Royal Caribbean's Monarch Christmas Cruise - Very Long

Yes, I'm very late in writing my review, but at least I got it done. Here it is and it's quite long. Short synopsis: we really enjoyed the cruise - both the ports (5 in 6 days) and the ship. I wouldn't hesitate to do Royal Caribbean again. I'd probably prefer 4 ports and 2 days at sea, but I difinitely liked doing more ports than 3.
Introduction - This was my 3rd cruise. My 1st cruise was on the Norwegian Sea out of Houston in July ’99 and the 2nd was last Christmas, December 19-26, on Carnival’s Sensation. This cruise was Royal Caribbean’s Monarch of the Seas out of San Juan Puerto Rico on December 24-31st. Ports were St. Thomas, St. Martin, Antigua, St. Lucia and Barbados. This cruise included my immediate family – husband and two daughters, ages 14 and 16. On with the review - I’ll compare this cruise to other cruises at the end.
Cruise Setup/Booking – We booked our cruise with Tara at MyTravelCo.com. She has since left the company but found us great prices on our cruise. We booked 2 outside category F cabins at $540/person at Christmas. While this was an unbelievably good price, the downside was the cost of the airfare to San Juan, Puerto Rico. We live in Ft. Worth, TX and could NOT find cheaper Christmas airfare than the $630 that Royal offered. We booked the cruise in July and I checked airfare prices then and the fares were $775/person. I checked them off and on over the next two months and they were up to about $1000/person. So, we decided to book air with Royal. We looked into their pre-cruise packages, which required a minimum 2-day stay before or after the cruise. The costs were outrageous – anywhere from an extra $300-$400/person. I figured out that the cost of the hotel was about $400/night. So, we decided to do an air deviation of $35/person and come in a day early. So, that made the airfare $665/person. We booked a Hampton Inn suite in San Juan for $179/night for the 4 of us and saved lots of money. One suggestion, if you book air with the cruise line and don’t do a deviation, be prepared to not have assigned seats, get your cruise documents late (booking air means they’ll be late anyway) and not getting non-stop flights to your destination. With our deviation, we were able to find out what flights we were on months in advance and were also able to get seat assignments. I’d also always recommend coming in a day early on winter flights – you never know what can happen, even if you live in sunny Texas. Pre-Day Arrival in San Juan - We left on an American Airlines flight at 8am Saturday, December 23rd, and arrived about 2:30 that afternoon. We waited 30 minutes for our luggage. Then, we went to the Public Transportation booth and got a voucher for an $11 taxi-ride to the Hampton Inn in Isla Verde – right by the airport. The hotel is in an OK neighborhood with the very elegant Wyndham El San Juan hotel about a block away. On the right side of the hotel is a Cock-fighting arena – big fun – and on the other side of the arena is a very good restaurant call Metropol. We didn’t actually eat there, but have had this restaurant recommended by multiple people for great Puerto Rican cuisine. The Hampton Inn is very clean and very new and has a nice pool area and provides an OK continental breakfast. Across the street to the right is a good-sized drug store where you can get canned and bottled soda, medicine, and other sundries. Across the street to the left is a small deli/liquor store with reasonable prices. A block further up the street is the Wyndham El San Juan - a gorgeous hotel with a big casino, multiple restaurants and shops inside. If you can afford it, this is a very nice hotel, but I think its rates/night are $200 and up. We mostly just relaxed and bought snack food from the drugstore and sat out by the pool. The noise from the airport at the pool can be deafening, but is a nice pool, with a small snack bar and a nice hot whirlpool. We walked to the beach by cutting through some hotel lobbies and really found a circuitous route back to our hotel. The beach was nothing special and it’s hard to find direct access there. Also, our hotel porter told us NOT to go there at night – a sobering thought. All in all, I’d probably do the Hampton Inn again, just for the value and ease. However, Isla Verde isn’t that nice an area of town and the Wyndham Old San Juan is situated in a nicer part of town and within walking distance of the pier.
