Finally, my last substantive post of our 5D4N cruise with Royal Caribbean International onboard the Spectrum of the Seas, with a 16-20 June sailing date! I figured I’d quickly put together my notes and comments of our trip right after it, on account that the experience is still fresh in my mind.
Firstly, here’s a simple cost analysis of the trip: because one question that we asked ourselves was whether we’d be better off just doing a 5D4N staycation during this June school holiday break. Here’s what I came up with:
I’ve allocated a healthy sum for dining by equating the kind of dining quality and general experience we had onboard against how much we’d normally pay for similar fare and experiences at restaurants here in Singapore. And my guestimate figure is about $80 per meal for the four of us. So, from a very simple and also limited perspective, it seems that a cruise of this type – to nowhere – is indeed cheaper than an equivalent staycation experience: but with the following huge caveats in mind nonetheless:
The stateroom onboard ship is small. For about $600/night, you can get a semi-decent family room hotel room in Singapore.
Internet quality is on the overall significantly poorer on a cruise.
Many activities onboard are first-come-first serve and require queuing.
And the numerous other intangibles: the entire experience of being on a cruise ship, and that everything you can take part in is within easy walking distance. Bottom line, and keeping in mind that this comparison is surface level only, a cruise does at least seem to make sense cost-wise.
There’s also the cognitive comfort of paying for everything upfront as a lump sum, and not have think further about expenditure, unless you’re going for the more premium packages. So, sort of like going with a tour group with a (mostly) single one-time cost, but also retaining the freedom to plan your own itinerary of activities when onboard – unlike a tour group.
Next, the experience you finally get on a cruise is also really dependent on how intently you are going to take part in the onboard activities – especially also keeping in mind that the whole queuing thing and having wait for your turn can significantly detract from whatever entertainment value you’d derived from the activity itself. For example, a tough question you’d need to ask: would you queue up 30 minutes, possibly in the hot sun, for a 2 minute ride on FlowRider? And unlike a staycation where you’d make up your own itinerary and pay only for what you’d consume, on a cruise like this, it’s a package deal: and you would have already paid to take part in those activities, whether you finally do so or not.
You might need to also keep in mind the suitability of activities for your kids if you’re traveling with young ones. Assuming you don’t want to leave your seven year olds every day at Adventure Ocean, I’m uncertain if there’s enough activity range to suit guests of this age group. Sure, some kids won’t mind doing the same thing over and over and over again. E.g. the water play areas. But these areas onboard are basically tiny, with its offerings will not even begin to approach the range of even a small land-based water park.
So, if you’re traveling with young kids and you’re uncertain if they’re going to get bored or complain about how crowded the children play areas are, doubt if they would appreciate a number of the more adult-oriented gameshows, what’s there left for them then? Well, there’s a small amusement center with the typical child friendly token-operated arcade machines – but these, from a cursory check, require additional monies to play. Assuming that I did not see wrongly, it’s seems like a lost opportunity. Honestly, RC would have gained much goodwill by making these arcade machines complimentary to play, and set play time limits to ensure that everyone in a queue gets a turn without waiting too long.
I noticed a number of elderly guests on the cruise too, and I reckon many of these guests were accompanying members of larger multi-generation families who were all cruising together. Apart from the casino – and we saw a number of these elderly guests there each time we walked through it – and live performances, I didn’t see them much at other activities. Whether it were game shows, small band or musician performances, and certainly not the physical activities like swimming, Sky Pad, RipCord, Rock Wall Climbing etc. I reckon there would had been at least some activities for these guests, e.g. Karaoke, dancing, but they did not seem to be especially prominent or widely marketed and publicised.
Well, the dining experience onboard a cruise at least was still good, and more so since you don’t finally have to join into the tuckshop-like experience every day at Windjammer. There’s really plenty of food onboard. And in fact, we were so well-fed that by Day 3, we had that impending sense of dread as we approached meal times! As in, “Gawd, we are so full from lunch already, and it’s dinner time already!” Seriously, be prepared to get fattened up on a cruise of this type, and work extra hard post-cruise to burn off all that accumulated tummy areas!
At the onset, we were presented with options for a 4D3N or a 5D4N cruise to nowhere. Most of our friends, going with their posts on social media, opted for the former. With the benefit of hindsight now, the 4D3N is probably just about right for you to experience everything you’d probably want on a cruise. This is assuming that you optimize your time by prioritising the activities you want, a bit of luck in avoiding the long queues, and don’t mull your time away vegetating in your stateroom. Both the missus and I felt that 5D4N is a little long for a cruise to nowhere. For us, by Day 4, it felt like we’d had enough time to at least try out once everything we wanted to in the basic package.
The final analysis:
Would we recommend a cruise on Royal Caribbean International’s Spectrum of the Seas? This is a qualified yes for us, and more so if this is your first time on a cruise.
5D4N or 4D3N? Go with 4D3N, save yourself the money, plan your activities expediently and minimise slack time.
Would we come back for another RC cruise to nowhere on this same ship? Probably no. Once is quite enough, unless they change everything onboard ship!
Would we come back for another RC cruise to somewhere on this same ship? This one is a tougher question to answer. A quick check on the costs of longer cruises, e.g. a 9D8N with port calls to Bangkok, Nha Trang, and Ho Chi Minh, on roughly the same stateroom type and deck would cost almost SGD9K. That’s broadly in the same ballpark of what we’d pay for a full-on 9D8N trip to Vietnam and arriving by flight: with the major difference of course being that on a cruise, you’d be spending just perhaps 4 days of the 9 days on excursions, and the rest of that period you’d need to be engaged with something on the ship. So, unless the allure of sailing is what matters most to you, I reckon you’d just as well fly to the country and spend more/less the entire tour length actually in that country.
Our two kids at least enjoyed this cruise, and particularly so for Hannah since she was the only one of us four to really take part in the physical activities. Our next trip we’re putting together for now will be a normal tour, and we’re eyeing Penang. More on that for sure to come if we decide to go with it!