This was my first Oceania cruise, but not my first cruise. My cruise line of choice is Windstar -- I've also cruised with Captain Cook and other regional small ship lines. I signed up for this Caribbean cruise on Oceania for a variety of reasons -- but, actually, the main reason we took Oceania rather than Windstar was because the Oceania cruise departed from Miami, which was a heck of a lot easier to reach than the island from which the Windstar cruise departed.

I was pretty excited planning the trip. The personalized materials Oceania sends you in advance were a nice touch, and I pre-made all my specialty restaurant reservations and booked a couple of shore excursions.

As it happened, I was travelling with my parents, who wanted to do a shore excursion in the first port, Grand Turk. It then turned out that my parents could not join the cruise until our second port (Oceania, to its credit, was pretty good about allowing this), so I wanted to cancel the Grand Turk shore excursion and instead book a private excursion with some folks from the CruiseCritic Roll Call. I tried cancelling the excursion online, and ultimately discovered that while you can book an excursion online, you can't cancel one that way, and must call. Read more