Honeymoon Cruising

[breathesymphony]

I looked through the tags but was hoping for some more advice. My fiance and I are planning to cruise the Western Caribbean. We have never been on a cruise before, so it's a little overwhelming. I've been looking at the boards on cruisecritic.com, but there isn't much there about honeymooners

Comments

[hey_ungrateful]

We haven't gone yet but we have booked a cruise with Carnival leaving from Fort Lauderdale,going to Key West, Grand Cayman,and Ocho Rios, Jamaica. We are on the Carnival Freedom. It is 6 days and we are very excited. It has an adult only area called Serenity. It seems very nice. We ended up booking it with carnival although we did look at www.vacationstogo.com. When I went on a cruise with my family two years ago it was not overran with children. There was always a place you could go to get away from them, either night clubs, bar, casinos, or of course your room. Good luck finding something.

[etoilepb]

I really recommend Cruise Critic to cruising newbies. They've got a hugely helpful forum in addition to all of their articles and reviews, and tons of experienced, more-or-less friendly cruisers to help you out.

And for what it's worth, I've had a blast on the three cruises I've been on (one Disney, two Royal Caribbean) and I wish we could afford to do it more often. :)

[holytoastr]

I can't give you advice on which to take (our royal carbibbean cruise isn't for another couple weeks and my last cruise was when I was 12), but travel agent was the way to go for us. She didn't get us any super amazing deals, but she knew about all the sales going on so she snagged us a ton of on board credit to spend on the ship. She also thought of the things that stupid me would have forgotten like, uh, getting to the ship from the airport. (THAT would have ruined the trip real fast.)

I'm pretty excited. Our ship has a rock climbing wall, mini golf, and an ice skating rink!

[lalanav]

I may be wrong but as far as I know Carnival does not do adults-only areas. If that's an important aspect to you, I would recommend going to a travel agent just to find out which cruise lines [and then which ships, specifically] have adults-only areas. You usually don't have to pay them for their services unless you book through them, so it might be worth it to just find out.

[roseofjuly]

Some Carnival ships do have adult-only areas - I was just browsing the website today. The Carnival Freedom has an adult-only area called Serenity.

[sorry_msjackson]

We were on the Carnival Spirit for our honeymoon. We had a blast.

You might want to consider the fact that the Carnival Dream and the Norwegian Epic are both brand new ships, so the price is going to be a lot higher than if you check out some other ships. This is your first cruise, so I really don't think you'll be disappointed in most of their other ships that are newer, but not nessecarily brand new.

Cruises aren't usually discounted too much, so you might not get that big of a discount on it if you go through a travel agent. I know we booked with an agent, it was the exact same price as it would have been had we booked direct, and if I wanted to change anything with my reservation, the cruiseline wouldn't talk to me, because I booked through a TA, I had to get her to talk to them. Next time, I'll just do it myself.