We took a chance on hurricane season with Carnival and paid for it. My husband and I are first time cruisers that could not resist the prices of cruising during hurricane season, after all we heard how the cruise lines do their best to keep you safe and even make the effort to route to other islands if they can't make it to the original. It was that "effort" that in our opinion and several other cruisers' opinions was not made on behalf of the cruisers.

Booking of our cruise was done online where I normally book my business trips through. The nice thing about the site I use is it did let us choose our cabin, which is sounds like some of our fellow cruisers that booked though travel agents and vacation clubs did not get that option, although it could have been because they just "guarantee" rather than booking a cabin. Although next time I may choose look into booking directly though cruise line. Also, the site has cruise insurance, but take in mind, so does Carnival, I purchased the sites thinking it was the same as Carnival, so you may want to check that out before purchasing either one.

Saturday prior to cruise was spent in airports making our way from California to Miami via United airlines. Three planes later we arrived in Miami without our luggage, but lucky it arrived a few hours later. We spent the night at La Quinta Inn Airport East because of their free port shuttle. I would recommend staying there; they have both a free airport shuttle (call for hours, it is not 24 hour) and a free port shuttle. On arrival (around 9pm) we checked in and scheduled the port shuttle (don't forget to do this on arrival otherwise you may not get on!). Since we checked in a bit late, the later shuttle was booked so we had to catch an earlier shuttle that left at 10am even though check in for Carnival was not until 12:30pm. Read more