your question before answering- find someone else to ask lest you be told misinformation. Lots of little things we asked about - like asking the person running IDs through when we got to CC about where we could find the beach strollers, lead to lots of blank looks followed by answers that weren't necessarily true. Even the guy at the CC "information desk" couldn't tell me if there was a minimum height for Pelican Plunge or not. By this point, I realized that most of these people were new and just found more CMs to ask until someone seemed to know an answer without just looking blankly and then making something up!!!

Please enjoy yourself. Like I have said REPEATEDLY my overall experience was "good" it just wasnt the "exceptional" I had come to expect from Disney. Even a "good" cruise is still better than being home in the cold

 

[FJS961]

... seems like the "magic" is being lost as well for the concierge experience ... paying even bigger bucks and I'm getting reports of a "no can do" attitude from concierge staff which is really off from the norm ... not a good sign.

 

[noladave]

Please don't let my comments put a damper on your cruise.

Don't worry about that. I appreciate your honest comments, rather than the Disney-ana's around here that never find anything wrong with Disney.

We do something at Disney almost every year during Mardi Gras, and this year we decided on a cruise, since we hadn't done one since Thanksgiving of 1998 (Magic).

In hindsight, I should have realized that the first couple of months after the maiden voyage of the Dream, is not the time to schedule a cruise on DCL. If you think about it, Disney, like most corporations, was probably ill prepared for something like this, as it's been a long time since they have brought on a new ship...

C'est la vie.... We will have some good family time, even if the servers don't measure up. If that happens, we will address that.

Thanks again..!

 

[Bren58]

We had exactly the same experience, though we had late sitting at dinner. The first nite we finished dinner at 10:15! After that my husband never ate dessert, he took the kids back to the cabin after he'd quickly finished his entree. When we asked where our assistant waiter had disappeared to we were told he was sick. We found the food in Animator's Palace to be remarkably better than in the other 2 restaurants.
The evening before the day of no hot water, we were eating at Lumieres and we were sure they were having problems with their power. Thank you for giving the crew your feedback. It was our first Disney cruise and we thought they were all like this.
I too, was amazed at the huge line for the princesses. I walked by one hour a head of the scheduled time and people were lined up.
I was also disappointed in the "kids" club. I had expected interactive games, lots of crafts available all the time and a structured enough program for kids to meet and make a friend. I saw story reading with a character meeting, use of the slide, colouring and playing video games. The caretakers didn't even know the kids names.

 

[5boyz]

We had exactly the same experience, though we had late sitting at dinner. The first nite we finished dinner at 10:15! After that my husband never ate dessert, he took the kids back to the cabin after he'd quickly finished his entree. When we asked where our assistant waiter had disappeared to we were told he was sick. We found the food in Animator's Palace to be remarkably better than in the other 2 restaurants.
The evening before the day of no hot water, we were eating at Lumieres and we were sure they were having problems with their power. Thank you for giving the crew your feedback. It was our first Disney cruise and we thought they were all like this.
I too, was amazed at the huge line for the princesses. I walked by one hour a head of the scheduled time and people were lined up.
I was also disappointed in the "kids" club. I had expected interactive games, lots of crafts available all the time and a structured enough program for kids to meet and make a friend. I saw story reading with a character meeting, use of the slide, colouring and playing video games. The caretakers didn't even know the kids names.

We were in Lumeires that night too late sitting....I thought that the lighting was suppose to do that until it went completely black..... What table were you at? We were at table 21, we were 6 adults and we laughed alot.....had a great time with our table mates, we just them on the cruise too, spent the day at Serenity Beach with them and had lots of laughs there too....we had a bad head server but I think the fun at the table helped with that.

