Adventure Tea With Royalty is a unique Disney Cruise Line experience that gives kids and their adults the chance to encounter Disney characters in dessert-party setting, complete with a few fun songs and a swag bag of gifts for the little ones. We attended the event as part of a cruise on the Disney Treasure—read on to see what we thought of Adventure Tea With Royalty!

Basics of Adventure Tea With Royalty

Adventure Tea With Royalty is a paid extra aboard select Disney Cruise Line ships / itineraries. The tea is in the same style as Olaf’s Royal Picnic and the Royal Court Royal Tea Party, with one of the three being offered on each ship. Adventure Tea With Royalty is offered on the Disney Treasure and Disney Destiny, but that’s subject to change.

In this review, I contrast Adventure Tea with Olaf’s Royal Picnic a lot, but it’s not as if you’ll be choosing between them unless that’s your guiding principle in picking your cruise (it probably shouldn’t be). If you’re new to Disney cruising and want to learn more, we have a Guide to Picking the Best Disney Cruise.

The tea is an hourlong experience comprising three components:

a swag bag of free keepsake items for kids
finger foods / desserts
a show featuring Disney characters and songs (with a greeting and photo at the end)

I’m separately recounting our time on the Disney Treasure in a trip report that begins here. I hope to review the ship and our overall experience soon.

Adventure Tea with Royalty Pricing

Adventure Tea with Royalty is intended for kids 3-12 and their parents. Pricing reflects this:

Children (3-12): $250
Adults (13+): $75

Disney puts other important details clearly (emphasis added):

This special experience is designed for children ages 3 to 12 and accompanying adults. Each child must be accompanied by a parent or guardian, 18 years of age or older. Children ages 13 to 17 will be charged the adult price. This event is not open to adults without children.

So you can see immediately that adults without kids are not allowed. It’s not clear whether adults with only children 13 to 18 would be allowed. If so, they presumably wouldn’t get the keepsakes since they’re paying the lower rate.

Since the experience is targeted at kids (3 to 12), they pay a higher price, and each gets the swag bag to further “justify” the price. Adults are a lower price and don’t get the gear. For two adults and one child, we paid $400+tax, or about $133+tax per person.

This isn’t cheap, but the Treasure itinerary we were on was already around $7000. You maybe have to figure out where to draw the line for each trip rather than pretending to look at a single experience in a vacuum.

If it’s the character aspect of things you’re most interested in, it’s also worth noting that most Disney Treasure itineraries also have the free but very popular Royal Gathering. We also have a Complete Guide to Meeting Characters on Disney Cruise Line.

Booking Adventure Tea with Royalty

Adventure Tea With Royalty is booked as part of your activities booking. It opens for booking according to the same schedule as adult-exclusive dining, Port Adventures, and other onboard activities.

The precise date depends on your Castaway Club level. As a Gold member at the time of this booking, I could book 105 days before embarkation, as opposed to 75 days for first-time Disney cruisers and 90 days for Silver members.

We were assisted by Lauren Quirk of Travel with Character LLC both in booking this cruise and in nabbing this specific reservation. When it was out time to book, it was sold out for one day (Day 2, a Day at Sea) but available for Day 5 (Falmouth, Jamaica).

Our Adventure Tea with Royalty Experience on the Disney Treasure

I’m not going to bury the lede on this one anymore than I already have—we did not enjoy Adventure Tea With Royalty on the Disney Treasure, and I generally would not recommend it. That said, the conclusion below does include advice for making this experience work—and it can work, for the right guest—if, for some reason, you feel particularly compelled to do so.

And of course—there are already people who like Adventure Tea! Google can help you find them, and if the things they say speak to you, then Adventure Tea might be for you. I’ll try and be precise about things that didn’t work for us, too.

The experience started at 2:45PM in the Grand Hall. We checked in with a Crew Member in the area, and after a few minutes Sage and Coriander appeared, explaining that we were going on an adventure!

Now—we have to divert slightly because if you’re new to this ship you might be wondering, “Who are Sage and Coriander?” In a word, they are the ship’s “storytellers.” Basically, they’re a unique pair of characters who host a variety of onboard activities, and their gimmick is that they’re very much into adventure and storytelling.

I’m going to have much more to say about Sage and Coriander below.

Those first ten minutes of the experience are in the Grand Hall, which is a little awkward because of the presence of other guests who might reasonably wonder what’s going on and then find out it’s a super expensive thing they needed to book ahead of time.

We all know such experiences exist, but part of me feels for the hypothetical one-in-a-million kid who sees Sage and Coriander, gets excited, and then gets turned away when the event moves behind closed doors. I’d prefer the event just start behind closed doors, away from hoi polloi (/s, of course).

