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Specialty Dining with Kids


JasonL

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Our "No Kids Cruise" has been canceled and our first time trying specialty restaurants with it. I have blind faith that our Thanksgiving week cruise will happen. I normally wouldn't think about doing an Ultimate Dining Package with the kids, but desperate times call for desperate measures. We will have a 14,10,5 yr old. Do we just book the package for Me,Wife,14yr old and then bring the others along? I understand the 5 yr old is free and the 10 should be $10/meal. I have a massive desire to book up everything possible on my first cruise back.

Anyone else do this with their kids? Any challenges bringing kids to specialty restaurants? 

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On 2/6/2021 at 3:11 PM, JasonL said:

I understand the 5 yr old is free and the 10 should be $10/meal. I have a massive desire to book up everything possible on my first cruise back.

Anyone else do this with their kids? Any challenges bringing kids to specialty restaurants? 

We cruised with our son for Thanksgiving a few years ago.  It is best to buy dining package for adults and probably 14 yo, then pay for the 10 year old's meal a la carte.

You will just need to be sure that when you make reservations to let them know your total party number.

 

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  • 1 month later...
  • 4 weeks later...

The cruise planner fine print tells you to book for the total number of people in the party and pay for them as adults. Then they refund the kids to you as an OBC. Really dumb in my opinion and probably just bad website design that it requires that. You can try just booking the adults but you could run into problems with your first “courtesy” reservation.

We enjoyed specialty dining with our kids on Mariner in January 2020 but it was a 3 night sailing so it was affordable and allowed us a different restaurant each night. 

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  • 1 month later...

@tonyfsu21 I wanted to ask a question about this! My two kids (daughter will be 11, son will be 10) will be coming to most specialty restaurants with us on our Symphony cruise. We got the UDP, and are really excited about it. We plan to eat our meals together, and I'm a little concerned about my son. He is a genuinely picky eater (PBJ every. single. day. since the age of 3), and I'm concerned that even some of the kids menus will be too "adventurous" for him. I don't want to be a problem customer, but if we wanted to go to Wonderland or 150 CP, would they be able to get him something super basic (chicken fingers, burger, pizza, pasta with meatballs, etc.) or is that putting me in the category of a real pain in the.....? My daughter is willing to try new things, and likes a lot of what I've seen on the menus, so I'm not concerned about her.

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23 minutes ago, dandi799 said:

@tonyfsu21 I wanted to ask a question about this! My two kids (daughter will be 11, son will be 10) will be coming to most specialty restaurants with us on our Symphony cruise. We got the UDP, and are really excited about it. We plan to eat our meals together, and I'm a little concerned about my son. He is a genuinely picky eater (PBJ every. single. day. since the age of 3), and I'm concerned that even some of the kids menus will be too "adventurous" for him. I don't want to be a problem customer, but if we wanted to go to Wonderland or 150 CP, would they be able to get him something super basic (chicken fingers, burger, pizza, pasta with meatballs, etc.) or is that putting me in the category of a real pain in the.....? My daughter is willing to try new things, and likes a lot of what I've seen on the menus, so I'm not concerned about her.

We have the same issue regarding a picky eater and find most of the venues will accommodate the kids with something simple like a hotdog or burger exc. I can’t really recall Wonderland and if the kids ate anything from that place. Most of the time if the kids are still hungry we will grab what they want after dinner at the buffet and take it back to the room. It’s never been an issue, enjoy your speciality dining!

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8 minutes ago, tonyfsu21 said:

We have the same issue regarding a picky eater and find most of the venues will accommodate the kids with something simple like a hotdog or burger exc. I can’t really recall Wonderland and if the kids ate anything from that place. Most of the time if the kids are still hungry we will grab what they want after dinner at the buffet and take it back to the room. It’s never been an issue, enjoy your speciality dining!

This is great news! And, I didn't even think about that. He would be happy eating bread, and then grabbing something from the Windjammer or Sorrento's afterwards. Thank you so much!

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  • 1 month later...

Just wondering for those that did it in the past- did you buy your kids the UDP for it too? My husband and I have it.  We plan to eat some meals at specialty with our kids but not most(they love the buffet and like to go to kids club after) so I didnt want to prepay for the UDP for them. I'm assuming we can still take them if we choose and just pay for them ala cart @$10 each? And guessing we would still need to make a reservation for 5 when we did this, rather than 2 and just show up with kids? It's our first cruise on Royal so very new to us!

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On 2/6/2021 at 4:11 PM, JasonL said:

Our "No Kids Cruise" has been canceled and our first time trying specialty restaurants with it. I have blind faith that our Thanksgiving week cruise will happen. I normally wouldn't think about doing an Ultimate Dining Package with the kids, but desperate times call for desperate measures. We will have a 14,10,5 yr old. Do we just book the package for Me,Wife,14yr old and then bring the others along? I understand the 5 yr old is free and the 10 should be $10/meal. I have a massive desire to book up everything possible on my first cruise back.

Anyone else do this with their kids? Any challenges bringing kids to specialty restaurants? 


if you’re cruise planner is using the NEW version of the cruise planer there’s an option to book kids for the UDP at $10/day ……. If yours has that I’d book your 10 year old as a child ……. If it doesn’t, then I’d only book the 2 adults and the 14 year old.  We’ve never booked our 9yo son and never had a problem.  Our thanksgiving cruise on Odyssey is the first one to have the option for $10/day for kids and is the first time I bought it for him in advance.

When you make your actual daily reservations on board or with the concierge a week before if staying in a suite, just make them for the total number in your party.
 

 

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 7/24/2021 at 4:01 PM, MG728 said:

Just wondering for those that did it in the past- did you buy your kids the UDP for it too? My husband and I have it.  We plan to eat some meals at specialty with our kids but not most(they love the buffet and like to go to kids club after) so I didnt want to prepay for the UDP for them. I'm assuming we can still take them if we choose and just pay for them ala cart @$10 each? And guessing we would still need to make a reservation for 5 when we did this, rather than 2 and just show up with kids? It's our first cruise on Royal so very new to us!

With UDP do you get control over dining times or is that picked for you? We never looked into the UDP because the kids like to eat early 5:30pm and also it very specific venues like Giovannis table. From what I understand you don’t get to pick and choose?

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3 hours ago, tonyfsu21 said:

With UDP do you get control over dining times or is that picked for you? We never looked into the UDP because the kids like to eat early 5:30pm and also it very specific venues like Giovannis table. From what I understand you don’t get to pick and choose?

You do get to pick and choose, you just can't make your dining reservations until you get on the ship.  You can do it on boarding day at any open specialty restaurant or usually they have a kiosk on the Promenade.  I've even been able to make reservations in the app once onboard.

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  • 2 weeks later...

We have always book UDP with our kids..so we make the booking for all pax in the booking including the kids so that they know we are a table of 4 and would have secured our day 1 courtesy booking based on a table of 4 (I'm insecure like that haha) 

Once onboard, we will get a refund processed for the kids booking. They will essentially reverse the charges and only charge them $10 each. The kids will then have access to the kids menu at the speciality restaurants.

The only tricky part for us is my kids absolutely do not like eating kids menu anywhere and would always throw us 'the why are u torturing us with the kids menu look'..once we tried to just keep them on the UDP and didn't head to customer service to reverse charges but the restaurant staff were so proactive that they told us they had already reversed the charges so we were kinda stuck with having them on the kids menu..lol..needless to say kids were not happy..

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