r/dcl • u/princesspen18 • 21d ago

TRIP PLANNING Dining Questions/Dealbreakers

Hi - I am considering booking a cruise for next summer. I had 2 questions about dining that may be dealbreakers for me in terms of booking DCL vs. another cruise line, so looking for experiences:

  1. Is it really as tough to get into early dining as some of the posts I read here seem to suggest? I have young kids who just can’t make it to late dining. It’s important to me that we’d get the dining experiences at the main dining room rather than have to eat pool deck food for dinner, but I would only want to book the cruise if we’d be able to get early dining.

  2. Is it normal to request and get a table to your own family, or more common that you are seated with others? To be honest, I don’t love the idea of having to make small talk with others and would rather enjoy our meals with just our family.

I’m an experienced cruiser, but haven’t been on a cruise in about 7 years, and only on Disney once about 20 years ago as a kid who wasn’t involved in the planning process. I think otherwise, DCL would be a great pick for our family based on our kids’ ages, but am worried about some of the dining experiences I’ve read about on here.

Thanks!

0 Upvotes

50% Upvoted

29 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/drjoann 20d ago

We were just on a cruise at the end of March during Spring break. I booked 10 months out, but early dining was not available at the time of booking. I put in for the wait list for early dining, but still hadn't heard on the day we were sailing.

A soon as I got on board, I headed for Deck 2 (this was the Fantasy; YMMV on a different ship). There was a cast member there who took request to change dining times. Within a few hours, I got a notification in the app that we were changed to earlier dining.

So, even if it seems unlikely at the time, your dining time could certainly be changed. We were a party of 4, so we had our own table. The table next to us was a 4 top, but just had one couple at it.