My husband and I have done a LOT of traveling over the years, but we’ve never wanted to cruise!  Seriously!  We knew other people liked it, but we weren’t interested in sailing.

Until.

I started my travel advisor business!  One of my key goals is to do whatever is needed for my clients to travel confidently.  Sometimes that means doing a little bit of coaching for folks who head out on new travel adventures.  Setting them up for success, you know?

Turns out, lots of people are avid cruisers, and lots more people are considering cruising for the first time.  To ensure I can provide superb service to my cruising clients, I began by completing Royal Caribbean’s in-depth training courses.  I learned about their ships and how to book my clients.

It didn’t talk long for me to realize that *I* needed to go on a cruise and experience it for myself so I can better assist my clients.  YIKES!  I asked my husband if he’d be willing to sail with me and give it a go.  Usually he responds with a hearty, “When do we leave!”  But this time we were both pretty apprehensive.  We decided to do a 4-night cruise with Royal Caribbean on Allure of the Seas and hoped for the best.

I’m SO glad we went!  Here’s what we learned:

Cruising is fun!  When you want to just relax and rest, this is a great way to do it.  We enjoyed many hours sitting in the sun and reading our books.  There *may* have been some napping in there too!

Embarkation (boarding the ship) can be overwhelming, especially if it’s your first time cruising.  To be fair, I was nearly in tears getting on the ship because I just didn’t know if we’d like it or not.  Next time we will board with more of a party/celebration mindset!  We’ll ask for help right away and not try so hard to figure it out ourselves.  Alllll those crew members with “Ask Me” vests are truly very happy to help!  They’ll help you find your muster station and answer any questions you have.

Connecting to the ship’s wifi/internet plan can be a little tricky.  Ask a crew member to point you to the wifi help desk, and let them work their magic on your phone! 

Next time I’ll take screenshots of important info from the Royal Caribbean app before I board so I’ll have it easily at hand.  Helpful info such as my muster station number, what restaurants are open when, things like that.  (I couldn’t connect to wifi right away and panicked a little bit when I didn’t have access to this info.  See Lessons 2 and 3 above!)

The food and food selection were really good.

Overall, the cruise was louder than I expected.  Lots of people make for lots of noise I guess, but I wasn’t prepared for that!  The good news is that our room was nice and quiet when we needed a break, and we found fairly quiet places to enjoy the sunshine too.

It really will take a day or two to learn your way around the ship.  My sister told me this before we sailed, and I just rolled my eyes.  She was right!  (Enjoy this moment, Deborah!)  You can always get from A to B, but sometimes you to have to detour through another deck.  (Weird, right?!?  Who knew???  Other than Deborah, I mean.)

What a joy to be served and assisted by a crew who seemed happy to do so!  That was a DELIGHT, I tell you!  A DELIGHT!

I can’t wait to tell you more specific details about all that we loved on this ship, but I’ll save that for another day. I’ll end with this: How did we like cruising??? Well, I’ve already taken ANOTHER cruise!  So it’s safe to say that although I don’t think this will be our absolute go to for ALL our travel adventures, we DO see more cruises in our future!

Do you love cruising?  Have questions about it?  Let me know in the comments!

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