Cruising Norwegian Encore in Alaska is as much about the places you visit as the things your see passing by your verandah. Sipping hot coffee and watching wildlife pass by one day and exploring old mining towns or taking mountain hikes the next - there is so much to see. On our seven night cruise, we start by departing Seattle and sailing through Alaska's Inside Passage toward Juneau and then Skagway...

Packing tips are a hot topic among cruisers, but how you unpack once you're in your in cabin isn’t often discussed.  What is discussed a fair amount is what happens if you get back to the port late and miss your cruise ship.  Those two things, however, can be quite related...

I book a lot of cruises, but there is a method to what I pick.  Whether I am cruising for a quick getaway, a special trip to see new places with my spouse, a fun time away with friends, or any other reason, there are a few things, beyond the more obvious criteria, that I check on and consider almost every time, and you might want to as well.

Surprises on vacation can be fun, but seeing what your cruise ship looks like as it sails away without you onboard isn't something any of us want to experience.  While we've got a lot of practice cruising, there's still a little part of us that worries about missing the ship in port, but if you do these five things you can almost certainly make it back onboard with just enough time to shower before realizing that you forgot about your dinner reservations.

It was less than a year and a half ago that a new cruise line started sailing in North America with the promise of being different.  Suggestive marketing, tech-forward gimmicks like Shake for Champagne, and promoting themselves as a holiday for rock stars were cornerstones of the brand before Richard Branson’s Adult-by-Design Virgin Voyages even had a ship in the water.  We’re not all young sexy rock stars though (spoiler alert, I know), and this led to a statement I hear a lot, “I don’t think they’re for me.”  Funny enough, I’ve heard this from all sorts of would-be cruisers - er, sailors, as Virgin calls them...