Navigator of the Seas

You can see the sea from almost anywhere on Navigator of the Seas. From the steakhouse. From the Japanese restaurant. From a panoramic lounge at the very top. From a public washroom on Deck 11 whose view startles everyone who wanders in.

The ships that came after her are bigger and better equipped, but they bought that space by turning their neighbourhoods inward. She still looks outward, and you notice it long before you think about her age.

She is also built to a human scale, and that is what her regulars put ahead of everything else: you know where things are after a day or two, you keep running into the same faces, and you never feel like you are crossing a shopping mall. That is an argument, and it carries as much weight as the list of facilities.

What the 2019 refit moved

The fitness centre used to sit at the bow of Deck 11, directly above the navigation bridge — the finest position on the ship, given over to treadmills. During the 2019 amplification, the line did the opposite arithmetic: it pushed the gym aft to Deck 12 and built cabins in its place. The announcement at the time billed these as the brand's first forward-facing staterooms.

Not every ship in the class got that treatment. She and Mariner of the Seas were amplified; Adventure of the Seas never was. That is the dividing line to keep in mind for everything that follows: on paper these ships are twins, but in the details they stopped being twins some time ago.

The effects of that refit still cut both ways today. And it left, right at the top of the bow, an anomaly the deck plans give away if you know where to look.

The cabins

The ship shows her age in exactly one place, and this is it. The public spaces hold up to inspection, including inspection by people who come aboard intending to catch them out: bars, lounges, restaurants, open decks — all of it is maintained. The cabins have had new carpet and the repairs they needed, but the furniture, the vanity and the bathroom are original. The reason is simple and rarely explained. A ship of this age returns to dry dock regularly, and how often depends neither on the line nor on the ship's condition: it depends on the rules of the flag state she is registered under, and those rules tighten as she ages. But these are regulatory visits: hull, machinery, propulsion. Refurbishing cabins is not what they are for.

That said, these cabins have an advantage her sister ships do not, and this one owes nothing to the 2019 refit: it comes from the way her hull was drawn in the first place.

On her sisters, the balcony is carved into the side. To create it, the cabin wall was pushed inward — the balcony gained exactly what the cabin lost. Here, that wall was never pushed in. The balcony sits outside it, against the outer skin, and it projects from the ship's side.

The cabin therefore keeps its full length, and you feel it. Category for category, these cabins run deeper than the ones on ships far newer and far larger.

And the hull does not only decide how deep the cabins are. It also decides, from one end of the ship to the other, how wide they are — and that appears on no booking page anywhere.

Three reservations now, and they count.

The mattress is hard. Not firm the way a hotel chooses firm — hard. The exception is instructive: in the suites it is noticeably softer, which points to a choice made by category rather than a company standard. You can ask for a mattress topper, and that is the right move, but none of this is written down anywhere. It is not in the app. The laundry does not answer its phone, because it is overwhelmed. You have to go down to the guest services desk and ask in person — and you have to do it on arrival, before turndown service, because after that there are none left. The topper improves matters without solving them, which is worth knowing before you count on it.

The plumbing is temperamental, and not on any one deck in particular: this is a shipwide reservation. A toilet that does not flush every time, a showerhead that sputters. Nothing serious, nothing permanent, but regular enough to belong here rather than in the small print.

The third point has no fix, and it applies only to the interior cabins and the standard oceanviews. The sofa there is longer than the stretch of wall it is meant to sit flat against. So it juts into an already narrow passage, and moving it achieves nothing: there is nowhere else for it to go. In practice, two people cannot pass each other at the foot of the bed, and whoever sleeps on the wall side climbs over the mattress to reach the bathroom at night. The one useful move is to have the beds separated on the first evening. You lose the double, you gain a corridor — and over seven nights, the corridor is worth more.

One last thing, and it applies to only part of the ship. The cabins created by the 2019 refit are not fitted quite like the others, and the difference falls on a point almost nobody thinks to check.

At the table

Opinions on this ship's food look irreconcilable. The same restaurant gets praised and demolished, often in the same week, by people who ordered the same dish. It is not a question of cooking. It is a question of temperature.

Anything that waits arrives lukewarm, and that reaches almost every table aboard. The buffet, where the scrambled eggs, the bacon and the roast potatoes come out barely warm. The main dining room, where a filet mignon can sit on its tray until somebody comes to collect it. The seafood restaurant, which served one couple a cold chowder and a cold lobster tail on the same evening. The burger counter. The bread, more or less everywhere. And right down to the Mexican counter, whose tortillas arrive cold.

Anything cooked in front of you is hot. The morning omelettes, made to order with a buzzer handed to you. The buffet's stir-fry station, where you build your bowl and wait two minutes. The sports bar on the promenade, the only counter on the ship that cooks to order and by the portion — and the one place the hardest-to-please eaters put at the top of their week.

