MissingTurtle

All:

Thank you for all of the helpful feedback. I appreciate the encouragement to move beyond "analysis paralysis" of the reviews. 

I'm now off to do more reading and research. I'm finding that is a big part of the fun. 🙂

We are a family of experienced travelers, but have never cruised before. We thought that might be a nice family trip in the last 2019 time window. Since then, I've been trying to do research and I have ended up kind of flummoxed by ship reviews. It seems that every ship I look at on the major mainstream cruise lines -- new or old, big or little -- has a reasonable number of reviews that report that the ship is awful in some way.

I completely understand experiences can vary and folks are looking for different things on any given cruise. But the breadth of these kinds of feedback leave me really confused. And they seem out of alignment with the Cruise Critic editor's scores. Is this a huge problems in the cruise industry? Unrealistic expectations? Something else?

More to the point: I'm not sure what the right path is for a new cruiser. Is it safe to assume a modern ship on a major line will be a decent experience and discount the strongly negative reviews?

For what it's worth, we're pretty low maintenance -- we want a clean, comfortable room and to have a nice time, but we don't need anything really fancy. At the same time, it doesn't need to be a super-low rate. We're looking to cruise in the Caribbean somewhere in the week range.