Mariner of the Seas Review
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We enjoyed the places we visited on the cruise but not the ship - food was not great, very poor maintenance with rust everywhere, things broken and missing including furniture and chairs in lounges and public areas, and the office staff and management uncaring and not obliging. It lacked the lounges and bars and the forward located crow’s nest outlook of the smaller Holland America boats. Alcohol was very expensive and only Diamond status past passengers could access the happy hour prices – a very discriminatory restriction on the bulk of the 3,000 passengers on board. The starboard side of many decks (promenade, pool and bistro and the upper most exercise deck) plus the casino were approved for smoking and you were constantly getting fumigated. When you were at the office and the nearby lounge tobacco smoke flowed into these areas and the internal atrium space which had most of the limited lounges and the shops.
Our Viator tour of Jerusalem and the Dead Sea was delayed 2 hours as RCL was so disorganized that they refused to let off non RCL tours for 2 hours and 4 of the 14 people on our tour could not get off until passengers marched down to the ship’s office and loudly demanded to get off. We had got off at 7:45 AM and just walked through with the ship’s tours and insisted as we had an 8:30 tour booked! RCL blamed the Israeli Immigration people for not having sufficient staff on duty but this was not the case as the Immigration hall had roughly 250 passengers in it and we went through in 20 minutes and there was only a trickle of passengers walking through Immigration from 8:45 till 9:45 AM when RCL finally let the non ship tours passengers pour off the ship. The result for us and many others tours was that we hit the peak period of the day for visits to the Christian and Jewish quarters of Jerusalem with massive crowds on day tours from huge number of bus tours and other tourists.
The head waiter in our area of the restaurant looking after dozens of tables was really excellent however Florina could not despite her continued best efforts do anything with the product she was provided by the kitchen – she took all 6 of us on a complementary tour one day of the kitchens and she and our 2 wait staff looked after us very well just a pity about the food quality and the rest of the ship.
Cabin Review
Spacious Ocean View Balcony
Spacious but no fridge/many bar - 3 of the 6 of us had injection medicines which needed to be refrigerated but the "cool cabin" in our cabin was at 18 degrees Celsius when the engineering department checked and we were told by a number of the ship's personnel that it was not a fridge. Our medication had to be stored in a fridge elsewhere in the restricted staff area of the ship. The balcony door did not seal and wind/sea breeze whistled through it. We had 3 adjoining cabins but they could not open the connecting balcony doors - rusted shut (only way it could be done was if they used an angle grinder but the door holder fixture was missing so it could be fitted open!). We constantly had white paint in our cabin from the peeling and flaking paint on the sliding cabin/balcony door. Rust was very apparent on our balcony floor and you could not miss it on the underside of the balcony above. Our pray was that the ship was in better paint and repair condition below the waterline.