Hasahn and I had taken the plunge and opted for afternoon tea midway through our five-day Caribbean cruise on the Virgin Voyages vessel Resilient Lady. We have enjoyed teatime on Carnival Cruises across our roughly 15 cruises together, and were primed for a premium experience. Virgin, after all, is the brainchild of a legit Brit, Richard Branson, so this was gonna be good. Right?

In the interest of full disclosure, the tea experience might have been exquisite. Alas, we never got it. As it happens, tea is served in a bar and lounge area, the Sip Lounge, which sounds both impeccably cool and on-the-nose. Practically speaking, it meant we were being served tea by bartenders instead of regular waitstaff. Additionally, our seats were rather far from the bar. We ordered our tea and a tower of tea treats, after agonizing a bit at the $19 per person charge (it’s free on Carnival, with an option to upgrade your tea for something south of $19).

After our bartender/server returned, sat stuff down, and departed, we took inventory and realized three oversights: 1) only one of the two of us had a knife to spread jam and butter; 2) only one of us had a teacup; and 3) neither of us had any milk, sugar, honey, or other sweetener to add to our tea.

Surely he’ll be back to check on us, we thought, and waited patiently. After five minutes of waiting awkwardly to dive into the bounty before us, we began to wonder if we had been abandoned. At about the 15-minute mark, I went to the bar and canceled our order. Our “server” was visibly agitated that we had escalated the situation in this way, responding “fine!” defensively while trying to stay courteous. The manager followed me back to our table, begged us to at least take a scone or macaron with us for our trouble, but the mood had passed.

Teatime is not really about the food or the drink–that’s why countless children have enjoyed perfectly lovely teatimes with imaginary tea. It’s an experience, and our experience sucked.

And so it goes with Virgin Voyages. A number of people asked me to give them the lowdown on Virgin upon my return, so here goes. I’ll run down the 10 highlights and lowlights of our virgin voyage on Virgin Voyages.

Highlights:

1. Debarkation – yes, it’s a backhanded compliment to say the best part was leaving, but it truly was a revelation gliding off the ship, completely friction-free. Carnival (our main point of reference) spends the last day of the cruise obsessively educating the passengers on how to disembark, creating 22 different boarding zones, special luggage tags, in-room videos, a program in the main theater, continuous announcements on the morning of debarkation–it’s exhausting and anxiety-producing. Virgin does little more than say “the exit’s on Deck 7–leave when you’re ready.” And from our perspective, it worked like a charm. It’s almost like Carnival creates their own bottlenecks and then furiously tries to fix it by blaming the passengers, kicking them out of their cabins by 8am, shutting down breakfast shortly thereafter, and letting you know clearly that your time with them is DONE.
2. Dessert — every single dessert I had (except maybe one macaron in the Galley that was just OK) was exquisite. Two standouts were the Resilient Lady, a petite entremet served in the Galley made of a shortbread base, topped with a rich chocolate filling and a dulce de leche core, covered in blue mirror glaze and a garnished with a gold leaf lady; and the chocolate tamal at Pink Agave, the Mexican restaurant.
3. Opa Hour — what teatime lacked, the late afternoon Opa Hour partly made up for. This Mediterranean full-service, small-plate respite was offered most days (each day?) at The Dock at the back of the ship. The atmosphere is serene, the plates are yummy. Really no notes on this. It’s great (and free!).
4. Hammocks! The brilliant scarlet hammocks are part of each cabin with a balcony, and they are just as relaxing as you might imagine. I also noticed that I couldn’t sense the rocking of the boat while in the hammock, probably due to the hammock swaying in opposition to the ship, so counter-intuitively, it seems like it could help with seasickness.
5. Premium dining — one of the biggest draws of Virgin is that all premium dining options are included in the cruise fare. Each night you get to have a completely different experience, and the restaurants are all distinctive, exciting, and most of the food was outstanding. I can’t pick a favorite.
6. Style –– I have never stayed in a Virgin hotel, but I know that Mr. Branson was looking to recreate the same stylish boutique hotel vibe on his ships. For the most part, it works! Nothing was tacky or garish or epic. The decor was laid-back, comfortable, and chic.
7. The Happenings Cast — Virgin’s version of an entertainment and activities team is The Happenings Cast, and they are clearly an enhancement on what Carnival offers. Some of them provide an SNL-level skit comedy energy to mundane activities, and even the least entertaining among them are very polished. Amanda the Artist was the knockout highlight of our cruise.
8. French toast and French fries — I have a whole blurb or two on the Galley food (Galley being the Virgin equivalent of a lido deck buffet) in the lowlights section, but the French toast gets a special shoutout. I almost never like French toast, but theirs was special. The fries, which seem to be liberally coated with cornstarch, were also unfailingly crisp and well-fried.
9. Soda!!!! It can’t be a huge financial commitment to install two or three smaller-footprint Coke Freestyle machines on a 100,000-ton cruise ship, but what a difference it makes. Free self-serve soda is almost enough on its own to make me cruise with Virgin again (but not quite). It’s so exhausting to order and pay for a soda on Carnival, I will just drink water instead, and that’s saying a lot.
10. Sustainability — Virgin really seems to take environmental stewardship seriously. Sure, it could just be market positioning, but there were enough reminders and small gestures, such as the reusable grab-and-go containers, that didn’t seem showy or performative, just responsible.

