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Port Side or Starboard Side Mostly Does Not Matter and Here Is When It Does
People pay extra for the wrong side of the ship all the time. They heard port is better. Or starboard. Someone said it with confidence at a dinner party and now it is gospel. Here is the truth. On most sailings the side of your cabin barely matters. The ship turns around. The views even…
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Laser Tag at Sea Is the Hour Your Teenagers Will Not Shut Up About
There is a glow in the dark laser tag arena on some of the biggest ships afloat. You put on a vest. You chase your own kids through a fake space station. Nobody expects it on a boat. Royal Caribbean runs a version called Battle for Planet Z. It is set up to look like…
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River Cruising Is Not Just the Rhine and the Danube
Say river cruise and most people picture the same thing. A long skinny ship on the Rhine. Castles on the hill. A glass of Riesling at sunset. That trip is real and it is wonderful. It is also about two percent of what river cruising actually offers. The rivers nobody mentions are where the interesting…
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Celebrity Xcel Is the New Edge Ship That Finishes the Experiment
Celebrity just took delivery of its newest ship, Celebrity Xcel. It is the fifth and final ship in the Edge class. That matters more than it sounds. The first Edge ship launched years ago as a bet. The bet was that a mainstream premium line could build something that looked like a luxury yacht and…
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Ponta Delgada Is the Atlantic Stop Most People Sleep Through
Somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic, roughly halfway between Lisbon and New York, there is an island most cruisers only see through a porthole. It is called Sao Miguel. The port is Ponta Delgada, in the Azores. The Azores are Portuguese. They sit far out in the ocean, which is exactly why cruise ships…
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The Cruise App Chat Feature Is How You Find Your People at Sea
Your phone becomes a very expensive camera the moment the ship leaves port. No signal. No texts. And you still need to tell your teenager where to meet for dinner. Every major cruise line has a fix, and it lives inside the ship’s app. There is a chat feature that lets everyone in your group…
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Most Cruise News Is a Press Release Wearing a News Hat
A lot of what you read about cruising did not come from a reporter. It came from the cruise line. The line wrote it, sent it out, and hoped a website would run it word for word. That is not a scandal. It is just how the machine works. But it changes how you should…
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The Sea Day Is the Reason to Cruise Not the Thing to Survive
Most people book a cruise for the ports. They circle the islands on the map and count the stops. Then they spend the sea days waiting to get somewhere. That is backwards. The sea day is the product. Everything else is a nice interruption. Think about what a port day actually is. You wake up…
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The Tattoo Parlor at Sea Is Real and It Is Only on One Cruise Line
You can get a tattoo on a cruise ship. A real one, from a real artist, in a real studio while the ship is moving. The studio is called Squid Ink. It sits on deck 6 of Virgin Voyages ships, and it was the first tattoo parlor ever put on a cruise ship. Virgin partnered…
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Expedition Cruising and Small Ship Luxury Look Alike Until You Board
Two ships pull into the same remote fjord. Both carry fewer than 300 guests. One is an expedition ship. One is a small luxury ship. They are not the same trip, and the difference is the whole point. People mix these up all the time. Small and fancy does not mean expedition. Rugged and remote…