In this review are some general observations of the Voyager as a ship, the fellow passengers and my overall experience. I only got off the ship in one port, so if you are looking for in depth island and excursion information you may want to skip this review. To give you an idea of the perspective of this review, this was my third cruise, I am in my mid thirties am married but was traveling alone. The sole purpose of this trip was relaxation and I looked at the ship as the destination, not the islands themselves.

My vacation planning started with a sudden intense need around Thanksgiving to get out of the snow and cold. I called my travel agent who had booked my Alaskan cruise in May on the Celebrity Infinity, and gave him some general criteria. I told him due to my husband's work schedule I would more than likely be going solo, although I wasn't completely sure. I told him I was looking for something on either Princess or HAL and wanted to stay away from Carnival (not my thing) and that I also wanted to stay away from Royal Caribbean due to a not so impressive cruise last year on the Sovereign of the Seas. He called me back and laid out a few options for me...the Princess Grand, a HAL ship (I don't remember which one) and Royal Caribbean Voyager of the Seas. Both HAL and RCCL were waiving the single supplements on a few of their ships which helped to narrow down the decision. I was really fighting going on Royal Caribbean again, but my travel agent was really pushing for it due to my age (34) and the fact that I was traveling alone. So I booked a balcony guarantee on the Voyager December 16 2001 sailing.

Two weeks before sailing I was assigned a DB cabin on deck 7. This was the lowest possible category for my guarantee, but my travel agent had warned me that due to being a single, this would probably happen. The Monday before sailing he got me an upgrade to a C category "suite" (and I use this term loosely) on Deck 10 on the "hump" of the ship. I arrived in Miami around midnight Saturday night and stayed at the Embassy Suites by the airport. Sunday morning I left the hotel at 10:15am and arrived at the pier in about 15 minutes. When I arrived I was directed up an escalator to a waiting area where there were about 150 people sitting in chairs. I took a seat and then looked around to check out the process. The key here is there WAS no process. The people who were directing the traffic were not very pleasant, not very organized, and looked extremely bored. One of the biggest issues seemed to be that as people were arriving, they were foregoing sitting in the open chairs toward the back of the room and chose to stand around the chairs toward the front. These people obviously had been through this before and knew that once we began boarding they would be starting from the front. By 11:45 they still hadn't started boarding and what was happening was they had a group of about 60 people in the same room we were in, but roped off from the chairs (presumably they would be moved to the chair area as soon as we were cleared out), and there was another group of about 100 people waiting at the bottom of the escalator just to come up to the holding area to wait to get to the holding area with the chairs. At 11:50 they finally started letting people in. Another hold up was that they only had 2 metal detectors. It took about ½ hour for me to get to the metal detectors and then another ½ hour to get through the check in line. My advice would be if you can't get to the pier early, don't bother showing up until around 3:00pm otherwise you will spend and extreme amount of time waiting in a series of lines. Read more