cjappert

thank you everyone for all the great info!

We will be doing a stop in St-Lucia on January 19th. We are 2 adults and 3 kids ages 10, 5 and 3.I just realized, that my parents ( who are sailing with celebrity ) will also be doing a port stop in St-Lucia on the same day! We would love to do something all together, but since we are on 2 different ships, a shore excursion wouldn't work. Any other ideas? good beaches to visit near by?

We have cruised with Celebrity and loved it. It definitely an older crowd ( we are in our early 30s with 3 young kids) but we all had a great time. The only reason we go with royal instead of celebrity is because royal offers the kids sale free promo.

I've been wanting to go to Aruba since... well forever. We were going to go for our honeymoon, but ended up going to Barbados for 2 weeks instead. Now, we finally have a cruise booked that will be making a stop in Aruba! I would love to have some suggestions on what would we best to do for our excursion. I'm really not an adventurous person ( I don't like ziplines, jet skis, ect) I'm much more of a beach and explore girl lol. Any recommendations?

oh jeez I wish!!! my kids only need a few friends to keep them busy, not 100s! lol. we're going during mid January, so hopefully there aren't TOO many kids!

30 and 3 kids... I guess im in the sweet spot!

nothing for our January sailing :(

I guess then it would work for you guys, we would hate to waste part of our days sleeping

Nope, not for us at least, we go to bed early on the cruise, and we are up early. I feel like if you stay up super late, then you'll either get up too late and miss a good chunk of the day, or you'll be tired and cranky,

I think they'll be fine, they thought the celebrity ships were amazing, and honestly they just wanna go to the playgroups 90% of the time lol

Yes our kids cruised with us on the celebrity ships and on freedom of the seas.

We are only sailing in January.. so you let me know what you think since you'll be going first! lol The largest we have done is Freedom of the seas. This is only our second cruise with RCL, our others have all been with celebrity which are mid size ships

perfect thank you! that gives me a better idea of what to expect! I went ahead and transferred our reservation to the serenade, in a family ocean view, so we'll see how it goes!

thanks! would it be considered more like a ship from celebrity? like size wise and less kids options?

thank you! they are both southern Caribbean cruises, but I actually like the itinerary of the serenade better since its almost all places we're never done.

We are considering changing our cruise from the Anthem of the seas 12 nights, to the Serenade of the seas 11 nights. I know nothing about the Serenade ship other than its a lot smaller and has less kids things than the anthem. Is it still a good ship? We have the 3 kids ( ages 10 , 5 and 3). Our cruise on anthem wasn't included in the kids sail free promo, and the serenade one is ( which would save us around 5k). I guess I just want to make sure im not making a mistake by switching....

thanks I just saw! We are sailing in January 2018, so I guess this one doesn't apply to us :(

I havent seen that promotion out yet this year,. does anyone know if they will bring it back? We booked with that offer last year and it saved us so much( we have 3 kids ) so ive been searching non stop for it again this year...

We have sailed once with royal and have a 12 night cruise booked for next January on anthem of the seas. How does royal compare with NCL? we noticed it was quite a bit cheaper to go with Norwegian. Is there a big difference between royal and Norwegian?

this is the exact reason we are thinking of switching our 12 night from NJ to a 14 night from FL with Celebrity. We loved our last sailing with celebrity, but both agreed that RC had better options for our kids...

Matt would you mind sharing who your TA is? I've been looking for a good TA to take care of all these things for me but I don't know where to start looking

I wouldn't say its geared towards younger kids, but we wouldn't do it again. Maybe we got an "off" day, but we were not impressed at all

We're already starting to look at what specialty dining we want to book for our 12 ngiht cruise on Anthem. Which ones would you recommend? We want to do wonderland for sure since it looks so cool, but I'm wondering if its a good place to bring kids ( ages 3, 5 and 10) or should we go while they're at AO?

When I called to changed to the early seating I was told there was no availability and that I would be put on a wait list. A few days later I noticed I had the early seating in my cruise planner. So call and if theres no room ask to be wait listed

When we did it in January we booked for 5 ( we have 3 kids) the 2 and 4 year old were free but we were charged for our 9 year old daughter.