PLANNING

After considering several lines for our 16th anniversary celebration, my partner Philip and I decided that we would give HAL a try and booked for this cruise. We were both looking forward to the sailing since neither of us had sampled HAL and felt it would be a good fit for our lifestyle. Even though we live in Houston and had had a wonderful cruise on RCI's Rhapsody of the Seas (out of Galveston) earlier in 2003, we wanted to try a different line and hopefully find one to call home.

We had a great experience with our travel agent (I will be happy to send the name and URL to anyone who'd like to have it) and were pleased with the price we paid. We found the agency after doing some reading on the boards and I noticed several posts concerning this particular agency. I went to their website and was amazed at how much lower their prices were than HAL and several other sites. Even though there was a discrepancy from the posted itinerary on some of the online sites we had previously researched (they had shown an extra sea day on this sailing) we decided to stick with the ship and date since it dovetailed nicely with our holiday plans and available travel window. I would advise all readers and less experienced (and even some more experienced) travelers to pay close attention to this caveat: the itinerary information is apparently incorrect with some regularity at one of the major online booking sites. Plan well but always double check information that is critical to your success quotient. Fortunately, the extra stop was only a half day and didn't ruin the plan for us. Read more