Embarkation – On Sunday, we checked out of the hotel, caught a cab out front and paid $18 for all four of us to go to the pier. We left at 11:00 and got to the ship around 11:30. The ship is very big and was sitting right next to the Carnival Destiny, which is even bigger. We checked in our other baggage with the porter out front and found they would not let us in until noon, so we sat out front with our carryon baggage. Around noon they let us all in and we were checked in and on the ship within 15 minutes. We found our rooms, left our bags and went to have the buffet for lunch (food was OK). Then, since the ship didn’t leave until 10pm, we decided to explore Old San Juan on foot. We left the ship and walked across the street and up several hills where we could see a large fort in the distance. We got there and found it wasn’t El Morro, but Fort Cristobal instead. It was still quite large and we spent about an hour walking around inside. There are some great views of the ocean and the city from the fort. We then walked back to the ship and stopped at some shops on the way and did a little souvenir shopping. Right before we got to the ship, we found the Wyndham Old San Juan, where I stopped and tried out their casino. It’s a small casino – not as nice as the El San Juan, but still fun for an hour. Anyway, I got back to the ship around 5pm and our luggage was already in the room. We had early seating at 5:45pm, so we dressed and went to dinner. At 10pm, they had the life jacket drill and we left port around 10:30 that night.

Cabin - We had 2 cabins on the deck 5, the Showtime deck and while they were small (140sf), they were large enough for 2 per cabin. Our bed was made into a double and stayed made up that way for the rest of the week. Our daughters’ beds were made up as single couches during the day and beds at night. Our bed was quite comfortable and really felt larger than a double. Our beds also didn’t tend to slide apart since they were made up as a double. The beds on are Carnival were just pushed together and made up as singles. There were lots of plastic hangers in the closet with separate hanging spaces for dresses, shirts and slacks. The vanity had two sets of small drawers for a total of 6 drawers and it also had two mirrored cabinets above it which had storage space in them. However, if you put much on the vanity, you’d block these cabinets. There was no safe in the room. The bathroom had a built-in shampoo dispenser with nice-smelling coconut shampoo in it. It also came with little soaps. The bathroom was pretty small and the shower had that annoying curtain that sticks to you every time you move, but, overall, it wasn’t too bad.
The TV in the cabin was a 13-inch (maybe 15-inch) and mounted up on the wall opposite the vanity. It had a pretty good selection of cable/satellite channels, including the ever-popular channels which replay ship events. Also, the movies shown at the movie theater also showed all day on the TV. And, several of the movies were shown all day in Spanish. Finally, most of the cabins I saw were decorated in blue or peach pastels and were very easy on the eyes.
Nice touches: plenty of hangers, lots of drawer/cabinet storage, comfortable beds and pretty décor. Misses: no robes, small bathroom, no safe, no blow dryer and we couldn’t ever seem to get our room as cool as we liked it, whereas our daughters next to us froze. Luckily, we’d brought a small fan, so we were always pretty comfortable.
Once again, the view from our room was through a large but rather dirty window. It was nice to have the window, but the view was definitely not improved by the dirt and water streaks. Finally, all the cabins on this ship occupy the front of the ship, with public areas to the back of the ship. This means no matter where you are, you’re probably on the same deck as a public area. That never caused us any problems and we were on the same deck as the shops, casino and one of the lounges. We walked down 2 decks to the restaurant and 1 deck to the purser’s desk, main lobby etc. We did always take the elevators to the pool decks – 9, 10 and 11 - but it was still very easy to get around.
Clothing-We had brought nice clothes for the two formal nights, and mostly pants for the other nights. I found formal nights were dressier than on Carnival, but still not that dressy. Most men wore jackets and ties and a few even wore tuxes, but my husband wore a jacket and polo shirt on one Formal night and really didn’t look out of place. I brought less clothes on this cruise than on the last and was still fine. Other than formal nights, I couldn’t really tell when there were semi-formal, theme nights, etc. – if they were, there weren’t enough people dressing that way for me to figure it out. I typically wore nice pants and blouses for dinner. During the day, I was in shorts and sandals and usually wore a visor to keep from getting sun-burned. . We really enjoyed the 75-85 degree weather. since it was pretty cold when we left Texas (20s-40s).
Passengers – Although this was a Christmas cruise and they said the ship was full, it never seemed crowded and I didn’t feel packed in like we did on Carnival. We didn’t notice huge crowds of kids or really any particular age group. It just seemed like a good mix. Also, since this ship visits so many ports, you don’t have 3 days to spend with your fellow passengers so we didn’t get as much interaction with each other as we had on other cruises.
