On Ship Entertainment

These days, all cruise providers have some sort of on ship entertainment.  If you are cruising on Viking, Cunard, Virgin or others like this, their entertainment options are going to be a bit different than Carnival, Princess, Celebrity, Norwegian, and Royal Caribbean. The former have entertainment options that more geared toward adults and sophistication like musicals, dancing, art and that type of stuff.  The later might have comedy shows, magicians, game shows, quiz's, movie night, etc...  For the most part, all have pools and spa's.  Some ships have water slides, rollercoasters, surfing, and racetracks.  So if you are trying to decide to take a cruise, you need to determine what types of entertainment you like.  Do you want to be around a bunch of kids on the ship?  If not, then you might want to take a cruise a Virgin (18+ only) or some of the more upscale cruise lines where there are not as many children on board.  Several providers have sailings where kids come free.  Of course these sailings are going to be heavy on kids and families, so you really have to think about what you are wanting on your cruise.

Now back to my review of the entertainment on the Royal Princess ship.  The entertainment crew was great.  They went out of their way to try and make sure everyone had a great time.  They came ready with jokes and lines that I am sure they had said 100 times, but to all of us on the ship it was the first time and they were funny.  Every evening when the room attendant cleaned our room, he left a sheet of paper that had all of the next days activities on the ships as well as information about the different dining options and opening and closing times.  Something that Princess also has is their medallion smart phone app.  Now this app is not perfect and the internet that is provided to allow the medallion app to function while on the ship is not perfect, but for the most part, it worked fairly well.  The app allows you to see what entertainment is available and you can bookmark or mark that you plan to attend that event on that day.  If you dont mark it, it doesnt mean you cant come, it just gives an idea to others how many people might come to it. 

The ship I was on had really 5 entertainment rooms.  These differed in size and audio/video capabilities.  We spent most of our time in the Princess Theatre, Princess Live, Sapphire Lounge, and the Piazza.  We took part in a bunch of musical trivia's they had all week one.   They give out prizes (coasters, bags) for the winners of the trivia's.  We also had a comedian on board that did 2 different shows during our week.  He was funny and entertaining.  We had a comedy magician also do two shows, we caught one of them and he was also entertaining.  There were several different musicians on the ship who were playing seemingly all of the time.  The picture you see for this post was the Level 5 Piazza and there was a band set up there that played pretty much every night.  My wife and I were able to do some dancing, which was fun.  The entertainment crew also did some game shows which they did a great job on.  One of the other cool things our ship did, was to bring in a past winner of the Iditarod (The Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, more commonly known as The Iditarod, is an annual long-distance sled dog race run in early March).  He also brought two of his young sled dogs and allowed pictures and petting of the dogs after he was finished.  Lastly, they had the two top culinary people on the ship give some cooking presentations and speak about the food and how it was all managed for a ship that size.  Then they gave us a very quick kitchen tour to see some behind the scenes views.  We certainly had some down time on the ship, and after several days, this was not a bad thing, but in all, the entertainment was good and we had a nice time.

On Ship Entertainment Rating = 4 (on a scale of 1 to 5 with 5 being the highest)