2014-Allure of the Seas

Royal Caribbean’s ‘Allure of the Seas’ and ‘Oasis of the Seas’ are very similar, the Allure of the Seas is around 2 inches longer than the Oasis allowing the Allure of Seas to make the claim of being the biggest cruise ship. Not sure if it was planned that way or it was discovered it was slightly longer once it was built.

This was certainly one of Royal Caribbean’s ‘wow’ ships…

Swimming pools and great shows.

Variety of shopping through out the ship.

The list goes on and on, overall it is one beautiful cruise ship.

Some activities such as the zip line you have to sign / agree to a waiver, this can be done online prior to the cruise.

If you are into photos taken by on board photographers, Royal Caribbean offers better deals than I have seen on a lot of cruises I have taken with other cruise lines. If you want only 1 picture or 2 then you have the individual prices comparable to other cruise lines, but if you want to buy every single picture that was ever taken during your entire cruise – it cost us $ 309 for everything on a digital cd, and for an extra $ 50 you got everything also printed (8x 10 for most) we had close to 400 printed pictures and a digital cd with all the pictures for $ 359. They offer the same deal a bit cheaper if you decided to take the package at the beginning of the cruise and a bit more if you waited until the end of the cruise to decide.

Now they did have independent separate from the regular photographers that you could book for specialized photography that cost more, but for us the regular photographers with all their nice backdrops was perfect for us, the Mercedes vehicle on the promenade was one of the popular locations for pictures, certain times they also have someone in central park taking pictures.

Overall wheelchair accessibility was very good, the jogging track was tricky to get to as the button to open the sliding doors was on the door itself and therefore had to be on the ramp itself to push the button and with my travel scooter it needed a bit on run on to get over the ramp to outside which meant you had to back off a bit to get some speed up and often the door would start to close before you got to it again.

We had an inside wheelchair accessible cabin with Roll in shower, my only complaint was that the in room safe was on a closet shelf that was too high to reach from a wheelchair position.

We only went around the port areas and never used any ship tours. Also all ports on this cruise was docked.

Also most of the shows you need to book ahead of time preferably before the cruise, all free but you have to book the day and time of every show and no tickets as it is on the room card that they scan when entering the theater, if you wait too long and not pre book you may find that a lot of the shows times are already full. Likely because of the large number of passengers on the ship they do not want everything trying to go at the same time. The wheelchair positions in the main theater was at the top as there was steps going to bottom seating.

Even with a large passenger base it was very efficient in getting people on and off the ship.

By: Donald Kerr