Royal Caribbean has started a promotion to create a special announcement commemorating his two years in Brazil.

"You are the star of two years of Royal Caribbean" will be the campaign running with a photo of a guest of the company.  To enter the contest, the participant must upload a photo of him or herself on board a Royal Caribbean ship to any of its social media outlets (facebook, twitter, flickr, orkut, picasa, etc.) and send a link to the email address [email protected].

The best photo wins a mini cruise on board the Vision of the Seas will be the subject of the announcement and celebration.

Royal Caribbean continues its project of promoting social lunches for organizations located in ports where its ships make stops, this time in Salvador and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

About 70 senior citizens attended with social worker Sister Dulce.  They came aboard Vision of the Seas in El Salvador and were excited to board the ship for the first time. In Rio de Janeiro, almost 60 children from the NGO Viva Cazuza and Child Health also had lunch on the ship.

This program of social outreach started in December and continues today, "The action represents a way found by the company to contribute to the work done by these entities and offer a chance, unknown to many, to meet a ship and live an unforgettable holiday experience," says the CEO of Royal Caribbean in Brazil, Ricardo Amaral.

Photo by Elaine Escorcio

Royal Caribbean is offering a sports and fitness program on an upcoming Vision of the Seas cruise, February 5 to 12, 2011, dubbed Royal Life. 

The cruise features seven nights on board, with an intense schedule, for both adults and children, with activities such as spinning classes, rhythms, hydrobike, pilates, yoga (at sea and ashore), kids yoga and contest for the whole family, besides trekking Buzios accompanied by monitors. Best of all, the activities will take place overlooking the sea and the beautiful beaches of Brazil and the menus will always be a choice of dishes lighter and healthier.

Participants will have the opportunity to attend lectures by experts as Szerman Ward, manager of the health and beauty and pioneer in the practice of aerobics in Brazil and in the implementation of PAS in the country. In Ilhabela, guests may participate in a volleyball clinic with Marcelo Negrao, Olympic champion and former national team player. There will also be lectures nutrition, with tips on how to build a healthy menu.

In addition to Ilhabela, the scales of the ship include Rio de Janeiro, Buzios and Salvador. The loading can be done in Santos (February 2) or Rio de Janeiro (February 6).

Guests will also enjoy moments of relaxation in leisure areas of Vision of the Seas , which has two pools, six whirlpools, spa, solarium, theater, shops and beauty salons, distributed in 11 decks. The ship has capacity for over 2,400 guests.

Royal Caribbean announced the winner of their recent cruise director contest, created to select and recruit someone who will be responsible for managing and planning the program of entertainment activities on board ships of up to 4000 guests.

The port of Riga, the capital of Latvia, saw a 19% jump in tourism in July 2010 compared to the figures from July 2009.  Royal Caribbean's Vision of the Seas made her first stop there and with it, brought to Latvia's capital more than 2 thousand passengers. 

With these figures, the city bureau of tourism, Maxim Tolstoy, intends to maximize the flow of tourists for next season. Most of the tourists that visited Riga were tourists from Sweden, USA, UK, Germany and Norway. 

Riga, and Latvia in general, is still an outsider in terms of tourism among its fellow Baltic countries. Riga spends 2.1 million Euros on tourism, which is dwarfed by the city of Tallinn that spends four times that and the city of Vilnius three times that figure.

Tom Truxton of the RVTimes, an online guide for camping, posted an interesting review of their trip on Royal Caribbean's Vision of the Seas.  What's interesting about the review is it not only documents much of the trip, but also harps on negative elements of their cruise to bring up the issues they experienced.

To start things off, after boarding Vision of the Seas, Truxton went to the Windjammer for lunch and were disappointed in the food they had.

The food for the boarding lunch was dry and bland, kind of like the foods the kids cook at home when it is their turn to cook; compared to the Monarch we were greatly disappointed and hoped that it was not the norm for this Windjammer. Unfortunately this did prove to be the norm for the Windjammer on this cruise but a glass of lemonade improved things some and gave it a tangy taste. Every time we ate in the Windjammer we found the food to be dry and relatively bland, I looked around the restaurant and peeked into the kitchen but I didn’t see my kids working, there were a few dishes that broke the pattern but not many.

The good news is they also took the time to highlight what they liked about the cruise, like dinner in the main dining room.

Dinner in the Aquarius Dining Room was fantastic; we were not disappointed once by the quality of the food or the service that we received there. We ate dinner in the Aquarius every night, breakfast every morning but one, and lunch twice. Our waiter and assistant waiter were very attentive, after the first night the waiters called us by name as we were arriving, had our preferred drinks waiting for us and made us feel at home (Unlike our kids who make us feel like we shouldn’t be home.) Where the Windjammer disappointed the Aquarius made up for.

In the casino, things weren't very good 

The Casino table game staff did not seem to know what they were doing, it seemed as if I constantly had to remind them that they did not pay a bet, did not remove a lost bet, paid my winnings to another player, or they just did not seem to understand their games themselves. My biggest disappointment in the Casino came from the Texas Hold-Em table, which was only opened once during the cruise, was dealt by a dealer that did not seem to understand the game, and had an outrageous rake of 10%

In the end, their cruise was a positive experience for Truxton and his family.

While I identified a lot of negatives in this review overall we did enjoy ourselves, but we can see several areas where the crew of the Vision of the Seas could improve if this is reflective of their normal attitude. Hopefully we can schedule a trip on the Vision when it is on a regular itinerary and we can see what a trip then would be like.

The Brazilian Cruise Associaton has announced that the port of Rio de Janeiro is expected to welcome almost 500,000 cruisers for the 2010-2011 season, which begins in October. About 17 ships will make a stop in Rio and according to the Brazilian Cruise Association, 479 000 cruisers will disembark in Rio de Janeiro. This number represents a 7% increase compared to the quota registered last season.

Along with many other cruise lines, Royal Caribbean will have two of it's ships visiting Rio.  These ships include Mariner of the Seas and Vision of the Seas.

The Brazilian season of 2010/2011 Cruise will have 20 ships, two more than in 2009/2010, which will sail along the coast of Brazil until May 2011. In 2008/2009, Rio de Janeiro received 112 cruises, which took almost 270 000 cruisers, and in the 2009/2010 season were 448,000 tourists on 193 routes.

Southampton, England is called the cruise capital of the United Kingdom and for good reason.  The BBC is reporting that business here is booming with lots of cruise ships calling the port home as well as making stops here.  Royal Caribbean is no different, having Independence of the Seas and Vision of the Seas call this port home.  With steady business from Royal Caribbean and other cruise lines, the people of Southampton are reaping the benefits of having so many cruisers come through their city.

"Every cruise ship brings in the average of £1.2m per ship, so you're talking in terms of £350m benefit to the local economy."

It's no secret that Royal Caribbean has been favoring sending their ships from North America to Europe to help quench the demand for cruises that many Europeans have been seeking.  This seems to be just one of many popular ports in Europe that is benefiting from an upswing in Europeans' desire to go on a cruise vacation.