Oasis of the Seas 4/15/18 - family caravan plus baby!

[Philomath]

Intro:

I benefited so much from reviews on this board as a relative newbie to RCCL and wanted to pay it forward! A bit of background: we’re a multigenerational family group of 11 traveling – myself and husband in our 30s with a 10 month old, both of our sets of parents in their 70s, and my sister in law with our 3 nieces ages 16, 11, and 7. My husband and myself and my parents have sailed Celebrity several times and Princess once, and my SIL/nieces have sailed Disney once. I sailed RCCL once in the Med over 10 years ago with friends but haven’t been back on since then. We chose this itinerary and ship based on proximity to Orlando where my parents live and the date of our nieces’ spring break. Oasis class wasn’t a requisite for us but seemed like a great fit in terms of the wide range of ages and interests. We booked on Black Friday so had a few associated perks from our TA, but all kids paid full fare. The ports were pretty irrelevant to us – our goals were family time, warm weather and relaxation. Prior to the cruise my husband and I squired our nieces around the Magic Kingdom and Universal Studios for two very long hot days while the baby stayed home with his grandparents, so we were already tired before we got on the ship!

 

Travel to Port:

We booked a van service through Orlando Sun Transportation from my parents’ house to Port Canaveral that picked us up at 9:30am. It was a 15-person van, and they provided a rear-facing infant car seat so we didn’t have to bring our own. The cost was $300 roundtrip plus tip for our pleasant driver, which was very reasonable. Arrived right on time, and after a half hour of loading and running back inside to get things, we were off and he got us to Port Canaveral around 11am.

Embarkation:

The exterior line to enter the terminal was actually the slowest part of the process. Once we cleared that, there was a security line which moved briskly, and after that the check-in line was minimal. All boarding groups had been called by the time we were done,so we then walked right on after a couple of adults bought lanyards in the terminals (the kids knew they’d get theirs free at Adventure Ocean). As a verrrry slow moving group of 11, we made it from drop-off to on-board in <45min. A check-in note - I have Platinum C&A based on being Select on Celebrity, but nothing about that showed up on our Set Sail Pass. I had printed out the front page of my C&A account page just in case, but they just waved me into the line once I explained and did not make me produce it. Another note– one of our party carried on 6 bottles of wine (we had 5 cabins total and knew we could bring 2 per adult cabin) and security didn’t even ask who the other bottles were for! All in all, we were very pleased with the embarkation experience for such a large ship. I had worried that arriving at 11 would be too late for such a slow group but it worked out great.

[CreativeCruiser119]

Following! Great job so far! Thanks for sharing, can’t wait to read more!

 

 

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

[3happykids!]

Thanks for sharing. Looking forward to reading more. Enjoy your cruise.