First time Caribbean cruiser questions? Some answers inside

[1500cc]

I completed my first cruise over the Easter weekend, sailing on the Destiny out of Miami stopping at Key West and Cozumel. Like many folks, I had lots of questions and spent hours on these boards researching things. I thought I'd distill my findings and impressions into one post that will hopefully help future cruisers.

 

Flying into Miami: Our flight arrived at 11:00am, and that was just about perfect timing. By the time we got to the ship we were able to board and grab lunch, although we couldn't yet go to our cabin. You wouldn't want to arrive too much later. To get to the port you can take shuttles or taxis. Since taxis are $24 flat rate, if you have two or more people in your group that is the cheapest, not to mention easiest, way to go. We wanted to pick up some pop for our cruise so that meant we had to go on the meter instead of flat rate, and since there is nowhere to shop at the airport or port, it was a bit of a detour and the ride ended up costing us over $30. Lesson: make sure to bring all your pop and whatnot on your flight so you can go directly to the port.

 

Sneaking booze on board: With all the horror stories we read on here about the high tech scanners at Miami, we were a little concerned. We purchased a couple of opaque 15 oz mouthwash bottles at a dollar store and filled them with vodka, then put one in our checked and one in our carryon luggage. We also each had a bottle of wine in our carryon (which is permitted). The scanners are just like the ones in airports, and we sailed right on through without a blink. They didn't even pull out the wine bottles to make sure they were wine. We would definitely do it the same way again. Since we still bought drinks by the pool and on shore excursions, almost 1 litre of vodka and two bottles of wine was plenty to get us through four days. Make sure to bring your own insulated drinking mug to fill up and carry around since the ship supplies only small plastic glasses. There's no fridge in your room, but ice is fairly available. Related to this: we bought a bottle of tequila in Cozumel to bring back, and fully expected to have it held for us upon reboarding. My g/f put it in her purse, and the guy scanning us back on the ship never said a thing and we took it right to our room.

 

On board entertainment: We'd heard it could be difficult finding lounge chairs by the pool, but we never had much problem. If you go up at 2:00 you might be out of luck, but get there before noon and you'll find something. The pools were salt water so we weren’t fond of them. The jacuzzis aren't really hot tubs so again we avoided. They had one ‘adults only’ pool and that was a lot quieter than the family one. Inside the ship we saw a couple of comedians that were great, but otherwise there wasn't much worth watching. They had a few game show type things that were kind of lame. Bingo was a rip off at $10 a card for one game only. They had a Vegas style singing and dancing show that wasn't our cup of tea. Basically, aside from lounging by the pool, don't expect the ship to entertain you for large portions of your trip.

 

Key West: We didn't plan anything ahead of time, just got off the boat and wandered up and down the streets. There's actually quite a bit to see and do that way. We came upon a booth offering tandem parasailing for $30 pp so we signed up. You go on a boat with 10 other people, and each get about 8-10 minutes in the air. It actually seems much longer. You can keep totally dry if you want (you take off and land on the boat's rear deck), or they can dip you. We spoke to some other people on the cruise who signed up for parasailing on the cruise ship and paid $70 pp for the exact same thing!

 

Cozumel: Again, we didn't sign up for anything in advance. We'd heard good things about Nachi Cocom, but didn't get around to booking it. We started wandering around the port but there's not much to do there aside from some tourist shopping. So we decided to chance taking a $15 cab ride to Nachi and hope we could get in (they accept a max of 100 people per day, and this was a Saturday). Not a problem, we got there and the took our $49 pp, then led us down to a nice thatched umbrella on the beach. There probably weren't more than 20 people there. All drinks and a meal are included, and the drinks are excellent and come as quick as you can drink them. We overindulged a wee bit. The beach has nice soft sand, and there's also a chlorine pool with swim up bar. You can pay for extra things like parasailing or snorkeling, but we just wanted a quiet laid back afternoon and it was perfect. Some other folks on the cruise had booked the Playa beach through the ship for $70, and it was crowded, loud, had slow service, little shade, and the beach was too rocky to even use. So it seems the moral of the story here is to do your own research and book your own stuff.

