A friend and I booked this cruise on a whim after finding out that another friend, her cousin (also a friend of mine), her mother and a bunch of her mother's friends booked. My friends scored the $399 fare while some of the others paid between $600 and $700 for their cruise.

We checked back every week for three weeks before we were able to nab that amazing $399 price. Granted, it was for an interior stateroom and I have been spoiled by my past cruises (a Royal Caribbean ship's first voyage for planners/travel agents where everything was completely paid for and everything was VIP, suites, etc and two cruises on Carnival in the owner's suite which is pretty much the side of a huge hotel suite or apartment- absolutely amazing). However, on each of those three cruises, I found that we didn't spend much time in the room anyway to the point I was sad that we had all of the entertaining space (full living room, bar, kitchen and dining room table as well as a huge balcony with the owner's suite) yet didn't really do anything with it. So, we said hey, we'll just be sleeping in the room, so let's go for it! As soon as the $399 fare popped up, we booked.

You will notice that I chose "other" as the port of embarkation (this is important for anyone booking. If you are flying, come into Newark airport) because it's not New York City- even though the Royal Caribbean website states that the terminal is only 7 miles out of New York City. You still need to deal with a lot of traffic both getting to Bayonne, New Jersey and getting home if you live in NYC or Long Island. For us, it was about an hour and a half each way. And, parking was $95. The parking situation was actually interesting and I didn't remember this from the other cruise I took with Royal Caribbean (I don't think it was the same process at all). We had to drop off our luggage at a tent looking structure which made me a little nervous (the note we found under our door on the 3rd day of the cruise stating that some people still hadn't received their luggage and asking us to check ours to make sure we didn't have it by accident didn't make my nervousness seem unwarranted at all) and then you park your car, walk all the way back to the tent structure (I walk all the time, usually 3-5 miles a day so I am not complaining about that, but the process seemed a little weird in my opinion) where you go through security and wait on line to check in with your carry on items. It looked like there were shuttle vans in the parking lot, but they weren't occupied so I am not sure what the deal was with them. The gentleman at checking terminal 13 was absolutely awesome and super friendly. We then boarded a shuttle to go over to the ship. This entire process (minus the travel time) took about an hour and fifteen minutes. Read more