erinburrsir
Earning My Ears
- Joined
- Jan 31, 2018
I was on the Nov 12 - 15 sailing on the Dream.
The wall is down and the Gingerbread house is complete! There is a very limited selection of Merrytime merchandise but they do have holiday themed tumblers, pins, clothing and the Loungefly bags at White Caps.
On a whim we checked once we got on board to see if there were Palo openings for Brunch for 2, and there was a waitlist already so we skipped it. We were in Boarding Group 3 to give you an idea how quickly it filled up.
I asked our servers (Jonathan and Nick who were AMAZING) what the numbers looked like, and our sailing had roughly 1680 aboard. He said 4-nights tend to be less guests than the 3 nights. Speaking of the MDR staff, they were happy to give us paper menus every night since my partner does not have a smart phone and gave me one as well. No issues there if you don't want to endlessly scroll the menus on your phone.
4 showtimes for Beauty and the Beast on the first and last night - 6pm and 8:30pm. If you want to go on the first night, I recommend getting there early for a good seat. We arrived at 5:30 and were seated in row 7, social distanced from other guests. A number of the activities like family game shows and karaoke were mostly repeats of the same activities/games on different days (even including Match your Mate which usually only gets one time slot on the first night in my experience!) so if you miss something the first night, chances are there will be a repeat on night 2 or 3.
For fireworks I recommend going straight to Deck 12 on the Dream early around 10:00pm and dance to Christmas music while the rest of the crowds file in closer to time around 10:15 - 10:30pm. The app says Deck 11 so it filled up much quicker, but the views on Deck 12 are better in my opinion and there's plenty of those blue circles to stand on with your party.
The trivia they had on board was Disney trivia (that my partner and I won!), Marvel trivia, 80s and 90s music trivia, movie quotes trivia and Pixar trivia. They had Pixar trivia twice, but I only went the first time and all the questions were Toy Story related, so just a heads up on that!
Castaway Cay had absolutely beautiful weather and any rainclouds all stayed at bay. It really did feel like we had our own little circle of sunshine with rain way off in the distance.
We docked in Nassau and stayed on the ship which a lot of families did, so if you're hoping to get an empty ship on the port day, it won't be as empty as usual. Our cruise director Ashley let us all know any children who wanted to disembark had to be booked with an adult on a Port Adventure so I think most of the families I saw skipped it to save the money. It wasn't too bad, we were able to find lounges, and the waittimes for the family pools seemed to go smoothly although we mostly stuck to the Quiet Cove which was a little packed around 11am. 45 minute wait for the Aquaduck seemed to be consistent so I recommend getting there early.
For Castaway Cay we did need to join a virtual queue on the app that you can join after 7:30am. We joined with a debarkation time of 8:55 - 9:10 (earliest was 8:30am) and it went very smoothly.
That's my report and advice as best as I can give! No change in guest service or food quality (if anything I felt the food in the MDRs was actually better than I remembered!). I traveled without kids so I can't answer anything related to the kids clubs or activities.
The wall is down and the Gingerbread house is complete! There is a very limited selection of Merrytime merchandise but they do have holiday themed tumblers, pins, clothing and the Loungefly bags at White Caps.
On a whim we checked once we got on board to see if there were Palo openings for Brunch for 2, and there was a waitlist already so we skipped it. We were in Boarding Group 3 to give you an idea how quickly it filled up.
I asked our servers (Jonathan and Nick who were AMAZING) what the numbers looked like, and our sailing had roughly 1680 aboard. He said 4-nights tend to be less guests than the 3 nights. Speaking of the MDR staff, they were happy to give us paper menus every night since my partner does not have a smart phone and gave me one as well. No issues there if you don't want to endlessly scroll the menus on your phone.
4 showtimes for Beauty and the Beast on the first and last night - 6pm and 8:30pm. If you want to go on the first night, I recommend getting there early for a good seat. We arrived at 5:30 and were seated in row 7, social distanced from other guests. A number of the activities like family game shows and karaoke were mostly repeats of the same activities/games on different days (even including Match your Mate which usually only gets one time slot on the first night in my experience!) so if you miss something the first night, chances are there will be a repeat on night 2 or 3.
For fireworks I recommend going straight to Deck 12 on the Dream early around 10:00pm and dance to Christmas music while the rest of the crowds file in closer to time around 10:15 - 10:30pm. The app says Deck 11 so it filled up much quicker, but the views on Deck 12 are better in my opinion and there's plenty of those blue circles to stand on with your party.
The trivia they had on board was Disney trivia (that my partner and I won!), Marvel trivia, 80s and 90s music trivia, movie quotes trivia and Pixar trivia. They had Pixar trivia twice, but I only went the first time and all the questions were Toy Story related, so just a heads up on that!
Castaway Cay had absolutely beautiful weather and any rainclouds all stayed at bay. It really did feel like we had our own little circle of sunshine with rain way off in the distance.
We docked in Nassau and stayed on the ship which a lot of families did, so if you're hoping to get an empty ship on the port day, it won't be as empty as usual. Our cruise director Ashley let us all know any children who wanted to disembark had to be booked with an adult on a Port Adventure so I think most of the families I saw skipped it to save the money. It wasn't too bad, we were able to find lounges, and the waittimes for the family pools seemed to go smoothly although we mostly stuck to the Quiet Cove which was a little packed around 11am. 45 minute wait for the Aquaduck seemed to be consistent so I recommend getting there early.
For Castaway Cay we did need to join a virtual queue on the app that you can join after 7:30am. We joined with a debarkation time of 8:55 - 9:10 (earliest was 8:30am) and it went very smoothly.
That's my report and advice as best as I can give! No change in guest service or food quality (if anything I felt the food in the MDRs was actually better than I remembered!). I traveled without kids so I can't answer anything related to the kids clubs or activities.
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Thankfully we saw two girls getting off at this time and I asked if one of them would ride with him. They were super sweet and each took a turn with him!