Children/Teen Programs – We had our two teenager girls and, unfortunately, the 16-year-old was sick with the flu for most of the cruise. The 14-year-old participated some in the teen program, but other than having their own teen disco, she didn’t feel like the program was as good as the one on Carnival. She found a group to hang out with and they spent time together in the evenings. Having both girls in the cabin next to us (rather than down the hall and around the corner, like last cruise) made it much easier to keep up with them. We just made sure we gave the 14-year-old curfews and things went much more smoothly than the last cruise where we never knew where she was. I also brought 3 walkie-talkies, which we rarely used. Maybe if we’d had more at-sea days.
Service - We enjoyed our waiter, busboy and room steward. Most of room stewards were Jamaican but the food servers were more mixed nationalities – Romanian, Jamaican, Indian – the whole range. We tipped our steward and the waiters the recommended amount which really added up for 4 of us. We also tipped the Head Waiter and the Wine Steward $15 each because we saw quite a lot of them throughout the cruise. The Head Waiter was a strange fellow with some kind of German accent who reminded us of Hannibal Lecter in his prissiness. But, he was at our table almost every night with something silly to say and helped cut food and serve, so we felt he deserved some kind of tip. Also, on Christmas Day, I gave our waiter, assistant waiter and room steward $5 and $10 phone cards. They were really happy to get them and planned to use them in San Juan to call home.
Food - There were two dinning rooms: the Flower Drum Song (4th deck) and the Brigadoon (3rd deck), with main or late seating. We were assigned main seating in the Brigadoon at a table for 8 in the very front of the dining room by the window. Both dining rooms were pretty much the same. I never saw much congestion waiting to get into either dining room except for the late seatings. But then again, I’ve learned to show up at the dining room about 5 minutes after it opens and you never have to wait. Also, I still hold with my theory have a theory either cabins category or early booking means you get window seats in the dining room – I just haven’t figured out which it is.
The food was better than the Norwegian or Carnival food. Also, the waiters were still very generous if you wanted additional appetizers, entrees or desserts. I had a few times that I didn’t like an item – they immediately got me a different one. Also, I enjoyed the Shrimp Scampi and Lobster so much, they brought extra servings. The people who sat with us at our table came in 15-30 minutes late every night. So, we usually had to wait a little for them to catch up to our entrees, but it wasn’t too bad.
We ate in the dining room for all evening meals – the food was that good. We also ate there for a few lunch meals, but they were open seating most of the time and although the food was still good, it wasn’t as good as the evening meals. We ate all our breakfasts and some lunches in the Windjammer Cafe which was pretty mediocre, but sunny and airy. Something funny about Royal is that they don’t have food available all the time – no 24-hour pizzeria, like Carnival and if you wanted a snack after 10pm, sometimes, no food areas were open. We could always have used room service, but we never tried it. Finally, there were rarely lines for meals in the Windjammer.
As for purchasing drinks, we brought a bottle of rum and some 2-liter bottles of Coke and made some drinks for the room. We also bought a few drinks at the shows and mostly bought some bottles of wine at dinner. We brought a nice bottle of wine from home for one meal and they opened it for a $10 corkage fee. That was a little hard to take, but I got really irritated when I won a bottle of champagne at an art auction and they told me I’d still have to pay the $10 corkage fee since they didn’t sell that particular brand on their wine list.
Activities/Shows – We went to 2 of the evening shows – 5 days in port tends to wear you out in the evening. The shows we saw were quite enjoyable. One featured a comedian I’d seen on HBO and he was very funny. The other show was a set of acts, including a ventriloquist, and it was also very funny. Sightlines were fine in the showroom and you didn’t have to get there 30-45 minutes early. We were there 15-20 minutes before and still got pretty good seats.
I love to gamble, so I spent a lot of time in the casino. They had about 15 blackjack tables, all at a $5 minimum, a couple of Caribbean Stud tables, a Roulette tables and a Craps table. There were about 250 slot machines. The casino was never very crowded. They had some fun contests – blackjack tournaments, slot tournaments, etc. and I played those a few times. I didn’t do much on the slot machines, but I had some good luck at Blackjack and Caribbean Stud – however, note that the bonus payoffs for high hands in Caribbean Stud are much lower than in normal casinos.
