Hi Everyone. Well, after 15 years the RV-Dreams Community Forum is coming to an end. Since it began in August 2005, we've had 58 Million page views, 124,000 posts, and we've spent about $15,000 to keep this valuable resource for RVers free and open. But since we are now off the road and have settled down for the next chapter of our lives, we are taking the Forum down effective June 30, 2021. It has been a tough decision, but it is now time.
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Howard, that's the question. Just curious about what it means?
Barb
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Just a couple of people looking forward to this next adventure in our lives. We will be fullting in our HitchHiker with our cats and enjoying life on the road in this beautiful country. Barb
"Freestyle cruising" is mostly a marketing term to indicate a little more flexibility in cruise dining.
On traditional cruises, dinners are served in a main dining room and there are usually two or three seatings. Passengers had to choose a seating time and they were assigned seats. And sometimes there are certain required dress codes on certain nights. You eat at the same time every night with the same people and menu choices are limited.
With freestyle cruising, there are multiple restaurants with different food. You can choose when and where you want to eat and who you want to dine with. So you have more flexibility in your schedule.
It also allows you to have a more intimate dining experience or you can choose fine dining with formal attire if you want. However, many of those restaurants have a "cover charge" that the more popular restaurants don't have.
So, since eating is a huge activity on cruises and dinner was sort of the big event of the day, everyone had to schedule all of their activities around their chosen seating time. With freestyle, there is much more flexibility ... in theory.
They still want you to make reservations and you have to worry about not getting a table in the restaurant you want during primetime. So it's not exactly the "walk-in-whenever-you-want" freedom, but it should be better than the traditional approach.
Now, all of the above is based on what I've read. We've never experienced it. So I'll be sure to let you know how it goes.
We've never been on a cruise, but hope to sometime. That formal dining thing always turned us off. I would love to take a combination Alaskan cruise and land tour. I just didn't like the idea of packing formal attire, just to dine. .
Barb
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Just a couple of people looking forward to this next adventure in our lives. We will be fullting in our HitchHiker with our cats and enjoying life on the road in this beautiful country. Barb
Glad the question was introduced....we are scheduled to do a combo land/cruise to Alaska next July. Have been reading about the new "free style dining". Sounds good to us.
We did a freestyle cruise with Princess in December. Most cruises have assigned seating as Howard mentioned. The freestyle offers that if you want traditional. The other option is to go to one of the dinning rooms when you want to eat. All the main dining rooms have the same menu, so it is really a seating issue. At that point you have several options that include: 1) Taking the next available pair of seats, which usually puts you at a larger table with other people (this was our most common choice). 2) waiting for a solo table for your party size. They then give you a beeper and will presumably ring it when they are ready. 3) apparently reservations are available also. This seemsed to mostly apply for larger parties.
There are other downscale options such as the buffet, burger & dog stand, or pizza stand.
Additionally on our ship there were 2 restaurants requiring a cover where we made reservations. for the wine drinkers I will note the wine list at these dinners was much more extensive than the very limited selection offeren on the main dining room wine card. We learned mid cruise that you could ask for the select wine list in the dining room.
Freestyle is popular now, but I will note that our original freestyle experience was with Windstar 15 years ago, and they would still rank as a favorite cruise line for us. Keep in mind Windstar has no poolside limbo, big shows, horse races, bingo and such, just quiet relaxation and personalized service.
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We are just going for broke as Firstimers and Fulltimers simultaniously.
