Star of the Seas Cabins to Avoid (and Which Are Actually Fine)

On Star of the Seas, the window in your balcony is wired to your air conditioning. Open one and you lose the other.

That is the thing I’d want to know before picking a room here, so it goes first.

The infinite balcony: fresh air or a cool room, pick one

An infinite balcony is not a balcony. It is the cabin pushed out to the hull line and closed off by a tall window that drops down into the wall.

There is no door and no rail, so you never step outside. The sea air comes into your living space instead, which is the part people either love or resent.

The catch is mechanical. That space sits inside the cabin’s air-conditioned envelope, so the system shuts off when the window comes down.

In the Caribbean in August, the room heats up fast. You choose breeze or cold air, and you do not get both.

It also means one of you cannot sit in the wind while the other sleeps in the cool. And in rough weather the bridge can lock the window shut altogether, which turns your balcony into a very good picture frame.

Cabin 9590 on deck 9 is the one I can put a number on, an Infinite Ocean View Balcony that has been set side by side against conventional balcony 8268 on the same ship. On the booking page these rooms are the ones with “Infinite” in the name, and if the word is there, so is the window.

Plenty of cruisers prefer them, and they do make a small cabin feel bigger. If you keep the door shut and the air running anyway, book one and enjoy the extra floor space.

If you booked a balcony so you could sleep with it open, do not take an infinite one. A conventional Ocean View Balcony (the D categories) or an Ocean View Large Balcony (C3 and C5) gives you a real door, a real rail and no interlock, usually for less money.

The Surfside Family Suite is smaller than a junior suite

The Surfside Family Suite is 269 square feet. A standard Junior Suite on this ship is 322.

So you pay for the word “suite” and get a room 53 square feet smaller than the one sitting below it in the naming order. It is only 65 square feet bigger than a regular balcony cabin.

Inside, that space is chopped up. There is a main cabin, a kids’ pod with a fold-out couch, and a bathroom split into two small rooms: sink and shower in one, sink and toilet in the other.

The split bathroom sounds clever on a floor plan. In practice it is two closets, and with four people getting ready for dinner you feel every one of those missing square feet.

The balcony is 53 square feet and faces inward, over the Surfside kids’ neighborhood rather than the sea. If you pictured coffee and open ocean, this is not the room.

There are 42 of them, on decks 9, 10 and 11. Cabin 9693 is the one I can name, and the number barely matters, because the floor plan is identical in all 42.

One thing this room is not is loud. People who have stayed in them say the kids’ area below is barely audible and they slept fine, so the layout is the complaint, not the noise.

There is also a change in the fine print that is easy to miss on the booking screen. For sailings on or after May 2, 2026, Royal Caribbean moved the Surfside Family Suite down from Sky Class to Sea Class, and every sailing you can book today falls after that date.

What that costs you is Suite Lounge access, the suite concierge, included internet, and breakfast and lunch at Coastal Kitchen. Dinner at Coastal Kitchen survives, along with the robes, the pillow-top mattress and the espresso machine. It also drops the Surfside into the same Sea Class tier as a plain Junior Suite, so the swap below no longer costs you anything in suite benefits.

If four of you are sailing, book a Junior Suite instead, but be clear about what the swap actually buys. It is 322 square feet with one normal bathroom and a tub-shower, and an 80 square foot balcony pointed at the sea rather than at the kids’ neighborhood. What it does not buy you is more real beds. Two of you are still on a double sofa bed, exactly as in the Surfside. You are paying for floor space and a bathroom you can turn around in, not for an extra mattress.

If the Surfside neighborhood is the whole reason you are on this ship, take a Surfside Family View Balcony. It is 196 square feet, it looks out over the same place from the same side of the ship, and it costs a lot less.

Deck 14 aft: slides all day, quiet all night

Cabin 14750 sits at the back corner of deck 14, under the aft pool deck and two decks below the waterslides. It is a standard balcony room, 204 square feet with a 50 square foot balcony, which is the small end of a category where some balconies run to 70.

From roughly 8am to 6pm, the balcony gets a roar every 30 seconds as a slide empties out, with the waterpark soundtrack looping underneath it. Step inside, close the door and it mostly disappears.

The part nobody expects is the night. Nothing thumps down from the bar above, and the pool deck empties out after dinner.

What you do get after hours is deck chairs being dragged back into rows and the deck being cleaned overhead. It is occasional rather than constant, and it is the only thing here that would wake a light sleeper.

Cabin 14750 has one other quirk. The bar structure above stops just short of it, leaving an open gap where people lean on the rail and look down onto the balconies, so the noise most likely to bother you there is other passengers rather than the ship.

