My wife and I traveled on the 4/2/06 Western Caribbean cruise aboard the Jewel of the Sea. This was our third cruise in the last five years. We had cruised on the Disney Wonder to the Bahamas and the Celebrity Summit to Alaska previously. This was our first Royal Caribbean cruise. We are frequent travelers both for business and pleasure and have traveled extensively in Europe and the US.
We booked the entire trip including shore excursions and flights through the Royal Caribbean website. This was an easy and straightforward process.
I will not spend a great deal of time on the ports of call or shore excursions. These will be the same for most cruise lines and should not be used for selecting a ship or cruise line. We did visit Key West, Cozumel, Costa Maya, and Grand Cayman. We were the first ship to dock instead of tendering at Cozumel since the recent hurricanes. This definitely simplified the shore experience that day. We only had to tender in Grand Cayman.