life ring
Hits and Misses on Symphony of the Seas is purely my opinion (with some input from my sisters) about the things we liked and didn’t like about the ship during our cruise. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion so it is likely something we didn’t like could be someone else’s favorite thing about the ship.
Hits
One of the best things about Symphony of the Seas is the variety of things to do. There are of course the usual cruise ship things like pools, hot tubs, and organized activities. On this ship there is so much more. Lots of things people can do on their own. It has waterslides as well as 10-deck dry slides. There’s a flow rider, rock climbing walls, mini golf, ping-pong tables, a carousel, piano stairs, running track, and even a zip line among the many options of things to do onboard.
pool deck, waterslides, and Central Park
There’s also a lot of different places to go, which is nice to keep a ship that carries so many people from feeling crowded. At least it never felt crowded anywhere during our cruise, but then again it sailed less than half full so there was a lot more space per person than there would be if the ship was full. Which was definitely a plus. People can hang out on the pool deck, in the solarium, go to any of the fun stuff mentioned above, or go to other areas of the ship like the Boardwalk, Central Park or the Royal Promenade.
When booking a cruise Symphony of the Seas offers extensive cabin choices. Besides the usual inside, ocean view, balcony, or suite, this ship has inside cabins with outside spaces in the balcony cabins above the boardwalk and Central Park, and some inside cabins with a view window above the Boardwalk and Royal Promenade as well. It also has a greater variety of suites than most ships. Even some of the completely closed in inside cabins have a virtual balcony view.
elevator bay decor
The crew on this ship was very attentive. Granted they didn’t have as many passengers to take care of as usual, but they did all seem to go out of their way to help passengers in whatever way they could. Typical of crews on other ships we’ve been on, somehow they manage to remember individual passengers even when they see you in other areas of the ship than where they work, or from one venue to the next if they work more than one area. Even when people aren’t wearing masks I’d find it hard to remember a new group of faces every week, yet cruise ship crews manage it even with people who are masked a lot of the time, which they were on this cruise as it was taken when cruising first started back up again after covid and masks were required in all indoor public spaces.
running track on the promenade deck
Symphony of the Seas had the best outside promenade deck I’d ever seen on a cruise ship. (Royal’s other ships in the same ship class have the same, but Symphony was the first of those ships I sailed on.) I always prefer ships with an outside promenade deck that goes all the way around the ship. It’s the best place onboard for a run. Some ships have top-deck tracks, which are usually just a painted line. Those are awful. Besides not covering a lot of distance, they are out exposed to the elements and on some ships pass through and/or above smoking areas. They’re also generally the main passageway for that deck so crowded with people just going from one place to another rather than actually using the so-called track. Symphony not only had an outside promenade deck fully encircling the ship, it actually had the outside promenade deck set up as a track. Promenade decks are great for tracks. Besides going all the way around the ship, they’re at least partially sheltered. Usually mainly overhead, but this one was behind the lifeboats on the sides and enclosed at the bow so more shelter than usual, but less view since on the sides it’s just bits between lifeboats. It also had distance markers so if you started at their designated starting point you would know how far you went. Signs overhead and along the sides of the ship ranged from informative to encouraging to entertaining. There were also a few chairs and a bit of space at the stern where people could sit and watch the wake go by. On each side an open space held something to do, one with shuffleboard and the other with ping-pong and cornhole.
bionic bar
A big hit for our sailing rather than for the ship itself was that nothing was ever crowded since it had less than half the guests the ship could hold during our sailing. There were some areas of the ship closed since there were less guests. One whole level of the normally 3-deck dining room was closed, as well as at least one section of cabins. Other than that one level of the dining room none of the public areas were closed, and it wasn’t needed as the parts that were open always had lots of empty tables.
gym
The ship had a nice gym with lots of equipment. Some cruise ship gyms have just a few treadmills or elliptical trainers with never any available. This ship had lots, always with plenty of them empty. Which could have something to do with the number of passengers onboard compared to the amount it holds, where on a full sailing perhaps there would not be so many always available, but there were still more of them than average.
skaters doing lifts in Symphony’s ice show
The shows we saw onboard were quite good for cruise ship shows. We didn’t go to every show available, but the water show and ice show were spectacular and the one theater production we went to was well above average.