 

Food on the ship: All meals are included, of course. For breakfast and lunch you can either do a buffet or sit down. Do the sit down, the quality is far better, and the buffet lines can be long. For dinner they give you menus to choose an appetizer, entrée, and dessert. You can actually order more than one of each, and some people really abused that. It was actually sickening to watch. There was one lady that would order something, pick at it, order another, pick at it, etc., wasting at least 80% of everything. And she did that at every meal, usually ordering about 3 appetizers and 3 entrees, and throwing most of it out. I'd actually like to see Carnival clamp down on that somehow. Quality wise I didn't find the dinners all that extraordinary. The presentation and service were top-notch, but the quality wasn't much above, say, Applebees. Which isn't to say it was horrible, just not what I was expecting. Aside from the scheduled meals there's also a 24 pizza bar for midnight cravings.

 

Drink: Alcohol of course is not included, and that's understandable. Pop isn't included either, and that's less understandable, especially since it costs big outfits like Carnival perhaps 10 cents to pour a glass of Coke. So what's that leave you? Well, at your sit down meals you can get orange and other juices free. Aside from that, if you're thirsty for something cold and free in the middle of the day or at the pool, your only choices are lemonade or unsweetened ice tea. That's it. To me, that's simply unacceptable and is the main reason I probably won't sail with Carnival again. You can bring your own soft drinks on board, I've heard perhaps 6 bottles per person. We only brought 4 bottles of pop total and wish we'd brought more. One nice thing we packed was those Crystal Lite packets that you just add to water. So I'd suggest bringing those, plus your limit (or more) in bottles of pop and juice so that you'll have enough to drink and mix with your booze.

 

Going home: Most ships dock at 8:00am so Carnival recommends flights leaving no earlier than 11:30. Ours was 11:20, no big deal. They had info seminars on board describing the process, but in summary if you want to get off quick, you haul *all* of your luggage down to deck 3 at about 7:00am and be among the first to disembark. We did that, as did about 100 other people, and they opened the doors at about 7:15. We sailed through customs (everyone has to go through customs since you're re-entering the US) and we were going to grab a taxi but they had shuttle guys for $10 pp outside the terminal so we thought we'd try it to save a few bucks. It worked fine. We were actually inside the Miami airport at 8:05am! Of course you'd never want to count on things going that quickly, but it goes to show that they are very efficient at disembarking and you can make things happen very fast if everything falls into place.

 

That’s all I can think of for now. Post up more questions if you have them.

[legalwife]

Good info for the new folks and easy to understand.

 

Go ahead. It is time to book your next cruise now... :)

 

Welcome to the World of Cruising! Another newbie joins our group. Hooray!

[conchead]

I completed my first cruise over the Easter weekend, sailing on the Destiny out of Miami stopping at Key West and Cozumel. Like many folks, I had lots of questions and spent hours on these boards researching things. I thought I'd distill my findings and impressions into one post that will hopefully help future cruisers.

 

Flying into Miami: Our flight arrived at 11:00am, and that was just about perfect timing. By the time we got to the ship we were able to board and grab lunch, although we couldn't yet go to our cabin. You wouldn't want to arrive too much later. To get to the port you can take shuttles or taxis. Since taxis are $24 flat rate, if you have two or more people in your group that is the cheapest, not to mention easiest, way to go. We wanted to pick up some pop for our cruise so that meant we had to go on the meter instead of flat rate, and since there is nowhere to shop at the airport or port, it was a bit of a detour and the ride ended up costing us over $30. Lesson: make sure to bring all your pop and whatnot on your flight so you can go directly to the port.

 

Sneaking booze on board: With all the horror stories we read on here about the high tech scanners at Miami, we were a little concerned. We purchased a couple of opaque 15 oz mouthwash bottles at a dollar store and filled them with vodka, then put one in our checked and one in our carryon luggage. We also each had a bottle of wine in our carryon (which is permitted). The scanners are just like the ones in airports, and we sailed right on through without a blink. They didn't even pull out the wine bottles to make sure they were wine. We would definitely do it the same way again. Since we still bought drinks by the pool and on shore excursions, almost 1 litre of vodka and two bottles of wine was plenty to get us through four days. Make sure to bring your own insulated drinking mug to fill up and carry around since the ship supplies only small plastic glasses. There's no fridge in your room, but ice is fairly available. Related to this: we bought a bottle of tequila in Cozumel to bring back, and fully expected to have it held for us upon reboarding. My g/f put it in her purse, and the guy scanning us back on the ship never said a thing and we took it right to our room.