I went to Art Auctions on three different days and bought a few pieces. I ended up getting a small island print just by volunteering a price of $50 for it – I decided later on that I didn’t like it that much, but it was too late by that time. So, moral, don’t bid on items unless you REALLY like them. We also purchased two more Salvador Dali prints from Dante’s Inferno at very reasonable prices. But, the prices on different Dali prints varied greatly, so we really had to be choosy based on price. One auction day, they gave me so much champagne that I came to dinner afterwards quite tipsy. I learned to watch my intake after that. We also went to the Art Auction on the last day of the cruise when the prices of everything are about as low as they’re going to go. This last-day auction was different in that they had all the paintings that hadn’t been purchased previously and told us to just go pick out what we liked, bring it to the front and they would auction each piece of art at rock-bottom prices – rock-bottom being their term – I found that their version of rock-bottom and mine were quite different. We ended up purchasing our 2nd Dali print at this auction for $300. So, all in all, we really like our two Dali prints but could have done without the $50 print.
Ports and Shore Excursions – We did 3 shore excursions in 5 ports through Royal. I’m getting to where I’m just not very fond of packaged shore excursions. I always end up feeling like I’m in a herd of cattle being shuttled from place to place. Also, paying for 4 shore excursions at a time can add up to some serious money. We ended up doing two of them with all of us and one with just my husband and I. They were OK but I didn’t really ‘love’ any of them.
One other note, Royal does allow you to ‘check out’ beach towels before you exit the ship. Then, you turn them in when you return. And, I use the term ‘beach towel’ loosely – they were more like large bath towels. They weren’t big enough to lay on and after the first day, we always took 2 per person. Carnival and Norwegian both provided really nice beach towels, so of course, this was the first cruise where I didn’t bring my own large beach towels. Drat.
St. Thomas – We arrived in St. Thomas on Christmas Day and since my daughter was ill, we really didn’t want to do a shore excursion. So, we got off the ship around 9am and walked to some of the shops nearby. We then walked a few blocks to the entrance for the sky-tram to the top of the hill/mountain that overlooks the port. It cost $12/person to take a round-trip ride and it was wonderful. It was a crystal-clear day and we could see all over the island. They also had a snack-bar and a few shops up there, so we just relaxed and enjoyed the view. We then went back down and had lunch on the ship. Then, my non-sick daughter and I decided to go to Megan’s Bay. The taxi ride cost $6 each, each way, and then it cost $3 each to get in. So, the total cost was $15/person. However, the beach was unbelievably crowded and we each had one tiny Royal Caribbean beach towel which we tried to lay on amongst the multitude. The water was OK, but nothing special and we were rather disappointed with Megan’s Bay.
St. Maarten – St. Maarten was the only port that required a tender and I’ve heard that they’ve now finished the pier there, so it no longer needs tender service. Again, we didn’t do a shore excursion here. We got on the tender around 9:30am and faced a large line. However, we broke in line and pretended ignorance and got on the tender within 15 minutes. Yes, I felt guilty, but not guilty enough to wait an hour. We could have avoided the long line had we come later – like around 10:30 or 11:00. Once on shore, we shopped a little and were constantly asked if we wanted a taxi. We said, ‘No, no, no, no’ and kept shopping. The shopping was very good at St. Maarten. Then, we walked further down the beach and found some chairs with an umbrella in front of a Chinese restaurant called Captain’s or something. A guy came out immediately and said that we could rent four chairs for $10 and the umbrella for $5. We agreed and asked where we could change. He showed us to a small bathroom in the restaurant and we changed there – I’d recommend you just wear your bathing suit under your clothes and then you don’t have to worry about changing. Anyway, the water was a beautiful blue and we played at the beach for about 2 hours and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. We then tendered back to the ship, ate lunch and spent the rest of the day on the ship.
Antigua –We did a 1/2 day tour of Antigua - Historical Antigua, I think - and it was OK, nothing special. I'd have probably enjoyed going to a beach more. We did learn many interesting facts about Antigua – they have 32,000 people that live on Antigua and were hit very hard by the hurricane in ’95. Of their total population, about 200 men are in jail and live in very primitive conditions. Crime is low because everyone knows everyone else. Our tour went to Nelson’s Dockyard which I didn’t find very interesting but they had a very cheap liquor shop on the site where I bought a small bottle of Cavalier rum for about $2. It’s great rum – try it. In the afternoon, we shopped in town, an other than the thousands of ‘Do you need a taxi?’ questions, shopping was pretty good – not quite as good as St. Maaten, but better than Barbados later. Overall impression of Antigua – very poor, but the people are nice and probably the beaches are very nice too. Lots of rich people estates there.
