We did the repositioning cruise on the Regal Princess from New York to Fort Lauderdale. We have not been to New York before and thought it was a great opportunity to tick this off our bucket list. We have previously done 2 cruises on The Royal Princess and loved this class of ship and the Regal did not disappoint at all.

We j had just two days in New York but seemed to pack in a lot of sightseeing during this flying visit; including a 5 hour ‘New York at Night’ guided tour on the day we arrived. A bit ambitious perhaps and we had visions of falling asleep on the coach, but it was a terrific tour with an excellent guide which took us to many places which we probably wouldn’t have done on our own. Our only regret was that we were unable to access the viewing point of the Rockafeller Centre as it was shrouded in cloud for all of our visit. New York was preparing for their Christmas festivities so it was a bit surreal to be looking forward to bringing out our ‘sunshine wardrobe’ in the next few days.

Our Hotel in Manhatten organised a private taxi to take us to Brooklyn Cruise Terminal and we were handing over our cases to the luggage porter by 11.15 am. At this point I was asked if I would mind wearing a ‘tag’ as they were randomly monitoring how long it took passengers from kerbside to boarding. This was a very quick process as there were no long queus at this time and we had completed the ‘ocean ready’ process before leaving home. As we are from the UK we couldn’t have our medallions mailed to us but check in was no different from picking up the traditional cruise cards, except maybe quicker. On the subject of ‘The Medallions’ – we liked them and found them to be more user friendly than we anticipated. Both hubby and I are both ‘technically challenged’ so we were a bit anxious about using them, but we coped fine and even managed to order a drink from the relevant app on one occasion. Read more