 

On board entertainment: We'd heard it could be difficult finding lounge chairs by the pool, but we never had much problem. If you go up at 2:00 you might be out of luck, but get there before noon and you'll find something. The pools were salt water so we weren’t fond of them. The jacuzzis aren't really hot tubs so again we avoided. They had one ‘adults only’ pool and that was a lot quieter than the family one. Inside the ship we saw a couple of comedians that were great, but otherwise there wasn't much worth watching. They had a few game show type things that were kind of lame. Bingo was a rip off at $10 a card for one game only. They had a Vegas style singing and dancing show that wasn't our cup of tea. Basically, aside from lounging by the pool, don't expect the ship to entertain you for large portions of your trip.

 

Key West: We didn't plan anything ahead of time, just got off the boat and wandered up and down the streets. There's actually quite a bit to see and do that way. We came upon a booth offering tandem parasailing for $30 pp so we signed up. You go on a boat with 10 other people, and each get about 8-10 minutes in the air. It actually seems much longer. You can keep totally dry if you want (you take off and land on the boat's rear deck), or they can dip you. We spoke to some other people on the cruise who signed up for parasailing on the cruise ship and paid $70 pp for the exact same thing!

 

Cozumel: Again, we didn't sign up for anything in advance. We'd heard good things about Nachi Cocom, but didn't get around to booking it. We started wandering around the port but there's not much to do there aside from some tourist shopping. So we decided to chance taking a $15 cab ride to Nachi and hope we could get in (they accept a max of 100 people per day, and this was a Saturday). Not a problem, we got there and the took our $49 pp, then led us down to a nice thatched umbrella on the beach. There probably weren't more than 20 people there. All drinks and a meal are included, and the drinks are excellent and come as quick as you can drink them. We overindulged a wee bit. The beach has nice soft sand, and there's also a chlorine pool with swim up bar. You can pay for extra things like parasailing or snorkeling, but we just wanted a quiet laid back afternoon and it was perfect. Some other folks on the cruise had booked the Playa beach through the ship for $70, and it was crowded, loud, had slow service, little shade, and the beach was too rocky to even use. So it seems the moral of the story here is to do your own research and book your own stuff.

 

Food on the ship: All meals are included, of course. For breakfast and lunch you can either do a buffet or sit down. Do the sit down, the quality is far better, and the buffet lines can be long. For dinner they give you menus to choose an appetizer, entrée, and dessert. You can actually order more than one of each, and some people really abused that. It was actually sickening to watch. There was one lady that would order something, pick at it, order another, pick at it, etc., wasting at least 80% of everything. And she did that at every meal, usually ordering about 3 appetizers and 3 entrees, and throwing most of it out. I'd actually like to see Carnival clamp down on that somehow. Quality wise I didn't find the dinners all that extraordinary. The presentation and service were top-notch, but the quality wasn't much above, say, Applebees. Which isn't to say it was horrible, just not what I was expecting. Aside from the scheduled meals there's also a 24 pizza bar for midnight cravings.

 

Drink: Alcohol of course is not included, and that's understandable. Pop isn't included either, and that's less understandable, especially since it costs big outfits like Carnival perhaps 10 cents to pour a glass of Coke. So what's that leave you? Well, at your sit down meals you can get orange and other juices free. Aside from that, if you're thirsty for something cold and free in the middle of the day or at the pool, your only choices are lemonade or unsweetened ice tea. That's it. To me, that's simply unacceptable and is the main reason I probably won't sail with Carnival again. You can bring your own soft drinks on board, I've heard perhaps 6 bottles per person. We only brought 4 bottles of pop total and wish we'd brought more. One nice thing we packed was those Crystal Lite packets that you just add to water. So I'd suggest bringing those, plus your limit (or more) in bottles of pop and juice so that you'll have enough to drink and mix with your booze.

 

Going home: Most ships dock at 8:00am so Carnival recommends flights leaving no earlier than 11:30. Ours was 11:20, no big deal. They had info seminars on board describing the process, but in summary if you want to get off quick, you haul *all* of your luggage down to deck 3 at about 7:00am and be among the first to disembark. We did that, as did about 100 other people, and they opened the doors at about 7:15. We sailed through customs (everyone has to go through customs since you're re-entering the US) and we were going to grab a taxi but they had shuttle guys for $10 pp outside the terminal so we thought we'd try it to save a few bucks. It worked fine. We were actually inside the Miami airport at 8:05am! Of course you'd never want to count on things going that quickly, but it goes to show that they are very efficient at disembarking and you can make things happen very fast if everything falls into place.

 

That’s all I can think of for now. Post up more questions if you have them.

 

ok :rolleyes:

From what I have seen in the pricing,

you could easily purchase the soda card and

still be cheaper with Carnival