Essential Cruise Tips

I decided to see how today’s travellers spending their own hard-earned money river cruising in Europe are rating the lines on review sites. I quickly discovered the rankings were not as I expected th…

It is a great time to be cruising if you are a family with kids. But if you’re looking for kid-free cruising it is getting harder than I have ever known it to be. In this video I talk about guarantee…

I look at 5 things that no-one, including cruise lines don't like to talk about, when it comes to cruise ship cabins - and why and how it is affecting the way passengers like you cruise and ingenious…

It feels to me like the world is getting smaller for cruise passengers. I keep seeing reports of yet another port banning, reducing how many ships or the size of ships that can call there. And even i…

On my last cruise, Cunard Queen Anne, I never ate in the buffet restaurant, on a recent Holland America cruise I ate lunch in there every day and on my Royal Caribbean Symphony of Seas cruise I ate m…

I am frequently contacted by stressed cruise passengers at the end of their tether, seeking my help on how to get out of a costly blunder they've made. In recent weeks, several cruisers have been in …

When I told friends, family, and followers online that I was headed off on a Viking Ocean cruise to Alaska, I was struck by how much misunderstanding and myths they all had about what it's really lik…

Reports of an incident of passengers breaking cruise rules with costly consequences, got me thinking about what cruise rules I see being broken often. It struck me that some rule breaking bothered me…

While there's been many reviews about cruising on Cunard's new Queen Anne, there's not been much about what it's like to travel in their costly first-class Grills “ship-within-a-ship” on it. I spent …

I believe I can bring a unique take on Cunard's new Queen Anne as I’ve been on 23 Cunard cruises and spent 210 nights across all their fleet, including most recently 14 nights on board Queen Anne, wh…

What can you take home from your cruise without any fear you're doing the wrong thing, either morally or legally? This question hit me while I was packing at the end of a recent Cunard Queen Anne Cru…

As all the passengers you will hear about discovered, being denied boarding for a cruise, not only turned their dream vacation into complete disarray, but lost them a fortune as cruise lines do not r…

With ships sailing full, and all the major cruise lines saying that on average they're sailing at 104% capacity, the techniques that I used to use and spoke about in the past, even as recently as thi…

I was driven to make this after I saw a series of issues blow up on cruise ships after people did not come clean with their cruise line, sometimes intentionally but more often because they hadn’t rea…

I recently embarked on Holland America Eurodam to host one of my group cruises with some trepidation, because I'd had past fans of Holland America telling me they were falling out of love with the li…

Experiences on my two last cruises reminded me that just because my cruise ship is calling into a port does not mean that I can assume it's safe for me to get off and explore. In fact, even in the tw…

The Indian Pacific is one of the famous and costliest train journeys in the world travelling 2,700 miles (4,352 kilometres) between Sydney and Perth Australia. So, I had very high expectations, but b…

One of the more frequently asked questions I see on cruise message boards is: “what can I ask my cabin steward to bring or do for me?”. As I keep seeing the same limited list of suggestions, I decide…

Oceania Cruises is one of my all-time favourite cruise lines, and so I was incredibly excited to try their new class of ships. Until I did. I went on Vista, the first of this new class, and despite m…

I’ve just returned from back-to-back Caribbean cruises on two very different ships, the massive 6,000 passenger Symphony of the Seas and the smaller 1,200 passenger Oceania Vista. And on both, despit…