
I just completed a 5 day cruise on board Royal Caribbean’s Mariner of the Seas ship to Labadee, Haiti and CocoCay. Here’s my top 3 takeaways from this cruise:
- Unless you really plan to drink a lot, there’s no need to buy a drink package. Cruise lines – Royal Caribbean anyway – really pushes their drink packages. This tells me that they are very profitable for cruise lines. In other words, for most people a drink package ends up being more expensive than buying drinks individually. Use this drink cost calculator to help you decide which way to go.
- If your primary reason for taking a cruise is simply to relax – as opposed to doing lots of excursions – you should consider staying on the ship on port days. When the ship is at a port, most people get off. So if you stay on the ship, you’ll have the pool and restaurants to yourself. I stayed on the ship for both port days and those were the very best days of the cruise.
- Pack a roll of your own toilet paper. The toilet paper provided on board is thin – very thin. Just pack one roll of the good stuff and you’ll be glad you did.