Myself and 16 others were on the Freedom of the Seas ship the week of December 3-10. This week would prove to be the 3rd straight week of illness aboard this ship. Being a Crown and Anchor Society member and cruised exclusively with Royal Caribbean 4 times in the past with excellent experiences, I had great expectations. The ship itself is amazing. But with all of the sanitizing onboard durring our week it made our vacation anything but enjoyable. We were traveling with children and it was very difficult to deal with this illness. Sanitation efforts were horrendous. Imaging if you will, your gardener walking up and down the hallways of the ship with a liquid back pack sprayer, soaking everying in his path, and leaving it to dry. Everything was constantly wet. Try telling your children not to touch the handrails when walking up and down the stairs or not to touch the buttons in the elevator. We spent the entire week telling our children not to touch anything. The service was terrible, the food was cold and the ship was in total disaray. I realize that the virus is not the fault of Royal Caribbean, but the way the issue was handled was totally unacceptable. This was anything but a vacation. When we returned, I continued to follow the developments on RCI's website and the media. I was shocked to hear was was going on the week of the December 10th sailing. The CDC was holding the ship in port until Tuesday for extensive cleaning. Therefore the tip was changed to a modified 5 day sailing. RCI gave all of it's passengers the option to cancel their trip with full refund and a 25% discount on a future booking within the next 12 months OR continue with the 5 day sailing. If they opted to sail on the 5 day trip, they were put up in hotels Sunday & Monday, given $250.00 for meals, were rembursed 50% of the cost of their trip and also given 50% off a future booking withing the next 12 months. (This information was on RCI's website the 11th through the 13th. Then it disappeared from their site. Hummm, I wonder where it went?) Granted the sailing was modified to 5 days, but that seems to be a pretty sweet deal if you ask me. Especially since we were only given 20% off a future booking within the next 12 months, even though we spent and entire week just waiting for it to be over and were never given the option to cancel. The week before us there were over 300 passengers sick. You would have thought that we would have also been given the option to cancel our trip as well. I feel that for what we went through, 20% discount on a future booking is NOT GOOD ENOUGH. For what we paid to vacation on the Freedom with a family of four, I am truely disappointed. The way I see this as a consumer, especally since I have cruised with RCI before, is that I booked the cruise with RCI and on the Freedom because I expected excellent service, excellent food and a beautiful ship, and we received none of that. The short of it all is that "WE DID NOT GET WHAT WE PAID FOR". People have tried to get us to cruise on other lines in the past and I was always firm on my position that RCI was the best line available. Now I'm not so sure. I have written to corporate and received a response. There response was that they apologize and that the 20% discount was a coporate decision and that nothing else would be done. I am going to continue to pursue this until I receive what I think is "CUSTOMER SATISFACTION". If your are thinking of cruising in the future, consider other cruise lines. Maybe they still believe in customer satisfaction and not just think about the all mighty BUCK$$$.

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