We booked this cruise in July for our family of 4, including a 16 year old son and a 20’s something daughter. My husband and I had cruised on Royal Caribbean (Navigator) about 7 years ago and loved it and wanted to share a special vacation with our kids this time. When we booked this summer there were no more balcony rooms available so we choose adjoining interior staterooms without windows. We figured we wouldn’t be in our rooms much, anyway! We really wanted one of the Oasis class ships due to all the bells and whistles, since we had some youthful cruisers along and we chose Thanksgiving week to coincide with school and work time off. So the Allure it was! A few weeks before the trip we were emailed that we could “Royal Up” and bid for a better room. We decided to go for it and got both rooms upgraded to ocean-view balconies! Super excited because we paid less for these than we would have if we had booked them originally. Our rooms were no longer next to each other, but this was not an issue since our kids are older and we were on the same floor and pretty convenient to one another. Also, the RC app worked great for texting one another all week so we did not purchase “Voom“ and didn’t miss it one bit! The upgraded rooms were probably the biggest treat for us since we LOVED the balconies for viewing the beautiful Caribbean sunsets, having our coffee in the morning, and just watching the action as we sailed into and out of the ports-of-call!

We flew into Ft. Lauderdale the day before and enjoyed a beautiful day on the beach there, (very impressed with the North Beach area) then took an Uber to the cruise terminal around 11am on Sunday morning. We were super impressed with how quickly the embarkation process went. We were on the ship within 30 minutes of being dropped off and didn’t even have to touch our luggage, other than our backpacks and carry-ons. (Yay - because I packed way too much stuff!)

Once we boarded the ship we headed for Guest Services to book the shows that I wasn’t able to pre-book (I had waited until about 2 weeks before and a lot of the slots were full, but they always hold a few hundred seats for booking while on the ship) ate lunch, and were in our staterooms by 1:00 with our luggage arriving by 4 - 5pm. Read more