Before I begin this review, I feel it best that I explain some background. My wife and I fell in love with cruising 4 years ago, and we have just completed our 4th cruise, on our 4th cruise line. We decided we'd like to try all of the mainstream cruise lines in hopes of finding one that suited our taste to settle down with as a frequent cruiser. So far we've cruised with Celebrity, Princess, Norwegian, and Royal Caribbean. We would still like to try HAL and Costa/MSC. Crystal and Radisson are unfortunately out of our budget range, not to say we wouldn't like to try them too! Based on reviews and word of mouth, we have no desire to try Carnival, and we have no children, so we have no real need to try Disney, though we've heard nothing but positive about them. The following review is based on a comparison of 4 different cruise lines. Please do not be offended if you are a fan of Royal Caribbean, I'm a tough critic, and opinions are like, well... what you'll think I am by the end of this review.

Airport: We arrived in Miami shortly after noon, and easily found RCCL representatives displaying their signs around the luggage carousels. Once all of our luggage was pulled together, we began to drag it toward the exit to the bus when an RCCL representative stopped a man with a large luggage cart and told us to give our luggage to him, and queued me to "take care of him", which I assume was my hint to tip him, which I did. Having only our carry-on luggage now, we were quickly directed to our bus transfer (included in our cruise-air package), which was a filthy Greyhound bus. Not that I'm above taking a Greyhound, but this one was nasty, and to think it cost me more for this bus than it would have for cab fare...not cool.

Cruise Terminal: Once off the bus, we tipped the driver and we were off through security and into the terminal. Like most cruises, we had to show our I.D. to several different people along our journey, a security measure for which I am grateful. We were directed to the appropriate line to stand in based on our deck number (deck 6). The line took roughly half an hour, and we were up the ramp to the ship. Read more