 

[Pixelfrog]

Well, just to throw my 2 cents in (again) for the first time cruisers, we had a fantastic, unforgettable experience. Every CM we encountered was cheerful and helpful, even when they couldn't fix what was wrong. For example, my son was severely sunburned and we tried to cancel his portion of an excursion at the last minute. The CM involved tried everything she could think of to get a refund for us, but was unsuccessful. I appreciate her effort, and it does say on the tickets that it's like making a contract with Satan - someone practically has to die if you don't cancel early enough. She was thoughtful enough to warn us that a trip to medical to obtain a waiver that would allow us a refund would end up actually costing us $50.00 more than the missed excursion, so we avoided that nasty surprise.

I am a former (a long, long time ago) Disney CM and I am well versed in Disney standards. The experience that my family and I had very much met and exceeded those expectations. Was it perfect? No. But it was still amazing and we weren't disappointed at all.

I'm no Disney apologist. After working for the company in the parks and resorts for 3 years, I've seen inside and out that they don't always live up to their own promises. I did not feel that this was the case on this trip. Perhaps I don't have the same perspective because it was my first DCL trip, but I've been on other cruise lines and if this is DCL at below par standards, they still blew my other two cruises out of the water.

 

[Goofy4Disney99]

Sorry you had such a negative experience on the Magic. We've been on 10 DCL cruises, the most recent bringing the Wonder to the West Coast, and we have never expeienced the things you went through. In fact on this most recent cruise we thought the service was the best we had ever experienced. Keep in mind that we always opt for the second dinner seating so that we won't feel rushed. We like long dinners and would rather see the shows earlier which gives us plently of time to get to dinner. I hope your next cruise meets your expectations.

 

[5forDis]

I appreciate reading your trip report. We have never taken the kids on a cruise & my husband has never been on a cruise. We are planning one now for April 2012, but I am concerned since that is around the time the Fantasy debuts. We are not going on the Fantasy. My concern is the inconsistency of service and the long dining time. My daughter has food allergies, so I've been told we must eat every meal in a sit down restaurant (no buffets, no quick service)....does this mean 6 hours of our day will be spent 'dining'???! I shudder to think that is the case.

I also need to know they have their act together in the dining/kitchen/wait staff as my daughter's health depends on them preparing/serving the right meal (without her allergies).

We are big Disney fans....parks in Florida (yearly) and California (a couple of times), but I do expect great, even magical, service when I am spending a lot of money.

After reading the mixed reviews (some people rave about the excellent service/others do not), we are going to slowly dip into the DCL experience and book only a 3 night cruise, or we are going to look into another cruise line. Disney's care with allergies has always kept us loyal to them, but even that approach sounds inconsistent lately

 

[NAB]

I appreciate reading your trip report. We have never taken the kids on a cruise & my husband has never been on a cruise. We are planning one now for April 2012, but I am concerned since that is around the time the Fantasy debuts. We are not going on the Fantasy. My concern is the inconsistency of service and the long dining time. My daughter has food allergies, so I've been told we must eat every meal in a sit down restaurant (no buffets, no quick service)....does this mean 6 hours of our day will be spent 'dining'???! I shudder to think that is the case.

I also need to know they have their act together in the dining/kitchen/wait staff as my daughter's health depends on them preparing/serving the right meal (without her allergies).

We are big Disney fans....parks in Florida (yearly) and California (a couple of times), but I do expect great, even magical, service when I am spending a lot of money.

After reading the mixed reviews (some people rave about the excellent service/others do not), we are going to slowly dip into the DCL experience and book only a 3 night cruise, or we are going to look into another cruise line. Disney's care with allergies has always kept us loyal to them, but even that approach sounds inconsistent lately

Don't worry so much I am sure your cruise will be fine. And Disney does take you allergies in to a count. Not sure if you are going on the Dream but they have separate allergy kitchen I hear. My sister and her family have a nut allergy and the head waiter brought out her food everynight and she got to choose what she wanted a night ahead of time so no wait. My niece loved all the attention.

Your breakfast and lunch are not 2 hours long either. They are pretty quick even in the restuarants. And I hear now if you want your meal to come fast it will.