The Independence is a beautiful ship with top notch service. We chose this cruise for our first family cruise with young children because of the ship's beautiful public spaces, cabins suited for families, and wide range of activities for children, in particular, Adventure Ocean. We stayed in a suite and enjoyed the "suite perks", which where definitely worth it for us. Downsides of the trip were the rain in Labadee and a very unfortunate Norovirus outbreak onboard.

EMBARKATION - Starting at Fort Lauderdale, we had cold weather during embarkation...highs in the low 60's. At the port, we had a smooth experience except for our interaction with the bag porter (who is NOT a RCCL employee). After spending a few days at the hotel in Fort Lauderdale and taking cabs around town, we had nearly run out of small bills for tipping and tried to give the porter a dollar for helping with our bags. He was clearly offended at the low tip and was quite rude about it. He shoved it back at us and refused it. The rest of embarkation went smoothly, with no issues at all. Everyone inside the terminal was very friendly and the process went quickly. We were not surprised however that evening, when some of our bags failed to be delivered to our stateroom with the other bags. Our stateroom attendant was eventually able to find the missing bags in an unclaimed baggage area later that night. The tags had been removed. We assume the porter removed them as they had been secured fairly well, but anyway, we were happy to get our bags on the first evening.

CABIN - Our room was spectacular! We had a suite and it did not disappoint. We used the heavy curtain to separate our bed from the sofa the kids slept on to give everyone their own space and it worked really well. The room was quiet, despite being near the elevators and below the pool deck. The bathroom had Grohe fixtures and was very nice and sparkling clean and well laid out. Our stateroom attendant Mikhail Tibu, was top notch and greeted us every day and gave us his bell station phone number in case we needed anything. The room was very clean everyday. As a suite guest, we also had a concierge assigned to us - Jackie Yabut. She was also very friendly, and greeted us every day and left voicemails in the morning giving a briefing of what was going on that day. There were a couple of things on-line in the cabin description that were different in-person. First, the refrigerator in the room is not cold at all - it is barely cooler than the room temperature, maybe 50-60 degrees. If anyone is wondering if you can chill a bottle of wine in there, you can't. You can't keep milk cold for kids or refrigerate medicine. And if you happen to be traveling with an infant, you definitely can't keep breastmilk cold. The stateroom attendant brings ice everyday though, so it wasn't an issue for us. Also, on-line I read that we would have a DVD player so I brought several DVDs for the kids. I think that the DVD players were recently removed because the player was gone but we could still see the Velcro where it was attached. Instead of DVDs, the suite comes with free in-room movie purchases. Our kids watched 2 movies, normally $12 each, for no fee, so that was nice. Read more