Now for the really fun part. I’m ready to let. Them. Have. It. I was expecting a premium experience, and here’s ten ways Virgin FAILED MISERABLY.

1. Maintenance — our first night in the cabin, the sliding balcony door came off the track. That’s never happened in the roughly ten times we’ve had a balcony room on Carnival. Then, when we returned to our room from visiting Costa Maya at 2pm on the first port day, we found maintenance in our room fixing an AC condensation issue, so we had to find somewhere else to go. (Unfortunately, “somewhere else” was the ill-fated teatime.) Three hours later, they kicked us out again, before we had a chance to get ready for dinner. No notifications, no communication, no planning, just “we’re here, now leave.”
2. Customer service — this follows from the maintenance issue. It took two days and multiple interactions to get them to address the inconvenience from the maintenance issue. We went to Sailor Services after being kicked out of our room — they called in the housekeeping supervisor, who had nothing to do with the issue, but promised to escalate it on our behalf. She came back to our room two hours later, told me she had arranged for a vague $100 in “loot” (Virgin parlance for onboard credit) but wasn’t sure how or when it would show up. She graciously offered a bottle of “bubbly” (the housekeeping team has this as a discretionary make-good for any issue, it appears), and I said sure, why not. Then, no further communication until the following afternoon, when another housekeeping supervisor flagged us down as we left the room. He knew there was an issue, but was clueless as to the details of what had happened, so we had to explain again. His face lit up as he suggested (in exactly the same way as the other supervisor) “bubbly” as. a remedy. We accepted (again, after not having received it the prior evening), then were treated to a bottle of white zinfandel. I’m not a wine drinker, but I know that white zinfandel doesn’t have bubbles, and Hasahn informed me it’s like the alcoholic equivalent of a cheap grape juice cocktail. He got our attendant to switch it out for something at least he could choke down. (I was out of luck because, you know, no bubbles.) It was a lot of hassle for a mediocre consolation prize. Then I made the mistake of starting a chat on the Virgin Voyages app to ask about the $100 credit. After being ignored on the chat for over two hours, I went back to Sailor Services in person to confirm that it was still coming. It finally posted to our onboard account that night, shortly before we departed the ship.
3. Dinner reservations — the same night that we got kicked out of our room, we had failed to secure dinner reservations. When this occurs, “sailors” are encouraged to go directly to the dining venues, where the host adds you to a list for walk-ins. We were third on the list after checking in right at 5:30pm, when the restaurant opened. We knew we were third because, get this, Virgin tracks walk-ins by having their hosts scribble a series of cabin numbers on regular yellow sticky pads. Yes, their sophisticated app reservation system is supplemented by Post-It Notes ^TM. Anyway, because of the delay in getting back to our cabin to get dressed and cleaned up after getting booted for the AC issue, and then waiting on the supervisor to get back to us on the remedy, at last we found ourselves clear to enjoy our evening at 8pm, but had received no callback from the restaurant. We then returned to Extra Virgin, the Italian restaurant, where the host was visibly startled to see us reappear after two and a half hours. There were myriad cabin numbers crossed out across several sticky notes, but ours was still near the top of the first one, untouched. “I’m glad you’re here, I was JUST ABOUT to call you.” She really said that to us. We did get seated immediately, but the incident did not reflect well on their system. The bigger issue to me is that I felt something adjacent to food insecurity that evening, and any cruise line that makes a passenger feel this way is doing something wrong. There should be a place for us to eat every single night, so if you scrap the idea of a main dining room, as Virgin has, then there needs to be default reservation to eat somewhere. Virgin restricts passengers from making reservations at any restaurant more than once on a five-day cruise, and two of the six restaurants on our cruise were fully booked before the cruise even started, so it was impossible for us to secure a reservation for that evening.
