Celebrity Reflection Caribbean 2016: Celebrity Fun Factory Kid's Club Review

I want to start out by saying that we were happily surprised by how much Sweet Pea, age 8, ended up enjoying the kids club on the Celebrity Reflection.

When we booked our cruise with Celebrity, we were worried that Sweet Pea wouldn't enjoy the kids club. She has been on two previous cruises with DCL (Disney Cruise Line), one on the Fantasy and one on the Magic, and loved the kids clubs both times.

Celebrity's kids club is called the Fun Factory and just from looking at photos online I could tell that the decorations were significantly less compelling than on the Disney ships. In the Disney's kids club there was an entire room designed to look just like Andy's room from Toy Story! No one beats Disney at theming.

I shouldn't have been worried however. When we arrived at our cabin on the first day, there was a letter inviting Sweet Pea to the Fun Factory and a schedule of events for the day for the "Cadets" age group. When there are enough children on board, they are divided into three separate age groups. She loved getting this special letter addressed to her.

Below is the Embarkation Day schedule for Shipmates, which is supposed to be the group for children aged 3-5.

Below is the Embarkation Day schedule for Cadets, which is geared towards children aged 6-8.

Last, this is the Embarkation Day schedule for Ensigns, which is the group for children aged 9-11. Note that by default, Ensigns are allowed to sign themselves in and out of the program unless otherwise specified during registration.

The first night, Sweet Pea was somewhat unhappy that there was only one other child (much younger than herself) in the club. When we picked her up, she said, "Mom, four-year-olds are kind of hard to play with. They don't talk very much." She was willing to return to the club the next day, however, and give it another try.

And it's good that she went back. Despite the fact that there were very rarely any children her age and she was often grouped with younger children, she ended up having a really good time. By the end of the cruise she told us that she actually had enjoyed Celebrity's Fun Factory better than DCL's Oceanear's Lab / Club! She said while there were some really cool events in DCL's clubs (such as a mad scientist helping them make "slime"), she had spent much of her time in there just playing video games. By contrast, Celebrity apparently had many more group activities and the counselors worked really hard to entertain the kids. The counselors on Celebrity really seemed to get to know her, too.

Now, I realize this might not be the case for a child that was a few years older, but some of the activities that she loved in the Fun Factory were:

Bug Hunt - The counselors had hidden paper pictures of bugs around the kids club like Easter Eggs and the kids got to explore and find them.
Super Hero Creation - The kids were able invent a super hero that they wanted to become. They thought up super powers, names and colored masks and capes.
Hot Kryptonite - A game like hot potato.
Talent Show - The kids practiced and put on a talent show for their parents.

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While Sweet Pea loved the Fun Factory, there were a couple of areas that I thought were better on DCL. The first is the hours. DCL kids clubs are usually open from 9am-12am. You can drop your child off any time. Celebrity's standard hours are about 9am-12pm, 2pm-5pm and 7pm-10pm. You can pay extra (either $6 per hour or $99 unlimited VIP pass) to use the Fun Factory outside of those hours, although they also request that you make a reservation in advance. This did not end up being as big of a problem as I thought it would be. We only ended up using the Fun Factory for an extra evening hour a couple of times.

The second thing that I really missed about DCL was the use of the wave phones as a method of keeping in contact with parents. When we checked Sweet Pea into Celebrity's Fun Factory, we had to state specifically where we were going to be on the ship while she was in the club. This was awkward because not only were we planing on being in multiple places (back to our room to pick up a shawl, then the theater for the show, then the World Bar to pick up a drink for Ross on the way to Cafe al Bacio) but our plans were subject to change ("Oh look, there is a game of Family Feud going on in Celebrity Central right now!")

We expressed uncertainty about where we were going to be every. single. time. we left her there and often came back to check on her since we knew it would be hard for the counselors to track us down. Ross and I frequently talked about how much better the system was on DCL. The DCL wave phones mean that there is never any concern about being out of touch.

It was not until the 5th(!) day of our Celebrity cruise that I saw someone else had listed "Pager" on the sign-in sheet under the heading "Parent's Location".

"You have pagers?!?" I exclaimed.

"Oh, sure. Did you want one?," suggested the counselor, obliviously.

Are you kidding? Of, course we wanted one! Why are these pagers not standard? Why didn't a counselor offer us a pager when they saw me struggling to write out all of our locations for the next 3 hours into a text box the size of my pinkie fingernail? I suspect that that counselors just didn't want to mess with getting the pager set up and signed out. This is really the only (slightly) negative experience that we had with the Fun Factory. If you think a pager would be helpful, remember to ask for it because they certainly aren't going to offer it to you!