15th entry - Legend of the Seas (Part 1)

My parents and an aunt are taking a cruise on board Royal Caribbean Line's Legend of the Seas this weekend. Over the next 4 days and 3 nights, we would be sailing on the high seas to Penang and Port Klang, experiencing the luxury of a 4-star hotel, with fine dining and a wide spread of international cuisine, and enjoying refreshing sea breeze and fabulous views of the Straits of Malacca... or so we are led to believe.


It was a last minute decision by my dad to try this liner. Costing nearly $700 per person (including taxes and pre-paid tipping - which just doesnt seem right in principle - shouldnt we be giving gratuities if we feel that service is good, rather than assuming that it will be so, and pre-paying according rates determined not by us but by the service provider?! Anyway...), the trip seemed a little expensive. A similar cruise on board Star Cruises would cost only $500 per person (for the same type of room we got, which was the stateroom with window at the lower deck). Sometimes there are even discounts, and off peak rates are also lower. The million dollar question in my head - is it value for money?



The representative of the agency selling RCL cruises in Singapore boasted that most customers who went for both Star Cruises and RCL tours preferred the latter. This was hardly reassuring and certainly not convincing because I have a low opinion of Star Cruises. I sailed on board Superstar Leo, Virgo (twice) and Gemini some years back and I felt that the food quality was mediocre and the menus were repeated for meals within the same day and throughout the trip so we hardly got to eat anything new; the service personnel were not quite as friendly or helpful (most didnt even speak proper English) and the room amenities and facilities were old and not well-maintained (there were stains on the old sofa and the stench that it was giving out was quite unpleasant; all sorts of stuff were floating in the pool, which was hardly used, for good reasons).



Surfing online, I discovered that many patrons of RCL (Legend of the Seas in particular) left their comments on cruise websites. Some reviews by professionals and guests were good, but on the whole I felt that the cruise experiences were mixed depending on where you embarked, so I gather that the standard of service delivery is quite inconsistent for this liner. One really bad review (the only one coming from a customer who embarked from Singapore) caught my eye. Fortunately, this customer who complained about the service and room appeared to be one who gets pampered on luxury travels and had really high expectations, so she was disappointed when many things didnt go smoothly (e.g. long waiting times during embarkation and disembarkation etc). I just hope that the service level has improved since then, and there are enough systems in place to ensure that staff knew what to do when things went wrong.



Having good systems and frameworks in place are important, but unless precision robots are delivering the service or staff are so well-trained that they can deliver the service consistently even under the most adverse conditions (like in an earthquake), hiccups are inevitable because of human factors. Good service recovery is just as important as good service delivery because people tend to remember bad incidents that they had to suffer during a bad experience and expect remedial action to be taken by the service provider. What's really important is how service personnel (especially the frontline managers) deal with the problems to provide effective service recovery.



I've developed a simple scale to measure the delivery and recovery standard on this cruise, which I will test on my trip.

(To be Continued ...)