Queen Mary 2 sailing out of New York to Southampton, UK and back in June 2025 was a complete and…read moretotal abysmal disappointment from start to finish. Cunard is the epitome of fake luxury. Recently, QM2 even got the lowest rating for an operating ship in the entire cruise industry (an 87, where 86 is the bare minimum to remain operational), and I for one am not at all surprised after sailing with them.
The service from cruise ship port to cabin stewards, to dining staff and more was incredibly inconsistent. Some staff members had clearly worked in high end luxury hotels around the globe, while others had never worked in hospitality before at all and it definitely showed.
Our room was located right next to an outside children's play area and directly across from "The Zone" which turned out to be the children's nursery, preteen and teen lounge. Which means, that for our 18 day trip, despite requesting 3 different times to be moved to a different cabin, we were constantly bombarded with noise day and night. Of course children are going to play and keep noise, but on a ship like this, which clearly wasn't designed to host young children, and Cunard even discourages bringing them, people clearly ignored that advice, obviously we didn't want to be stuck with the constant disturbance for our entire long holiday. It's why every other cruise line knows not to put a children's location this close to customer staterooms!
Which meant that from starting around 6 AM until about 11 PM every day for nearly 3 weeks, we had kids running, jumping, playing, screaming and tantruming in the hallway outside of our definitely not soundproofed door nearly all day.
For a still unexplained reason, we also got into Rotterdam nearly a full day late, which totally threw off my travel plans around Europe. Due to this, the Dutch port authority would not allow us to leave the country until we went through their immigration process, despite not meeting the vessel at the time we got into port. Due to all of this mismanagement, not only did we miss our scheduled train out of Amsterdam, we also later missed our morning scheduled flight out as well.
The ship isn't being well maintained or cleaned overall either, with plenty of areas containing stains, mold and mildew and dirty dishes that were supposed to be "clean."
The food was pretty good, but very monotonous for a longer trip, with essentially the same dining options served each day. There were also lots of issues with staff that didn't speak English well enough to be serving food, especially not when dealing with food allergies.
I had a number of items with specified food allergens brought to my party when dining, even after giving the serving staff written lists of everyone's food allergies. Yet because the service staff didn't have a solid command of either written or spoken English, they couldn't answer questions about what specific ingredients food contained, or figure out how to not bring us foods that contained our allergens. Likewise, the buffet had a lot of cross contamination of various types of food because people weren't paying attention, or thought it was no big deal to use a different set of tongs for various foods.
They did not stick to posted food schedules either. If they ran out of a particular food, they simply didn't make more. Or even closed food stations early so they didn't have to make additional food and stay open as per their posted schedules.
A lot of the experience onboard felt very nickel and dimey. They would offer a service for "The entire voyage" only to later state that the service period wasn't for the entire length of our cruise as the customers, but what they considered as each individual trip. So during the 18 days we were onboard, they considered it to be 3 separate trips!
There were also lots of times their staff was rude or unprofessional, like when I was trying to discuss with the purser's office what my options were for getting off in Rotterdam after Cunard got us into port so late. Yet instead of being a professional and going to get a supervisor, as another lady did when I dealt with a grownup later on for handling the matter, the man at the purser's office was incredibly rude, nasty, insulting and unprofessional the night we got into Rotterdam. Grow up! And go get a different job if you don't want to deal with customer service!
Their staff was also incredibly unhelpful with lots of missing instructions in the weeks and months prior to us boarding.
I truly regret taking this cruise and definitely don't recommend the Cunard cruise line. They don't give a d*mn about customer comfort and other needs and it showed in everything we experienced in dealing with them.