My husband and I booked a 7-day cruise on Royal Caribbean, leaving from San Juan, 1/5 -1/12/2008. It was last-minute venture at the invitation of some friends. They had done this same exact cruise with their college age daughters in Jan. 2007. They liked it well enough to do it again this Jan. We weren't sure we could find a reasonable airfare to San Juan less than a month ahead to make the trip financially feasible. However, with daily checking Kayak early in the morning for airfares, we finally found a round trip from Washington (Dulles) for $368 each. They had been running Around $550. So we grabbed that fare, which actually showed up on Hotwire through Kayak.

To get our cabin, we kept checking all the different on-line booking places for a balcony cabin, which is all that we wanted. Things were being sold out fast. I had already found a very few sights that had balcony cabins left. None showed up on Royal Caribbean's own web page. We ended up booking online and opted for the (no less than) a balcony E-1 class cabin (but we also had the possibility of an upgrade). In all our earlier cruises, we picked out the exact cabin we wanted from the on line agency. So, not knowing where our exact cabin would be was a small concern. We have been in every location from forward to the stern and never had a real problem. As long as we had a balcony cabin that was not too close to the elevators, we weren't too worried.

This was our fifth cruise. One to the Mediterranean on Holland in 2005 on the Westerdam, which was one of the line's newer ships. It was a wonderful trip and, we would certainly recommend the ship and trip to anyone. The other four cruises all have been in the Eastern and Southern Caribbean on Celebrity, Disney, and a smaller Royal Caribbean ship (Legend), respectively. We've always used on-line agencies; we have never actually booked with the cruise line we went on. Hot wire and cruise 411 came through like champs. We even received our luggage Tags along with our cruise documents, whereas our friends who booked on RCL directly had to print theirs out from on line. Read more