Our family of eight spent our first few days in Orlando before driving the 200 miles to Fort Lauderdale and Port Everglades to join the Allure of the Seas. On arrival at the port I was struck with the sheer size, even though I had traveled on the Freedom of the Seas previously.

The embarkation process was by far the smoothest I have experienced and we were on the ship within an hour of arrival at the port which was 11AM. You are given a map of the ship prior to boarding which we found useful. The decor and layout is what you would expect of RCI and it has all of our favourite venues and some additional ones. The crew were still finding their way around but in the main were knowledgeable. We explored until around 1PM when our stateroom was ready. The stateroom was excellent we had booked a balcony which was situated at the rear of the ship parallel with the boardwalk main entrance and one deck above it on deck seven. We were unable to dock in Nassau due to the wind being at around 40 knots which we were disappointed by. The Captain stated that he did not want to endanger the ship trying to get it into the port with the wind being this strong (apparently the ship cost 1.4 billion but no one factored in strong winds)

The on-board entertainment was good with Chicago and Blue Planet being the best of the bunch Please ensure that you book shows prior to your cruise as lines of people who had not booked were quite long. Read more