My family of four has a lot of cruise experience, having been on Carnival, Disney, Holland America, Norwegian and Royal Caribbean over the past 15 years. Probably 20 cruises total, I have lost count. This was our first experience on Celebrity.

My philosophy is that every cruise line has pluses and minuses. I read a lot of reviews on Cruise Critic where people complain about their cruises. We have never had a bad cruise. That is not to say that some are not better than others, but the trick to not having a bad cruise is to identify in the first day or two what the strengths and weaknesses of the particular boat and the crew, then go with the strengths and avoid the weaknesses. You don’t want to be spending your whole cruise saying “Royal Caribbean did this better, or Disney did that better, or Carnival is better than this, etc.”

Having never cruised on Celebrity, we were apprehensive about certain things we had read in reviews of the boat, just like our first time on all of the other lines. There were complaints about service and the food. However, our nine-day cruise which included stops in Labadee, Aruba, Bonaire and Curacao turned out to be really great, with relatively few shortcomings. Read more