It is also a long walk from the elevators, which will matter more than any of this if someone in your party is slow on their feet.

Treat this as a daytime balcony problem and not a sleep problem. If you plan to nap out there in the afternoon, pick somewhere else; if you are at the pool all day anyway, you will never notice.

If you want this deck without the slide, move forward along the same side, out from under the pool deck and the slide run. You stay in the same balcony category and the same price band. That is a direction on the deck plan rather than a room I can vouch for, because I do not have a cabin number up there that a passenger has written up, and I would rather tell you that than hand you one that only sounds authoritative.

The rooms under the Windjammer galley

The buffet kitchen occupies the aft end of deck 15, and a kitchen that size never really stops. Prep, dishwashing and restocking run through the night, and all of it moves on wheeled carts across hard flooring.

If your cabin is directly underneath, that comes down through the structure rather than through the air. Closing your balcony door does nothing at all.

It is not loud the way music is loud. It is a rolling, clattering rumble at 3am, and one passenger could not sleep through it and had to be moved to another room.

Now the awkward part. Nobody who described this ever gave a room number, so I can point you at the area but I cannot hand you cabin numbers to cross off.

It is also not the whole aft end. The guest who wrote up 14750 slept perfectly well down there, so whatever the galley sits over, it does not reach that corner.

Before you book anything at the back of deck 14, open the deck plan and look at what is stacked directly above you. If it is the Windjammer, choose again.

If you would rather not think about it at all, take a balcony on decks 10 to 12 in the same price band and be done.

Inward-facing balconies: the neighborhood can see you

Some balconies on Star face inward, over Surfside or Central Park, instead of out to sea. They are cheaper, and the discount is buying you the view rather than the privacy.

You look straight across at other people’s balconies, and anyone down in the neighborhood can look up at you. The infinite versions have no sheer curtain, so an open blind puts you on display in your own room.

If you booked one for the people-watching, that is a fair trade and you will enjoy it. If you want to sit out in a robe, spend the difference on an outward-facing Ocean View Balcony, which is 204 square feet and marginally bigger anyway.

The closet baskets that screech

Star’s cabins have wire baskets under the closet instead of drawers, sitting straight on a wooden shelf with no runners.

They screech. Metal on bare timber, loaded with a week of clothes, at whatever hour your partner decides to go looking for a shirt.

You also have to pull each basket all the way out to reach anything in it, which is a strange thing to find on a ship this new.

Cabins 12696 and 12698 are the two I can name, but this is standard fit and turns up all over the ship, in balcony rooms and interiors alike.

None of that is a reason to change cabins, and I wouldn’t pay a dollar to avoid it. Unpack into the baskets on day one and then leave them alone.

Rooms people worry about that are fine

• Decks 3 and 4 near the casino, the Music Hall and the theater. This is the worry I’d drop first. Guests in an ocean view right beside the casino, and another directly outside the Royal Theater, both describe their rooms as quiet once the door is closed. The soundproofing on this ship is good. Book one.
• Cabins flagged as obstructed view. The flag oversells it. The one guest who has described life inside a flagged room, an Ocean View Large Balcony, said the obstruction was nothing and gave the cabin full marks, and the deck 9 interiors sold as Central Park View (obstructed) are priced for it, so you already know what you are buying. I wouldn’t pay to move off the flag, though it is fair to ask your agent what the obstruction is, because on the inward-facing rooms nobody has said either way.
• Connecting cabins. 12696 and 12698 do not have the usual thin interior connecting door. Royal Caribbean gave them two exterior doors onto a shared vestibule instead, so you can shut the outer doors and still walk between rooms, and the old sound-through-the-door problem goes with it. I can only vouch for that pair, so check the layout on the one you are booking.
• Deck 14 balconies over Central Park, around 14221. People talk themselves out of these and then never sail in one. I could not find a single guest who had a problem up there, so if the price is right, take it.
• Cabin size. Passengers flatly contradict each other here. Some find the balcony rooms tight, some find them roomier than they expected, and they are describing the same categories, so treat it as taste rather than a defect.

The room I’d book on Star of the Seas

Take a conventional Ocean View Balcony on decks 10 to 12, midship, with a door that opens and air conditioning that stays on. It is the boring answer and it is the right one.

Skip any infinite balcony if open air is the reason you paid for the room, and skip the back of deck 14 unless you have checked what sits above it. Book the Junior Suite over the Surfside Family Suite, and stop worrying about decks 3 and 4 entirely.

Everything else on this ship is negotiable, including the baskets, which you will complain about anyway.

Image note: Some supporting visuals in this guide are AI-generated illustrations. They are not used as evidence for cabin layout, dimensions, views or ship-specific claims.