You hit the nail right on the head! I abhor the tought of Freestyle or any other type/named dining on ships as you have so perfectly presented it.

We were a major frequenter of one cruise line that boasts traditional cruise service and dining. They toyed with the dining in the main resturant, and screwd it up royaly. Thus, we do not sail on the ships of that line. It happenned to us on one other several years ago, and we left that one as well.

Along with the open, go and do and eat when and what you lijke, makes the dress code a joke. I am sure there are many of you that don’t give a fig for a dress code. You may like going to Dennys and Golden Corral in your jeans wearing a wife beater, or a halter top, but, please spare us you tattoos and flab at dinner on a cruise. Not to mention the cost, cost, cost for all of the extra dining soopts, and the lax service in the main restaurant, as noticed in many reviews.

If you want real traditional dining, and a true traditional cruise, visit the traditional comment at this site, It is perfect.

My first reason for this is the distant and impersonal service that comes as a result of this style of dining. Mind you I’m not saying the service isn’t good under Freestyle, but it is impersonal. It is no longer possible for me to have the same waiter and busboy every night in the dining room using this concept. It is an absolute impossibility to sit down at a table on a Freestyle ship and have my wait staff no that I prefer nothing but ice water with my meal, that I prefer hot chocolate to coffee at the end of my meal and that I like my steaks could medium. How can they, they don’t know me from the 1000s of other passengers on the ships like my waiter and busboy in a traditional dining room does. This level of personalized service is what separates the cruise dining experience from other 4 or 5 star restaurants available in my city. I can go many places and get excellent service while at home or on a traditional vacation. Only on a cruise however do I come to know the wait staff so well that I want pictures of them for my album by the end of the cruise.

The second reason I dislike Freestyle is that getting to know my table mates on a cruise is one of the highlights of my vacation. I’m far from a social butterfly (more of a social caterpillar actually) and find it difficult to meet new people, especially on some of the newer vast and impersonal vessels. Dinner with new table mates gives me an opportunity to make new friends and learn about new cultures or geographic regions. In some cases it presents the opportunities to make friendships that last a lifetime. Dinner becomes a social gathering that draws out the withdrawn and allows them to feel like they are a part of the community rather then just somebody who is watching the world go by them without knowing how or where to participate.

The final reason I dislike Freestyle is that it is eroding the concept of traditional dinner sitting. I don’t object to other people being given an alternative to the main dinning room, but it is not necessary to denigrate the concept of traditional dinner and make people who enjoy traditional seating feel that they are behind the times or need to be told where to go and when to eat. 99% of those who say they prefer Freestyle over traditional seating do so out of ignorance compounded by NCL propaganda. I have never had trouble arranging my schedule around dinner, never gotten a bad set of table mates, never been stuck with poor servers or in a bad section of the dining room (as if there were such a thing on most vessels). If for some reason I am not able to make my dinner time there has ALWAYS been an alternative way to dine in the evening (even going back as far as 1985 when I first started cruising). Ultimately the demise of traditional dinner seating, along with the increase in add on charges for certain activities or certain foods, and the continued efforts of the cruise lines to expand their revenue stream by finding more and more things to sell to their passengers is destroying the unique ambiance of cruising and turning it in to just another vacation.