I am a very experienced traveller but this was my first cruise ship experience. So I will try to write this review in a way that it perhaps helps other first-time cruisers to overcome certain (otherwise obvious) things that I found difficult to deal with for the first time.

We arrived to Houston a couple of days before departure. Royal Caribbean only offers shuttle service to and from the airports so we had to get back with all our luggage in the morning of departure.

At the port getting on the ship was really very very bad and exhausting. They offered us to take our luggage onboard but we did not want to lose touch with our suitcases so we decided to take them ourselves. It was harder this way but later I heard fellow passengers complaining about their lost suitcases. We and our luggage went through a kind of security check. The core issue was that we should have had the sea sail (or whatever it was) document printed out. Since we did not have this super important piece of paper (becuase our travel agent forgot to tell us) we ran into difficulty right at the beginning of the embarkation procedure and were held up for at least 40 minutes. They kept yelling us funny things, such as "you are on the list but not on the manifest" or "you can board of course but you are still not on the manifest" which we did not understand at all. Anyways they let us in somehow and we found ourselves in a giant hangar together with almost 5000 fellow passengers. The order of embarkation was a bit of a mess as well. There was one single guy letting people on the ship at random (or at least that's how it looked like) from two or three (and counting) competing queues. Read more