Wanted something more intimate and quiet this time. I hear R/C is popular for this. I was interested in going to St. Thomas and several days at sea. Enchantment and Explorer of the Seas hit these targets.

Do both of these have a 24hr cafe (carnival did), where you can get complimentary snacks... ice cream, pizza, etc?

Also, do either of these ships stack and lock the chairs outside at night? I hear people are going on cruises and can't sit outside at night because all the chairs have been locked up.

Is there such a thing as "kids opt out"?

And please... would love to hear negatives as well as positives!

Thanks

Don't recall if seats are available in the evening.

Which ship depends on what your looking for. If you are fairly active, I would go with Explorer. You will not go wrong with either choice.

Sorry, but need to confirm... do you mean that the food available in the 24 hr cafe is complimentary?

Sounds like Enchantment will be the ship. How annoying to get walkie talkies, surprised at that one.

Any sites you can recommend for good cruise rates?

Check out the phone number at the top of this page...

We sailed on Voyager last year (sister ship of the Explorer) and it was our best cruise EVER. It didn't seem too crowded to us at all. And the walkie talkies didn't bother us at all either.

On the Voyager, they had the frozen yogurt self serve open 24 hours a day, and I'm pretty sure the little restaurant on the Royal Promonade was open 24 hours also. (All free.) They had pizza (very good!) and pastries, cookies, sandwiches, etc... too. Believe me, you WILL NEVER go hungry. And you can always order room service any time too. Also free.

We absolutely LOOOOVE Royal Caribbean. It's by far our favorite. I don't think I will ever book with Carnival either. From everything I've heard, its just not the line for us. We're not partiers, and are usually in bed by 11 at the latest! (Princess was too stuffy for us, and HAL was great, but being in our late 20s,we were the youngest people on board. So RCCL is juuuust right.) We found everything to be just our style. That's why there's something for everyone's taste!

We knew RCCL was the only line we wanted to consider, and booked the Enchantment specifically for the itinerary. (I don't get excited about either San Juan or Labadee, which is mainly why we didn't choose Explorer.) Like you, we really wanted to stop in St. Thomas again, too, and we especially like extra at sea days.

Maybe one of the reasons they have to lock the chairs up at night is that (as you probably already read on this forum from a recent incident)some people might have too much to drink late at night and might think it's funny to throw the chairs overboard! Of course, this could be very costly for the cruise line and harmful environmentally. And the ships do tend to go faster at night, so maybe they're afraid if the chairs are not secured, they might cause damage if not secured or even fall overboard! I'm just guessing here, so don't take any of this as truth, of course!

For more information, you should also do a "search" on this website on both Enchantment and Explorer because there have already been lots of comments about both. And definitely read all the reviews. (In addition to this site, if you want to read more, there are tons of sites that have reviews...all very helpful.)

Laura... actually we were thinking of doing this in 5/02. I would love to hear how yours goes though.

See that, we were actually considering switching to HAL. I guess we just had such a BAD experience with the party crowd on Carnival that we were going to the extreme opposite.

I still keeping checking the sites to see if the itinerary has come out for next yr. Seems May is the turnaround for the ships, so I am not sure which one will be doing E. Car. at that time.

I definitely don't want to be the youngest or oldest on the ship. We just really want a quiet ride at sea. With ALOT of food to sample! That is my biggest panic. We love to snack at night and will be horrified if there aren't 24 hr cafe's. Since we like snacking pretty much every night... we would like it included! Imagine that bill!

Yeah, we weren't thrilled about most of the stops on some of the others. I was even tempted to try a ship going to San Juan and just staying on the boat instead.

OMG, could you imagine someone tossing a chair!? On Carnival they had to stop the boat because an intoxicated person was threatening to jump off the boat. They got him back to his cabin and we heard they put an armed guard in front of his door. Never heard of this in my life, but I guess anything is possible... it was JUST a rumor.