piano stairs
There’s a lot of things to do onboard that the ship promotes, then there’s also the hidden gems like the piano stairs. Near the buffet people might hear piano music and just think it is background music unless they investigate a stairway between the elevators. While each stair isn’t actually a functioning piano key, they are painted to look as if they are. The stairs do each have sensors that light up the stair and play a song as people pass by. If there is more than one person on the stairway it plays at normal speed, but a lone person can make the song play faster or slower by moving faster or slower on the stairway.
solarium
The solarium was a favorite hang-out spot for us. It had plenty of deck chairs and its own hot tubs, but is enclosed in glass rather than out in the open like the pool deck so more protection from sunburn or inclement weather. During our sailing we could always find open deck chairs there.
rising tide bar
The food was good, and there are quite a variety of places to find it onboard. Besides the dining room and buffet there were a lot of other food venues, some of which didn’t cost anything and others that had a surcharge. It also had a lot of bars, mostly of the normal sort, but the bionic bar had robot bartenders and the rising tide bar was basically a bar on an elevator as it sometimes sat in the Royal Promenade, and other times rose up to Central Park.
dinner in the dining room
The dining staff were very accommodating to special diets. They didn’t just take off the sauce and serve dry food, they made special sauces for the gluten free meals. They even made a gluten and dairy free Grand Marnier soufflé for me and it was delicious. Besides adapting dining room choices for special diets when ordered the previous day, they also had a gluten free section at the buffet, and some of the other food outlets like the café and pizza place had gluten and/or sugar free items available as well. The sugar free desserts they made onboard used a sweetener that is not aspartame or other nasty chemicals.
The photographers at the ports were available if wanted, but not blocking the line exiting the ship so anyone not wanting photos could walk easily past.
wayfinding sign
It’s a big ship, and finding your way around could be confusing, but there is plenty of easy to read and well-placed signage to help people find their way.
The one good thing about covid and cruises is the disappearance of the much-hated muster drill. Instead of packing all the passengers together in a small space now people individually watch safety videos and check into their muster stations on their own instead. This is supposed to be done shortly after boarding. It’s quick, easy, and just takes a few minutes, but there’s always those few people who think the rules don’t apply to them whose names get called repeatedly close to sailing time to complete their drill because the ship can’t sail until everyone does.
As cruise ship apps go, Royal Caribbean’s is really good. One of the best actually. It isn’t perfect, but it is way better than what some of the other cruiselines have. It has a lot of useful features for both pre-cruise and while onboard. Most of them actually work most of the time.
Misses
The first miss happened weeks before the cruise even started when they cancelled a snorkel excursion to Saint John that we had booked months prior for our port stop in Saint Thomas. We booked a different one, but since it was booked not long before the cruise we ended up on a late-day second run of that excursion and the place it went was not nearly as nice as Saint John is supposed to be.
snorkel excursion in Saint Thomas
The next miss happened before we got onboard. Once people got into the port building and upstairs to be processed, they were assigned to one of about 6-8 lines. Choosing which line you wanted to go into was not an option and really shouldn’t have mattered that much since they weren’t very long lines. Some of them had two help desks and others just one, but even the one-desk lines like the one we were sent to wouldn’t have taken long to pass through if people just went to the desk for their line when it opened up. Which they all would have done except for the port worker at the desk end of the lines who would direct people from some lines to a desk for a different line. Mostly from the lines on either side of ours – which had two desks each – into our line’s one, though sometimes she’d briefly go bother other lines.
finally made it to the gangway
All of the other lines cleared several times over while we were stuck in the unmoving line before even the loudly complaining people at the head of it finally made it to a desk. Then the next group stood at the head of that line for ages while all the other lines emptied again and again. People could pretty much only get out of our line by running to whatever desk for a neighboring line emptied before the people in that line got there when the port worker wasn’t looking because she never once sent anyone from our line to a desk. We finally made it to the front of the line and our desk emptied while she was away, but just as we started walking toward the desk she noticed and scurried over to direct people from the next line who had just gotten there so recently they hadn’t even stopped walking yet to our desk instead. Shortly after one for the next line over emptied while she had her back turned so we made a run for it or we’d never have gotten helped. The people behind us were still standing at the front of that line as we finished up and headed off to the ship.
casino
We have gotten used to, and much appreciate, ships with no indoor smoking. This one had a smoking area in the casino. Smoke, of course, does not stay within a designated smoking area. Besides wafting into the rest of the casino, the smoke would sometimes congregate unpleasantly at the entrance to the dining room or waft into the gym where it is extremely detrimental to anyone trying to get in a workout.
