I just wanted to throw Out our experience. We have never taken a cruise before and never used a TA before either. We wanted to take a relaxing cruise and we wanted a smaller ship, great food and a luxury ish experience without being able to afford the "luxury" lines. After much research here and on the web in general, we decided to find a TA. Maybe we are fortunate to live in the Dallas area but it was pretty obvious pretty quickly which ones in our area specialized in luxury cruising. We believe we have found one of the "preferred" TA's. We booked well in advance after a nice half hour in person meeting with our TA. It is clear to us that we are not in the main demographic she works with. Combination of a little younger (I am early 50's and my wife a little younger) and probably a lot less financially well off but we wanted to splurge after we became empty nesters and hope to continue at this level in the future if only a cruise every other year. We were fortunate to book a B3 extended balcony for our cruise in January and our TA is giving us free gratuities and a check for 5% back before the cruise. We chose cruise only and made our own flights and are fortunate to have friends in the Miami area for pre and post cruise stays and transportation. I hope to post a full report including all costs afterwards but we figure our costs for a 10 day cruise should be in the $6,000 to $7,000 range max. We are not big drinkers and plan to keep our bar bill below $200 including happy hours, captains party and bringing some liquor for consumption in our room. We are not planning on any excursions and as we are in the Caribbean just walking off the ship I to town at most ports. We plan to eat most, if not all our meals on board.
So, for us, we believe the this is more than we would spend on a higher mainline cruise line but we think not absurdly so after all the extras you have to pay for. We believe Oceania fits this niche very nicely and will report back. We also believe our TA was not that hard to find and even if they do nothing else (hopefully we will have no hiccups) was worth using.
I hope this helps some of you.