Royal Caribbean International
Freedom of the Seas Cruise Review
1 Night Cruise to Nowhere

David Thrower
Age: 49
Occupation: Travel Professional
Number of Cruises: 10
Sailing Date: May 15th, 2006

Paula and I went to the one night pre-inaugural May 15, 2005 and here is our review. We would like to thank Joanie Ogg and RCCL for giving us this opportunity to experience this ship.

We got to NYC a day early and stayed at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square which was wonderful and will highly recommend this hotel for clients wanting to stay in the Times Square/Theatre District.

Monday morning we ventured to get a taxi to the port. The taxi driver did not have a clue to where the port was (he only new the NY port), but we headed towards Bayonne. We followed signage that got us to a point where we could see the ship and it was across a small channel with no way to get there. The driver stopped and had to get directions from a telephone worker and we finally got to the ship it was $65 from Times Square. Between the signs sending you in to the wrong area and transportation personnel not knowing where the port is, RCCL has to do a lot of training/promoting for this new port.

Boarding the ship was fairly easy for us. We checked in and got our stateroom keys and boarded a shuttle within 15 minutes of checking in to takes us to the ship.

We got right on board, but had to wait an hour before the cabin was ready. This gave us a little time to inspect the New Family suite is nice, but to us it seemed quite small to hold 14 passengers comfortably.

The staff in the dining room was great, but the rest the staff was less than courteous.
The food was fair and I am just hoping that it will get better after all of the kinks are worked out.

The cabin was typical of most RCCL ships, but the new beds are wonderful. It was the most comfortable bed we have experienced on a ship.

Other than the FlowRider and the boxing ring the ship is very similar the Voyager class ships other than it's size.

The pool were larger than on most ships and the H2O kids zone pool is wonderful. To bad the weather was not great as we would have like to try out the pools.

As we had a couple of meetings to attend, we did not get to see as much of the ship as we wanted.

Overall the ship was great and hope it gets better as the ship takes on regular clients.

Dave Thrower, CTA, MCC, DS
PMT Travel
Medford, MA

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