For my 50th birthday we decided to book the 14 day Southern Caribbean cruise on the Celebrity Eclipse. We had sailed her sister ship the Reflection and had a wonderful time.

We drove from South Carolina to Fort Lauderdale the day before the cruise and stayed at the Hilton Garden Inn Cruise and Airport in Dania Beach. I cannot recommend this hotel more. When we arrived we were exhausted due to a flat tire we acquired on the way down. We were greeted by the amazing staff handing us cold bottled water and telling us we qualified for a free cook to order breakfast since we were Hilton Honors members. When we got to the room the AC was broken and we were about to lose our minds. When we contacted the front desk they immediately sent four engineers up who didn’t fix the AC, they replaced it with a new unit in about thirty minutes. It was like watching a NASCAR pit crew. We shared travel and life experiences with them while they worked and made sure to let the manager know what a great job they did. A few minutes later someone is knocking on our door and it turns out to be the engineers with a chilled bottle of red wine, two glasses and a menu to the pizza place across the street. The head engineer even offered to drive us to his favorite seafood place which we passed on being tired but wow what awesome customer service! We were able to park our car there for the entire two weeks and got a free shuttle to and from the port. The room was a King suite and ran around $230 bucks which was well worth the price. We will definitely make this our Port Everglades launching point. Sal’s pizza which is right across the street offers a great brick oven pizza at a good price. They even delivered us a small pizza which most places won’t.

The next morning we went to the terminal to embark on our cruise. We went through the x-ray/metal detector screening and proceeded to do our check in. Getting onboard was fast, efficient and painless. We didn’t have to wait at all and we were on the ship by 11:30. The whole process took about fifteen minutes. Read more