Cruising with my wife and two adult children from Upstate New York. We flew Jet Blue from Newark, NJ.. We had a balcony room and the daughters had an inside cabin. We stayed at the Riverside Hotel in downtown Ft. Lauderdale. I got a pretty good price on the room and upgraded to the tower rooms for $20 more per room. The rooms had an excellent view of the waterway and were very nice. I wished I had come two days early and had the time to "play" in Ft. Lauderdale.

I had heard about all the problems with the embarkation process with the Navigator at number 29 at Port Everglades. Because of this we delayed going to the port until 1:00pm. We took a van to the port for $7.00 each. Dropped the luggage and went through the process pretty quickly. I would estimate we were on the ship in less than 20 minutes. It was painless. Everyone from Royal Caribbean was very friendly and did everything they could to make your trip a good one.

There were a few little glitches. I will mention those first to get them out of the way. They were minor irritants, not enough to affect you vacation but mentioned because this is a review. Our room attendant made several omissions. He always corrected whatever we asked him to do and was very pleasant. Letters of notification for two "welcome back" events were left in our room after the event. I don't usually go to these so it didn't bother me much but it shouldn't happen. There was no soap in the room and no shampoo in the dispenser. We pointed these out and he corrected them right away. Read more