We chose Royal Caribbean for our first cruise because I thought they had a great reputation. However, instead that fact was proven to be very incorrect. We flew to San Juan on March 16 and proceeded to board the ship very quickly without any problems. Our luggage didn't arrive in our cabin until 7PM so we were unable to change for our 6:00PM dinner.

Later that night we were on our way to St Thomas and arrived the next morning. The third day we arrived at St Kitts. That's when the problem started. We were informed that we could no longer travel to Aruba (one of the ports we were really looking forward to going) or Curacao because of mechanical problems with the ship. Instead we would be going to Antigua, St Maartins and St Croix. We were also told that Aruba was too far south and if we continued on that course we would never make it back to San Juan on time.

Once we arrived at Antigua, they continued to work on fixing the ship's mechanical problems. However, instead of leaving that evening we were unable to set sail until the next morning. We spent 2 days in port at St Maartins. Which I'm sure would have been fine except there were 6 cruise ships in port and everything was very crowded. On our second day in St Maartins, the captain informed us that we would be heading back to San Juan and would be traveling at about 5 knots. After we left the island we headed out to sea at a reduced speed. The following day the main engines were shut down to try and do more repairs. We were dead in the water for a full day. Finally we were limping back to San Juan. We arrived so late that many of the passengers missed their flights. Fortunately, I arrived at my gate with less than a 1/2 hour to spare before we boarded our plane. Read more