Let me preface this review with a little background on our cruise experience. We are not first timers by any means. This was my families 20th cruise. We have cruised with almost every cruise line and hold status with NCL, RCCL, Celebrity and Princess. We have sailed on 3 day cruises, several 7 days, 10 days and even some 12 and 14 day cruises in the Med. Our review is based on past experience.

Day 1 - Our flight to Ft. Lauderdale. As you can expect these days, our flight from DFW to FLL was 2 hours late. This put us quite close to sailing time, but even so we expected to make it before the documented 5:00pm sailing. From the DFW airport I called RCCL to let them know that we were indeed coming and should be at the dock by 3;30pm. There were at least 2 other couples on our plane cruises this ship and I let RCCL know. This was my first disappointment in RCCL. The person on the phone informed me that the ship actually sails at 4:30pm (where does it tell me that??) and that if we cannot make it by 3:00pm then don't bother coming to the port as they won't let us on the boat. WHAT?? This was crazy! My family started to panic and I asked them to please inform the port that we would be coming. After landing at FLL I called RCCL again and this person was much nicer. I again told her we should make it by 3:30pm and she told me "no problem" we always have folks a bit late and would do everything possible to get us on board. After a taxi ride at almost Mach 1 we did indeed make it by 3:35pm. We ran from the taxi into the terminal only to find that there was a HUGE line of other folks that were still checking in. In the end, we waited another 30 minutes just getting on the ship. So after running at the airport, racing in a taxi and flying into the terminal the cruise line was not even done with boarding folks. Nuts...

Anyhow, the first night on board was fine. We found our cabin which takes all of 3 seconds to see. We had three people in the smallest cabin. Lets just say my family is very close now... VERY CLOSE. Read more