My wife and I decided to book this cruise because it seemed like a great way to see and do a lot of different things on several islands rather than just going to the same beaches each day. We viewed it as a floating hotel of sorts. Before the cruise, we started out at the Moana Surfrider hotel in Waikiki for a few nights, which was great experience and it also helped to get us acclimated to the 5 hour time difference before the cruise began. I heard several people mention that it was difficult and tiring to get acclimated when flying in the same day that the cruise began.

We are probably not your typical cruise-goers. For one, thing we are considerably younger than the average person on this ship and this was our first cruise, other than one I took with my family when I was a bit younger. There was definitely a big range of age groups though. I won't comment too much on the ship activities and food too much because we don't really have a good basis for comparison. We did relatively enjoy some of the shows and the food in the restaurants was pretty good. I will say that the buffet food was not good though. We did not go in expecting great cuisine - we were in it for the ports. We did have a very nice couples massage in the spa!

We got off to a bit of a rocky start, actually. We picked the week to cruise on the same week that there was a record high surf and up to 50 foot waves on the north shore. As a result, they canceled our first day in Maui and changed the schedule to basically go in reverse order to all of the ports. As far as I know, if anyone booked trips at the various ports on their own, they were out of luck. Any tours we took, we booked through the ship, so we were not affected. I did lose a couple of non-refundable rental car reservations though. Needless to say, we were very bummed to lose the day in Maui, but that is the risk you take and by the time we got going and doing other things, we basically forgot about it. Read more