Adventure Tea With Royalty Setting

After the introductory show, the event moved inside 1923. We were escorted to our table, where we sat with two kids and their accompanying adult, each party on one side of the six-person table, kids closer to the center of the room where the performance took place.

Now, in understanding many of my critiques, it helps to remember that Adventure Tea is a counterpart to Olaf’s Royal Picnic, which is offered on the Disney Wish. That event—which we reviewed positively—took place in the Frozen-themed restaurant, Arendelle, which corresponds to the Coco-themed restaurant on the Disney Treasure.

In the case of Olaf’s Royal Picnic, the setting supports the experience. Eating at Arendelle not only adds to the Frozen vibes, but I also noted that we wound up with bad seats at Arendelle during rotational dining and didn’t care because we’d had the good Frozen experience at Olaf’s Royal Picnic.

A display in 1923 on the Disney Wish, similar to Treasure displays

In the case of Adventure Tea With Royalty, 1923—which is a cross between a fine restaurant and a Disney museum—wholly removes us from the “Adventure” tea experience.

Disney knows this and tries to sell us on 1923 making sense. The “hook” is that Sage and Coriander are encountering the artifacts around the room (because, again, museum-ish), and these help us connect to our magical cast of characters.

That’s a fine enough try, but the vibes are all off. The vibes feel like if Victoria and Albert’s had an Indiana Jones character greeting. Sage and Coriander have “sit around the campfire and drink tea from a mortar cup” vibes, not “tea at the Grand Floridian” vibes.

Adventure Tea with Royalty Swag Bag and Small Bites

Turning away from the experience for a minute, let’s talk about the more “hard” elements. Each kid gets a swag bag to take home, and it’s got some good stuff—a themed notebook, binoculars, a sash, stickers, a shoulder Pascal (Tangled, not Pedro), and a sling backpack.

The backpack, in particular, is pretty cool, and having a nice themed journal is a good touch. The shoulder Pascal is fine, but it’s not unique (Disney shoulder plushes sell in the parks for under $30).

The drinks, desserts, and small bites were also all fine. I’m of the pretty strong opinion that the food continues to really underperform at these small-bite dessert events, whether it’s Olaf’s Royal Picnic or the Magic Kingdom Dessert Party or Adventure Tea.

To be fair, though, I’m not totally sure what I want changed. If you read my Olaf’s review, I call the desserts “delicious and more than enough for us”, which was also true here. (FWIW, Emily and I were both put off by an item or two, but neither of us left feeling unsatisfied. It’s just sort of par for the course at these things.)

The problem isn’t general quality, it’s that nothing feels special about the food, and none of the items stand out. It feels like what it is: designed for efficiency.

To take a shot in the dark, I think something like a character-inspired, family-size “Adventure Sundae” would be more to my liking. There’s just no “wow” in the current setup, other than that I definitely couldn’t finish all my desserts.

Filling up on desserts works as a selling point in some settings, but I don’t think it carries these cruise ship teas very far because you already have access to free desserts on the ship. And if you want something special, you can pay a lot less than $400 for it at Jumbeaux's Sweets ice cream parlor.

This tries to feel $400 event special—does it succeed?

On that note, there was also the awkward situation of being at a shared table with shared dessert trays. The numbers were never quite right, and there were a few items that we had four or five of—more than the number of kids, but fewer than the kids + adults.

But at the very least, I have to concede that the food and swag bag were on par with my positively-reviewed Olaf’s Royal Picnic. That brings us back to the rest of the experience—characters and show.

Adventure Tea with Royalty Characters

Before I get to the specific performance here, I want to talk about the characters involved. Adventure Tea with Royalty is, in part, a “character” experience. Some guests find great value in character experiences, but I think there are big problems with relying on the character angle to justify this paid experience.

The characters present for our experience were Rapunzel, Flynn, Tiana, and Jasmine. But a simple Google search will show you that the non-Sage/Coriander characters change. So you might encounter wholly different characters. This is a contrast with Olaf’s Royal Picnic, where you knew you’d meet the core Frozen characters.

This means you’re paying $325+ to meet an unpredictable batch of characters. That unpredictability makes it hard for me to assign value to the character aspect of this experience. For example, Tiana was in her “adventure” uniform, and I’d love to tell you “this is a unique outfit that might help make it worth it for Tiana fans”, but I don’t know if Tiana will be at your specific tea.

Add in that Zoe actually already met Tiana (princess outfit) and Jasmine as part of the Royal Princess Gathering, and the “character experience” angle here gets a bit thin. As for why this pricey event doesn’t have fixed, unique characters, well, I’ll speculate on that below.

