A little background, my wife and I are both 39 and relatively new to cruising. Our experiences are limited to Carnival and Holland America. My wife hated Carnival, and it took 5 years of convincing to get her to take another cruise...that was on a larger HAL ship. We have done several since then all on HAL.
We arrived a day early in Miami. Booked a town car to take us from the airport to hotel in Fort Lauderdale. The car service, from floridalimo.com was poor at best.
The hotel in FLL was the Hyatt Place Airport North. I booked it on Hotwire for a very low rate and it was a decent place to stay overnight pre-cruise , nice and clean, lots of local restaurants etc.
Mini suites on Emerald Deck were very nice. Long narrow room that can accommodate 4. A fully covered balcony that had 4 chairs and a small table. An in room mini refrigerator , 2 flat screen tv, lots of storage, a desk, comfortable sofa that pulls out into a bed and a chair. The bath was smaller than a HAL bath on a mini-suite but was nicely done. One feature I liked was the closet area just outside the bathroom. Overall very nice room.