There’s been lots of back-and-forth in the will they/won’t they roll out Dynamic Dining fleetwide. As a refresher, Dynamic Dining was Royal’s answer to the immensely popular Freestyle Dining on rival Norwegian Cruise Line. You dine wherever, whenever and with whomever. There also are no Main Dining Rooms [MDR] on these ships.
Royal introduced it when the Quantum of the Seas was launched and then Anthem of the Seas when she launched last year. They had some hiccups and some backlash initially from Royal’s loyals, but they seemed to get that ironed out and the complaints have gone down drastically. Then came time to roll it out to the refurbished Allure of the Seas after an extensive dry dock and it didn’t go over well; at all. Royal decided to ditch it on the Oasis class and instead reverted back to the traditional MDR experience.It was said that it was going to be postponed while they worked the kinks out.
Royal has now announced that they will not continue to roll it out fleet wide. When announced for the Quantum of the Seas, there was a big push that this was the future of Royal Caribbean. Now that future has changed. The Oasis, Allure and Harmony will have traditional set dining times. Furthermore the Allure will revert back to one main dining room. From passengers currently sailing, each level still has it’s own identity but not special menus.
In a statement sent to travel agents, that can be found at the bottom of this post, Royal Caribbean announced that “The revolutionary Dynamic Dining concept was created for Royal Caribbean International’s newest and most technologically advanced Quantum-class ships. It has been decided not to introduce the Dynamic Dining concept to the rest of the fleet, which was not specifically designed to support it, although previously announced for Oasis Class ships.”
Shockingly enough this will also not be rolled out to the Harmony of the Seas. Harmony is the third Oasis class and it was figured she would follow the Allure’s layout where in the traditional three tier dining room was subdivided into different restaurants. Now it seems she have the traditional three tier single main dining room.
Maybe it’s the way I’m writing this, or maybe I’m just overthinking this, but to have this drastic of a about-face on what was supposed to be the future of the fleet, probably doesn’t bode well for new President Michael Bayley. If i’m not mistaken, I don’t think Adam Goldstein had too much say in this decision. He stated before that it would not be rolled out to any other ships unless everyone asked for it.