My husband and I did the Mediterranean/Greek Isles cruise on the Brilliance of the Seas, leaving out of Barcelona on June 3.  He is 31, I am 25; we have done 3 previous cruises together, one of which was on RCCL.  We returned because we liked the quality of service with RCCL and enjoyed their selection of onboard activities.  Plus, when Carnival cancelled their 2009 Mediterranean itinerary, this was the next best itinerary we could find for the price.  We admittedly chose this cruise more for the ports than the ship/cruise line.

Embarkation and Rooms: We stayed in Barcelona for 2 nights before the cruise began.  We had the hotel concierge call us a cab, and we were at the pier in no time.  Porters were quick to take our bags, and the line inside took us maybe 20 minutes to get through.  I believe we arrived at the port around 1pm, and we were on board by 1:30pm.  Very smooth process.  The only thing I would note is that they took our passports away for the week.  Because Turkey is not part of the EU, Greek customs required RCCL to present all of our passports when we left Turkey and arrived in Athens.  Kind of threw us off (every traveler knows not to go without a passport!) but we had no problem getting them back after the Athens stop.

We stayed in a balcony cabin on deck 7.  The room was your typical cruise ship accommodations.  The only complaint I had was that the shower had a curtain, not a sliding door (as we've seen on other ships).  This was super annoying, since the curtain would stick to you throughout your entire shower.  The location on deck 7 is nice because you can get to the Centrum activities easily, but there is not a lot of noise on this deck. Read more