That is the whole of what there is to understand about dining on this ship, and it converts into a single habit: look for the flame. Where something is cooking in front of you, you will eat well. Where something is waiting under a lamp, you will eat lukewarm. It holds at the buffet at seven in the morning, when the room is empty and the omelette takes three minutes. And it holds at dinner: the earliest seating guarantees a hot plate, for exactly the same reason.

A word on the dining room itself, because its layout is not decorative. It occupies three levels, and each floor corresponds to a dinner arrangement: open seating on Deck 3, fixed seatings on Decks 4 and 5. Waiters stay on one floor for the whole week, which explains why the same restaurant produces such different experiences depending on where you were placed. Embarkation evening, though, is atypical everywhere: long queues, reservations poorly honoured, slow service. On the following nights, the same room at the same hour takes two minutes to get through. If you have to skip one dining room dinner, skip that one.

The rest sorts itself out predictably. The Japanese restaurant is the best on board, and it stands comparison with what newer ships are doing. The Italian restaurant, on the other hand, serves a chef-driven kitchen its sign gives no hint of, and the gap between what you expect walking in and what turns up on the plate is the most consistent disappointment on the ship. The pasta is made on board and nobody disputes it; it is the sauces that throw people.

As for the buffet, it has themed evenings, and the best of them are the ones drawn from the crew's own kitchens.

Moving, playing, climbing

If there is one thing this ship does better than average, it is keeping her passengers occupied, and the agreement on that is unanimous. Her ice show at Studio B is regularly named the best in the fleet. It opens with a drone sequence that impresses as much as it frustrates: you want them back during the performance, and they do not return. The rink is also open for public skating. The climbing wall is mounted on the funnel itself, around the line's emblem. There is laser tag, a mini-golf course open at any hour, a surf simulator, and an escape room built into the former chapel.

Two practical warnings, because both are paid for in lost time. No cameras are allowed on the waterslides, neither handheld nor strapped to the body: the rule is posted nowhere and it is enforced at the top of the stairs, after the queue. And several of these activities require specific clothing — long trousers, socks, closed shoes depending on the case. The equipment is provided, the clothing is not, and you are turned away on the spot. That decision gets made in your suitcase, not at the door.

The bars, the spa, and what does not work

The Bamboo Room is the tiki bar on the Royal Promenade, and it has one property nobody ever explains: it is acoustically cut off from the main thoroughfare, a few metres away from it. You leave the noise, you turn a corner, and you can hear each other. That is why so handsome a room is so often empty — from the promenade you neither see it nor hear it. It has its own cocktail list, which changes with the seasons, and its own small plates. It has no blender, though: if you want something frozen, you have to go up to the pool deck.

The pub serves its beer in cans and bottles, with one or two taps at best; for draught, you want the sports bar. The panoramic lounge at the top is air-conditioned and opens 180 degrees of sea view.

The spa is the weakest zone on the ship, and it deserves to be said plainly. The gym, banished to the far end of Deck 12 during the 2019 refit, is small and tired, and the walk to reach it is enough to put some people off — there are passengers who never went once, for that reason alone. As for the treatment rooms, they sit directly beneath the mini-golf course. You hear the footsteps and the chairs being dragged, and an hour's massage does not survive it.

The casino is small, the tables are saturated at peak hours, and the smoke is unmistakable. There is no genuinely protected section.

That leaves the lifts. The ship has two banks, and one car out of service in one of them was enough to push waits to twenty minutes at peak hours — enough that one passenger ended up taking the stairs without bothering to try. It is not the rule, but it happened, and it changes the character of a week when your cabin is on Deck 10 and the dining room is on Deck 3.

A moment on board

You go up to Deck 7 without quite knowing why. The aft lifts leave you in a corridor lined with posters and old film stills, and you turn left.

The room opens onto nothing. It overhangs the Royal Promenade, and from the railing you can see the indoor street down its whole length, end to end. You settle into one of the leather armchairs.

From here, the ship watches herself work. The shops have put their tables out, the bars spill onto the walkway, a band is setting up somewhere forward. A family crosses in single file, the youngest trailing behind. Two passengers meet, stop, talk for a minute, go their separate ways. A group parks itself in front of a window display and blocks half the street without noticing.

Behind you, the card room. Tables, more than anyone needs, and a shelf of board games free to borrow. Two players have been settled in for a while and show no sign of moving. The books, for their part, are mostly the ones other passengers left behind. You do not come up here to read.

You had meant to sit for five minutes. Twenty minutes later you are still following strangers with your eyes, and you have started inventing destinations for them.

“Nothing worth having on this ship announces itself. You have to know where to look, and what to ask for.”

Selvague