Our next cruise is now officially booked.

I have been looking for a cruise for a few weeks now and finally picked one. For two years I have had a vacation planner from Carnival calling me and trying to get me to book. They actually track every time you go to the Carnival website and call you almost every time you do.

So I called the gentleman who had been cruise stalking me for two years and got his voice mail. He called back and I told him that I would be booking today. We discussed different options and pricing. While speaking with him, he put me on hold 4 times. After the fourth time I was getting a little perturbed. I then thought, he didn’t put someone else on hold when I called initially so i must not be that important. I then decided phooey on him and hung up.

The funny thing about cruises and booking them is that there is absolutely no difference in pricing whether you book direct through the line or use a travel website. I decided I wasn’t going to use the cruise planner stalker. I was also going to show him by booking with Royal Caribbean. Since we had already decided we were going to depart from Miami, I looked at all the cruises from there leaving on May 2nd. Used to be when you looked at ports of call for Royal Caribbean you would see Labadee, Haiti. Now they just list it as Labadee. I did not feel comfortable going to Haiti and knew there would be no way to enjoy it with all the suffering that has been going on down there.

Interesting story about decision of Royal Caribbean to continue docking in Labadee.

S0 I decided to go ahead and book the cruise  on Carnival using Priceline with ports of call in Cozumel, Belize, Honduras and Grand Cayman. The good news was they threw in 2 nights hotel for free and I got 2% back for my Upromise account.

So after booking the cruise and ignoring the 4 phone calls from the cruise stalker I finally picked up on fifth time and told him I had already booked it. I asked him if he got credit for it and he sadly replied that he did not. Two years of stalking and he missed the boat.

So I now have 85 days to kick the cats off of the exercise bicycle and to get in shape.

Bon Voyage!