The outdoor smoking area wasn’t kept at the back where the ship would sail out of the smoke or within a confined area to keep it from migrating elsewhere. It was right on the main pool deck and as usual the smoke spread well beyond the area where it was actually allowed.
boardwalk area
There was no self-serve guest laundry onboard, which is pretty common these days, but still a miss in my book.
The usual guests saving deck chairs all day in spite of signs saying towels left unattended will be picked up, but they never are so there’s more chairs occupied by towels than people happened on the pool deck. With the reduced number of passengers empty loungers should have been easy to find, but there were sometimes whole sections of chairs claimed with towels or other belongings with very few people in sight.
formal night at the Titanic stairs backdrop in one of the four poses every onboard photographer used
If you happen to buy a photo package it’s hard to get much variety in the pictures other than different backgrounds. The photographers all want to use the same 4 standard poses and most won’t try anything different if you ask. They won’t shoot the photo until you do what they want if you try to do something different on your own either. Their preferred method of delivering the photo packages is by email. We were lucky we had asked for a flash drive because the email they sent had less than half the photos we’d had taken and the ones that were there were not of as good quality as they were on the flash drive.
entrance to the ultimate abyss slides
In spite of all the Covid precautions to keep from spreading germs, I still managed to catch a cold on this trip. At least it wasn’t covid.
One of my sisters was really looking forward to having a beach day, so the biggest miss for her was when the ship did not stop at Cococay due to stormy weather.
The bathroom just had all in one body wash/shampoo in the shower rather than separate shampoo, conditioner, and body wash. Good thing we all brought our own.
the rock-climbing wall was never open at the same time as the zip-line
Although the ship had a big variety of things to do, they never had the sort of things open at the same time that you would be dressed the same for like the zip line and the rock-climbing wall. They seemed to be short on staff to run those things with the same crew members running one for a bit then moving to another. Perhaps they schedule fewer crew when they have fewer passengers, but it would have been nice to be able to do the zip line, followed by the giant dry slide, then the rock-climbing wall since the same clothing would be appropriate for all three. They also didn’t have any ice-skating sessions for passengers.
This was the first cruise ship we’ve been on that had no clothesline in the shower. Usually they have the string you pull across the shower from one side and hook into the other. Even if people don’t do any laundry in their stateroom bathroom, that clothesline is pretty much a necessity for wet swimming suits. With 3 people having wet swimming suits every day and no clothesline we had to get creative finding places to hang them to dry, especially since the shower had nothing available to tie a line across it to. I’ve since purchased wall magnets with hooks on them which solve the problem of nothing to tie lines to in the shower as well as being useful for hanging things on the cabin walls. The showers seem to be more magnetic than the walls because the hooks can hold more weight without sliding down the wall there.
With three people the room could definitely have used a bit more storage space. They never seem to think about that when they add extra beds so a room will sleep more people.
looking over the Royal Promenade
To me the one of the biggest misses of all was the post cruise survey. Instead of having dialog boxes where you could say what you actually want it was just ticking a bunch of meaningless ratings boxes with no opportunity to explain anything or provide any actual input. And since they generally consider anything less than a 10 the same as 0 even the number ratings are useless. Like they don’t really want to know what you think.
Even worse than that is their registration. You can’t pick your boarding time until you complete the registration, which opens at midnight a set amount of days before the cruise – the last one I took was at 45 days. They open this at midnight per the time zone you are in though, not for everyone at the same time. So if you live on the west coast by the time registration opens all of the earliest boarding times have already been taken by people in earlier time zones. To make it fair it should open for everyone at the same time rather than by time zone so all of the people have the same opportunity to get an early boarding time regardless of where they live – or just let you pick it when you book so people who book earliest get first choice. Even at that though it is still better than the cruise lines that just assign you a time with no input on your part whatsoever.
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