My family of four (husband and two twenty-something boys) wanted an inexpensive, short-ish Caribbean cruise. We were traveling with eleven other family members and friends, one couple with a one year old toddler and two other couples with teenage boys and girls. Our only cruising experience thus far was three NCL cruises so I was (probably annoyingly) comparing the two cruise lines for most of the trip. So here goes...

We stayed at the Marriot Convention Center in New Orleans the night before - good choice, Priceline! We parked our cars at the Fulton Street parking garage just a few blocks down the street which was $8 per night as I recall, cheaper than parking at the pier, a tip I picked up from other reviews on this site:) Since we had so many people and bags the men took our bags to the pier, dropped them off and were going to come back to the hotel and pick us up, but the pier is actually walking distance from the hotel. This is not readily apparent but after asking a few different people at the Marriot we found that you could walk behind the convention center parallel to the pier and make your way to the embarkation point. The parking garage has a shuttle that takes you to the pier as well, but we had too many people to utilize that.

Embarkation was a little disorganized. We took 12 packs of soda on board and they do slice open the container to check that it's all soda and not beer - they then tape it shut. We got on around 1:00 so the lines were present but moving pretty well. Some of the staff seemed confused in directing people to the proper areas. Read more