Welcome to the Royal Caribbean blog podcast, a weekly look into the world of Royal Caribbean cruising.

I'm your host Matt Hodgeberg, and this is episode number 93.

It seems like nothing strikes fear into Royal Caribbean cruisers quite like these two words.

Formal night.

Confusion and anxiety are the typical responses I read about in emails that are sent to me

and message boards post all over the internet.

So this week, I wanted to talk all about formal night and explain what you need to know about

this tradition and what it really means to you today.

Here we go.

Ah, formal night.

It's a topic that everyone loves to discuss, and I'll tell you, if ever

started a website about cruising and you want some surefire way of getting lots of traffic, talk

about formal night, because everyone's got an opinion on it. And certainly, you know, I think

part of the problem is by the fact that Royal Caribbean kind of keeps it vague. I'm not sure if it's

on purpose or what the case may be, but this is one of

these topics that just seems to come up over and over and again. And you know what? Maybe it's for

good reason. So I wanted to discuss this week, especially because I was inspired for this week's

episode, if you will, by one of my friends Gillian Hoffman who wrote to me and asked me about,

it says, Matt, talk to me. What the heck do I pack for this cruise? How formal are the formal nights and how

casual are the rest of the nights? And you know what? I think Gillian's question is pretty much what a lot

of people go through, especially first-time cruisers, but even people that are new to Royal Caribbean.

And you know what? I'm betting there's still other people who've been in Royal Caribbean cruises

...