Hello:
We are long-time
DCL cruisers but have an RCL cruise lined up for late June. It is our 1st RCL cruise. We are struggling more than I thought we would regarding planning. I knew there would be differences but honestly I did not know they would be so stark. From navigating the RCL website to the few times that we have spoken with RCL live, we are struggling to feel much magic if any with RCL. I know RCL is considerably less expensive but it is not like we are not spending several thousands of dollars on the cruise. It is still a lot of money and it is our vacation, it should feel magical.
Any words of wisdom?
Thanks!
Magic is what you make of it. Granted, there won't be any Disney magic but at the end of the day it's a vacation, there's still magic.
Of course, by going on this cruise you get to answer the question of whether you like cruising because of the Mouse, or because of the Cruising experience itself.
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As for everything else...
I've spoken with RCI customer service once. Didn't find them any better or any worse than most other support lines. Except for Rogers, but any Canadian will tell you that talking to Rogers/Bell/Telus/Shaw support is The Worst. DCL I've heard is friendlier, but at the end of the day they are all trying to do the same thing - triage the question/issue, get you the help you need, move on to the next.
Mind you, I've done a lot of client support in my day, so perhaps I'm more sympathetic to them than most. Except for Rogers, because they are The Worst.
Anyway, if you'd seen the conversations when Royal switched to their current (presumably HTML5) design. you'll understand that the website is miles better than it was about 18 months ago. The old site was still better, but I think it used too much Flash and so I guess they decided to revamp it. And then relaunch without doing a whole lot of testing. Many bad words were used to describe this, especially if you were trying to access the Cruise Planner.
Nowadays, the Dashboard is nice. It's clean and perhaps a bit sparse on the information, although it seems to provide all the information that you need. But to your point the sparseness doesn't exactly convey "magic".
Since you're going in June the Cruise Planner should have everything available for your cruise. The problem here is that everything in the menu bar was consolidated together so it's now too many things. Shore excursions is probably familiar enough to you. It's nice but I find the interface to be slow relative to the rest of the site.
I'm not certain which ship you're on but one thing you'll notice about the dining is that there's no widespread anxiety of "I must book Restaurant X the first day it's available". That's in part because no one knows when restaurant bookings become available and in part because I feel that Royal doesn't put an emphasis on having to book things right away.
As for booking cruises on the website... let's just say that I use a TA for a reason.