St. Lucia – We did the Land and Sea tour on St. Lucia @$69/person for 4 of us. My main tip about this tour: make sure you're up in the 1st half of that tour group and you'll do Land in the morning and Sea in the afternoon. We were just behind the 1st half and ended up doing Sea and Land - I'll tell you, it's not that exciting having rum punch at 9am. Also, when they say they'll take you to a beach, they mean they'll take you to the middle of a cove and let you jump in the water and swim to the beach. Finally, St. Lucia vendors will swarm you every time you get off the tour bus, trying to sell bamboo and black stone necklaces. We said ‘No, thank you.’ dozens of time and got really tired of it. We had a pretty nice buffet lunch and then did our Land ride back. It was hilly and bumpy and noisy and pretty miserable. I don't know if I'd recommend this whole tour, but it's a good way to see the whole island - there's just not much of that island that's flat. I didn't like St. Lucia much but many other people loved it. Oh, well, maybe if we'd done Land and Sea instead of Sea and Land. We got back in time to do some shopping at the pier and I found a wonderful silk shirt in a shop for $32. Also, most of the stuff the vendors were selling was available in these shops – at slightly higher prices. And, while they would take U.S. money, they didn’t want to make change and would often make change in Caribbean coins. Barbados – In the morning, we took a taxi into town and shopped a little there. I didn’t enjoy the shopping as much there and we only shopped for about an hour. We caught a taxi back to the ship and had lunch. Then, in the afternoon, we did the Best of Barbados shore excursion w/Rum Distillery. I'd rather just have done Best of Barbados and skipped the Rum tour, but my husband really enjoyed it. Our bus driver was great and told us all about Barbados. I really liked Barbados - you can still sense the British influence there. Everyone is very polite. There are also many very nice resorts and living areas in Barbados.
At Sea – Our last day was an at sea day and we were really ready for it. One of the daughters spent a lot of time by the pool and got burnt. I got in the pool for a while and then did the last art auction that afternoon. All in all, a very relaxing day.
Disembarkation - We got off the ship fairly quickly (by 9:30am) after waiting in a lounge for about an hour. Our flight wasn’t until 2:30 and we could’ve gone to Royal Caribbean Club, dropped off our bags and explored San Juan some before our flight out. But, we would have had to carry all our bags there or take a taxi and we just decided to take the Royal bus straight to the airport instead. We had transfer tickets for the bus but they never asked for them. Anyway, we got to the airport around 10:30 and waited. We already had boarding passes but found that it was a nightmare for people without them (anyone who did Royal’s air but didn’t do a deviation) since they had no seat assignments and all the computers were down. Also, the whole East Coast had been virtually closed down the night before due to snow, so I assume people were sleeping in the airport. Once we got on our flight, we were offered $400/person and overnight at a nice hotel to give up our seats and fly out the next day – in other words, spend New Year’s Eve in San Juan and fly out on New Year’s day. But, we turned it down, being tired and not being able to stand the thought of getting all our bags off and packing and unpacking again. We returned to Dallas to find snow and ice and knew our vacation was officially over. Overall – We enjoyed this Christmas cruise more than last one since this one started on Christmas Eve rather than December 19th. We didn’t feel like we missed all of Christmas week. Also, the weather much warmer in South Caribbean than in the Western and weather much colder at home, so it was a nice break to be in warm weather. We enjoyed visiting five ports but probably could have done without either Antigua or St. Lucia and had two at-sea days. I realized from doing these winter cruises that summer cruises, especially in the Southern Caribbean must be boiling hot and miserable. I don’t know if I could take a summer cruise there and I’m from hot, old Texas. Comparisons between Carnival, Norwegian and Royal Caribbean - Norwegian was classier than Carnival but comparable to Royal. However, Norwegian seemed stingier about their food than both other lines. Norwegian and Royal have more subdued interior decorating than Carnival. Norwegian seems to be the priciest of all three lines, with Royal next and Carnival coming in with the best prices. However, of the three lines, I liked Royal the best – they were a good value, they were generous with their food, their food was exceptional and they didn’t seem crowded. However, Carnival is a great value with large, comfortable cabins. We enjoyed the larger ships on Royal and Carnival and probably wouldn’t go back to ships under 78,000 tons. Finally, Carnival seems to have the best kids’ programs – at least, according to our teenager. Finally, Norwegian’s theme cruises are very interesting.
We doing a 5-day cruise from New York to Canada and back in June on the Carnival Victory – the prices were good enough that we could try out balconies on this cruise and we’ll get to see how crowded a 104,000 ton Carnival ship can feel.
Lucy Johnson!