Adventure Tea with Royalty Performance and Greetings

The basic thrust of the tea-time performance is that Sage and Coriander are using a magic storybook and artifacts around the room to draw us into various the stories. Again, our experience featured the stories of Jasmine, Tiana, and Rapunzel & Flynn, but specific characters may vary. This performance lasts around 20 minutes.

To understand why I think this performance has difficulties, let’s again return to Olaf’s Royal Picnic. When you watch Olaf’s Royal Picnic, your level of interest in or attention to the specific story going on in front of you doesn’t matter—what matters is that you know Frozen.

You can eat and drink and enjoy your swag bag, all the while being immersed in a story you know and love. Olaf is there. “Let it Go” is there. It’s, ya know (*waves hands*), a Frozen thing. It’s all very comfortable and comforting.

Adventure Tea is wholly unlike that. The backbone of the experience—which, again, is bringing together characters from disparate stories—is this Sage and Coriander journey. So if you want to have any idea of what’s going on, you’ll need to be paying close attention (while eating and navigating the swag bag) and engage in their unique shenanigans.

The conclusion will address these thematic issues more, but for now I want to turn to the character greetings.

While Rapunzel, Flynn, Tiana, and Jasmine all came to our table, I found this to be one of the most lackluster character experiences I’ve had at a Disney event. Of course the characters were friendly and great with Zoe, that’s just a given on a Disney Cruise. But there were notable shortcomings.

The characters seemed rushed through the tables, and they were unclear and contradictory about whether they could take individual photos or not—you get a group photo at the end (the first photo in this post), but there are individual photo slots in the provided adventure book.

Taking individual photos takes time, so I understand not doing that—but just make an announcement and make it clear that’s what’s going on. As with all things, this isn’t so much an “us” problem—Zoe has met these characters before and will meet them again. But I do think it’s a problem for people looking for a once-in-a-lifetime experience (or who, ya know, want to justify their $400+).

For example, some parents didn’t really understand when individual photos weren’t happening (perhaps confused by some characters allowing them), and would spend the entire time the character was talking to their kid saying “Timmy. Timmy look here! Jasmine! Hey Jasmine can you look here!” I don’t think that’s a good outcome for anyone.

I imagine this time/organization crunch is also why they don’t have fixed or unique characters. People expecting to get time with a special character might be more demanding. Then again, this all somehow functioned on the Wish with Disney’s most popular characters without me noting any awkwardness.

Conclusion: It’s “Storyteller Tea with Sage and Coriander”

The bottom line: this is, really, a Sage and Coriander experience at its core. The other characters change, and the vibes of the swag bag are all Sage and Coriander (except for Pascal). The performance is anchored by Sage and Coriander. They’re really the stars of the show. It should be called “Storyteller Tea with Sage and Coriander.” That description best captures what it is.

The problem is that you probably don’t know ahead of time if you’re going to be a Sage and Coriander fan. You certainly don’t know if you’ll be a fan to the tune of $400.

As of this review, the Disney Treasure operates only 7-day itineraries. Having these characters to basically anchor a week’s worth of activities makes a ton of sense. And if you spend some time on the forums and social media, you’ll find people who consider Sage and Coriander as the highlight of their trip.

We weren’t those people, but that’s definitely not the fault of Sage and Coriander. I’d actually attribute our lack of interest in them mostly to the fact that we’ve spent a ton of time on Disney Cruises and came into this one with a plan that roughly mirror our past cruises.

We didn’t need a central arc or character duo to anchor our experiences. By contrast, I suspect that a rookie on the Disney Treasure would look at Sage and Coriander and think “this is exactly the sort of thing that makes Disney special!” And frankly, they’re right. Sage and Coriander are exactly the sort of storytelling device that makes a Disney Cruise more than just a cruise with lots of Disney IP.

The swag bag, themed to Sage and Coriander’s vibes, sort of speaks to this. If you’ve got the kind of kid who is going to wear this backpack, walk around with the binoculars, and write in this journal as they go on more “adventures” around the ship, including those guided by Sage and Coriander, then wow is this probably a great event.

As for us, we came into the cruise and Adventure Tea sort of expecting Sage and Coriander to be, for lack of a better word, extraneous. With that expectation, we failed to buy into their arc, and that made this $400 experience a bit underwhelming for us.

The open question is whether you, the guest, can fix that. More specifically, the question is whether you—the adult reading this—can help your child find something to love in Sage and Coriander. If I had a rewind button, I’d go back to the first four days of the cruise and try and get Zoe more invested in Sage and Coriander—they pop up starting with the welcome show on embarkation day.

Hopefully it would work, and in that case maybe we’d have found this Adventure Tea to be icing on the cake.