4. The Galley – but what about the Lido buffet, you may ask. Can’t you eat dinner there? Well, part of a premium cruise experience for me is sitting down to a full-service dinner each night, so no, that wouldn’t be my preference. Even so, the Galley shuts down en masse at dinner so they can repurpose the staff at the six restaurants. This reduces your dinner options to burgers, a tiny selection of hot entrees at the Diner and Dash station, and a smattering of other Galley offerings, along with the pizza and basic bar grub down on deck 7. I dislike the Galley in general–Virgin markets it as a host of individual dining experiences, but at breakfast it collapses into one big multi-station boondoggle. The crowding and lack of seating is most acute during peak breakfast hours. At lunch, it’s a series of tightly curated (i.e.. no variety whatsoever) showcases for different cuisines. I wasn’t impressed with any of them. The sushi looked unappetizing–Hasahn said it was supermarket-grade. My “breakfast burrito” at the Mexican outpost had no egg, tasted bland and was accompanied by six individual tortilla chips and a whisper of salsa in a shallow plastic ramekin. Once, at the salad station, I ordered the featured salad of the day, which was a chicken Caesar salad with kale and eggs. I pointed to the sign and everything–instead they made me a standard Caesar with neither of those ingredients. The bread and dessert station was the only bright spot. The Galley was truly disappointing.
5. The burgers — although I could have included this above, the burgers were so spectacularly mediocre that they get their own billing. I tried an Impossible Burger on Day 2 of the cruise, and chalked up my underwhelm to my choice of the meatless patty, which I assumed they offered as an accommodation and not something to actually try to make good. Then on Day 4, disillusioned with everything else I had tried, I tried the burger of the day, which had a prominent layer of tomato sauce that wasn’t listed at all in the description of the burger. Despite the smoked mozzarella and the pesto and the literally secret sauce, it still read as a high school cafeteria burger, only thicker. I never craved a Guy’s Burger Joint burger (Carnival’s standout lido deck offering) more than I did in that moment.
6. Ship by IKEA — although I enjoyed the stylish decor, much of it was lightweight and dare I say it, flimsy. I appreciate using modular materials so that fixtures and hardware can be easily replaced when they wear out, but compared to the marble, tile, and steel on Carnival’s ships, it seemed like a downgrade. The worst was when I briefly used the handrail in the main theater, and it nearly adopted me. I was almost able to pick it up out of the floor and carry it with me.
7. Indifference — the overall vibe of the cruise to me was that a rich acquaintance is letting you roam about on their yacht for a few days. Have fun, don’t have fun, makes no difference, but yeah, sure, we’re SO GLAD you’re here. Virgin seems to think it’s too cool to cultivate a sense of community among passengers. There’s no cruise director, no curation to indicate that the cruise is beginning or ending, no big welcome aboard to-do, no welcome to your next destination, no welcome back on the ship from your destination, and not really much of anything to differentiate Day 1 from debarkation. It’s a big blob of hey-you’re-on-our-ship-so-whatever.
8. Lack of activities — this one is an overall negative, but I do understand that purposeful restraint in scheduling activities is intentional and can enhance the cruise experience. On port days, Virgin just says screw it, you’re supposed to be enjoying the port, and there is virtually nothing to do. The upside is that I spent a couple of satisfying afternoons simply lounging and enjoying the serenity. That can get lost when there’s endless back-to-back trivia you want to participate in.
9. Cabin layout — ugh. I pack light but still struggled to cram my clothes into the tight closet and shelf space. I can’t imagine how cramped it would be with more than two people in a cabin. The bathroom felt tiny. I appreciated the partitioned shower (on Carnival the default is an open shower with just a curtain), but it eats up a lot of elbow room and induces claustrophobia. I found the low platform adjacent to the bed to be a waste of space. There was only one chair in the room. I wasn’t uncomfortable in the room, but it left a lot to be desired.
10. Teatime — seriously, what’s up with a British cruise line not knowing you need one teacup per person for tea service? I am not ever getting over this.

On the other hand, I did come back from my trip with a lot of tea.