What type dining do you prefer?

Mach · August 2, 2013

Traditional late dining for us. We like meeting folks so a round table for 8 is good.

WOOOOHOOOO! I like your style!! I can't tell you how many wonderful folks we've met at dinner and keep in touch with even now. Many of them frequently cruise with us and that makes it even more special.

People who love to cruise are special... of a special mindset that just works with us. Never a cross word, always thrilled to see each other and share our stories of the sea!!

We only get to sail two or three times a year and each one is precious as are the new friends we make on every voyage.

Ciao!!!

cruznjan · March 20, 2015

We do early dining. Hubby is diabetic, and he can't eat late.

Jan115 · March 20, 2015

Janis, thanks for resurrecting this old thread! It made me think of how the cruise dining trend has been evolving since this conversation was started. For instance, Royal Caribbean has introduced their Dynamic Dining, and many cruise lines encouraging pre-booking any timing dining times in advance. What do you all think about the changes being made to cruise dining?

rogue · March 20, 2015

We were always late seating traditional until our last 2 cruises. Last November, we cruised in the Meditteranean and thought due to the length of some of the excursions, we picked Anytime dining. The cruise before that was Canada-New England with friends who were on their first cruise. The Early Seating was far too early, and due to our friends diabetes, the late seating was too late. So we tried Anytime Dining and it worked out perfectly. On our next cruise, we plan to pick the Traditional Late Seating again.

DebbieandJerry · March 26, 2015

We were always late seating traditional dining. The past few cruises, however, we tried the anytime dining and found out that we preferred that over the traditional.

We have learned that we can request a waiter or assistant waiter's table.

We have learned that it is okay to wait 20-45 minutes to get the table that we want.

We have learned that it is okay to eat when we are hungry rather than when the ship tells us it's time to eat.

We have learned that it is okay to skip dinner and we won't be hurting anyone's feelings by not showing up at the table.

We have sat at tables of 2-4-6-8-10 and have enjoyed all of them. Most of the tables for 2 are side-by-side other tables of 2 and we have enjoyed meeting those folks as well.

The only anytime dining that we did not like was on NCL. They use the term anytime dining but you quickly learn that you have to book a reservation.

HeatherMcNally · March 31, 2015

We've only been on the one cruise on the Carnival Conquest last September.. bitten by the bug big time though so doing two THIS September.

We chose Anytime Dining for our cruise and enjoyed it. We were a group of 3 and it seemed we were always sat on our own even when we requested a sharing table except at breakfast.. Which we really enjoyed. I had never eaten with people I didn't know but it was fun to get to know people and see what they got up to onboard and on shore.

Is there anything we're missing with early or late dining that I should consider for this year's cruises? We're on the Elation and Dream b2b.

One thing i kinda liked was making sure we were there at the right time to see the dining staff sing to us lol... their welcome song the first night and the goodbye song at the end were really fun!

DebbieandJerry · March 31, 2015

All of our anytime dining in recent cruising history has been on Carnival ships. We see all the singing and dancing that we would see if we had a seated time. Early dining is just too early for us - especially on the port days.

We opted for anytime because we like the freedom of not having to be at a certain place at a certain time.

motherboarder · January 30, 2019

my daughter and I learned on our very 1st cruise that late seating was the way to go.. we had signed up for early seating and being total novices we thought we were OBLIGATED to be there.. One port we were having a crazy fun time and had to cut it short to return to the ship to shower and get ready for our seating.. that was when we said NEVER AGAIN! if my tummy is growling I grab a snack on Lido or a self serve ice cream.. does the trick every time :)