We live about twenty minutes from one of the busiest cruise ports in the world, and for years we barely gave it a second thought. Fort Lauderdale is a cruise town, everybody who visits us eventually asks about it, and yet our own travel style has always leaned toward the independent side, rental cars, local guesthouses, a list of restaurants we found through word of mouth rather than a concierge desk. Lately though, we have been looking a lot more seriously at caribbean cruise deals, and honestly, living where we live, it feels a little silly that it took us this long.
The Local Angle Nobody Talks About
Part of our whole thing here is helping people travel like a local wherever they land, and it occurred to us recently that we had never really applied that mindset to our own backyard. Port Everglades and PortMiami between them send more cruise passengers into the Caribbean than almost anywhere else on the planet, and most of those passengers are flying in from somewhere else entirely to get here. We are already local. Taking advantage of that instead of always flying out to start our trips elsewhere started to feel less like a compromise and more like an obvious move we had overlooked.
Food First, As Always
Anyone who has read this blog for a while knows food drives most of our travel decisions, and this is where cruising into the Caribbean genuinely surprised us. We went in expecting standard buffet fare and came away with a much longer list of on island food stops than we anticipated. Jerk stands a few minutes walk from the pier in Jamaica, roadside conch fritters in the Bahamas, rum soaked everything in Barbados.
The ship itself covers the basics well enough, but the real payoff is still ashore, and a week long itinerary gives you a genuinely different food scene every single day without the usual hassle of researching flights and figuring out where to stay.
Skipping the Parts We Usually Hate
We will admit it, the parts of travel we like least are the connecting flights, the layovers, and the logistics of stringing together several destinations without wasting half a day at an airport each time. A Caribbean cruise removes almost all of that. You unpack once, and the destination changes around you. For two people who spend a lot of our lives working remotely and squeezing trips into whatever week we can both get free, that kind of efficiency matters more than it used to.
Where the Independent Traveller in Us Gets Its Fix
We were a little worried, going in, that a structured itinerary would feel too boxed in for our taste. In practice, it has not worked out that way. Sea days give you a genuine chance to slow down, and port days leave enough free time to wander off script once you are ashore, grab a taxi to somewhere that is not in the excursion brochure, and still make it back before the ship pulls out. It is a different kind of independence than we are used to, but it is real enough that we have stopped thinking of it as a downgrade from how we normally travel.
The Numbers Actually Work
We are pretty upfront on this blog about the fact that we love a good deal, and this is where cruising has genuinely impressed us. With meals, entertainment and transport between islands all bundled into one fare, working out the real cost of a week away becomes a much simpler exercise than pricing out flights, hotels and inter island transfers separately for six or seven stops. When you actually run the comparison against booking a similar multi island trip independently, the gap is bigger than we expected.
We are the kind of travellers who track every receipt for the blog, so we actually sat down and priced out a comparable seven day, five island trip booked independently, flights, hotels, ferries, the lot. It came out noticeably higher than the equivalent cruise fare, and that is before accounting for the hours we would have spent piecing the whole thing together ourselves.
What Surprised Us Most
Going in, we half expected the onboard experience to feel generic, the kind of thing that could be anywhere rather than genuinely tied to the Caribbean. That was not our experience. Local musicians came aboard at a couple of ports, the food programming leaned into regional ingredients more than we anticipated, and there was a real sense that the itinerary had been built around the region rather than just passing through it.
Adding It to the Rotation
We are not giving up our usual style of travel, and we are not about to become the kind of bloggers who only cover cruise lines. But living this close to some of the best departure ports in the country and still treating cruising as something other people do never really made sense once we looked at it honestly. It is going on our travel rotation alongside everything else we do, and given where we live, that decision was overdue.
About Peter C.
Peter is a digital nomad who largely writes from Asia, Europe, and South America. Always following the "vibe," he sets up shop in hostels and AirBNB's and continues to entertain us with wild stories from life abroad. Ask him anything in our community forum. Make sure to download the AllWorld Travel Hacks FREE ebook.
