Cruise Reviews, Ship Reviews by The Avid Cruiser

Avid \Av”id\, a. Longing eagerly for; eager. - Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary

Welcome to the Avid Cruiser website!

My goal is to help people like you make informed cruise vacation decisions by providing you with content that is personal, passionate, informed and inspired. On this site, you’ll find articles, videos and photos designed to help you make the best decision for your cruise vacation, your time on ship and your time in destinations.

Occasionally, you’ll find articles about the trials of travel, such as frustrations with airlines. I hope these articles are useful to travelers, but perhaps I am only venting my frustrations to my digital companion, the computer keyboard. It’s amazing how effective purging with fingers can be.

At other times, I may wax poetic, especially when I am moved by a special moment at sea or by an unforgettable place. It’s part of my desire to be a real travel writer. Of course, I know that your computer has a back button or that you can leave our site altogether, so I always strive to make even my poetic waxing relevant to readers.

Several fine writers also contribute to the Avid Cruiser, and I am grateful for their talents and friendship.

Full Disclosure

It’s important that you know about my relationships with the companies I report on and whether those relationship compromise my journalistic integrity. I can say what I like, of course, but in the end, you’re the only judge of my journalistic integrity.

That said, there are two things you should know about me: 1) Issues of journalistic integrity were drilled into my head during my curriculum at one of America’s finest journalism schools, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. So it’s my spine, the concept and strict adherence to journalistic integrity. My guiding principle is that my first obligation is to you, the reader. If something really stinks on a cruise ship, I report it, particularly if it’s more than a one-off experience.

Others, too, have appreciated my high standard. The editor of United Airlines’ fine in-flight magazine, Hemispheres, wrote these words about me recently: Ralph has “won awards for my magazine with his creative, engaging, authoritative articles, which earned a letter of commendation from a cruise port Coast Guard commander for insider accuracy and refreshing insight into cruising.”

The second thing you should know is that I was a huge fan of Charles Kuralt, who was an Emmy-winning CBS reporter for nearly four decades. Stay with me for a moment so that I can clarify this seemingly random remark.

Kuralt had many guiding principles (he also had a 29-year extramarital affair, and if you care to read more about how I feel about that, you can read the piece I wrote for USA Today, Forgiving Charles Kuralt). One of his guiding principles was to look beyond what the mass media was reporting. Despite media reports that constantly suggested that America was unraveling at its seams, Kuralt summed up his four decades of travel to me in an interview in 1994, “The country that I have found does not bear much resemblance to the one we read about on the front pages of newspapers or hear about on the evening news. The country that I found presents cups of coffee and slices of apple pie and people who always want you to stay longer than you have time to.”

What that says to me is that what you read and what you experience can be widely disparate. My goal on this web site is to close that disparity.

Also, Kuralt roamed the backroads of America in search of ordinary people doing extraordinary things. He called those people heroes, because he said, “They keep the spirit of the country alive.” Like Kuralt, I am in search of such people in my travels. There are lots of those people at sea, making sacrifices for their families back home, and I believe that by interacting with them and by getting to know them, we enrich our own lives. My life was enriched by an encounter with Jerry Zape, Something About Jerry, Bagus Gunawan, One Of ‘A Few Good Men’, and many others.

And finally, Kuralt was not looking to uncover the dirt. “You know, most reporters can’t go back to the towns they wrote stories about,” Kuralt told me in that 1994 interview, and then added thoughtfully: “I never wrote that kind of story.”

My ambition is to be a little like Kuralt, to see and appreciate the good and to enjoy my time traveling and on board ships.

I am not a nit-picky critic, and I seldom complain without offering a solution. That’s something I learned from Charles and Alice (last names withheld), frequent cruisers on Oceania Cruises. One night over dinner on Regatta, people were offering critiques of various cruise lines. Alice prefaced her remarks by saying, “I try not to complain without offering a solution.”

I admired Alice for her sentiment, and that’s why you’ll find articles on this site such as Seabourn Odyssey: Five Little Annoyances And How To Deal With Them and Regatta’s Only Recurring Complaint.

Now that you know more about me, you should know about my relationships with the companies I report on.

Ralph Grizzle, Avidly Cruising

Cruise lines, destinations and travel agents do support Avid Cruiser, primarily through project-based fees. Cruise lines and destinations, for example, have hired me to produce videos or have advertised in Avid Cruiser digital edition.

Do cruise lines or destinations ever pay me to write specific articles? I wish!

Do they ever dictate to me what to write? Never.

Do they ever ask me to remove stories that they may not like from my web site? No.

Do I filter negative comments from readers? No. I do moderate comments in that I have to approve them before they are posted. This is to keep out spammers. On the contrary, I encourage opposing views or any information that will help inform others.

Also, I cruise for free, and yes, to answer those who have asked, they do treat me like a VIP. But show me one person who the cruise lines do not treat as a VIP.

Before you envy me too much, however, you should know that my lifestyle has its downsides: I’m divorced (though in a happy relationship), because of traveling too much; I have two children who I don’t get to see as often as I like; I barely eek out a living, because journalism pays so poorly; and I am nowhere near my ideal weight, because of all of the fine food that I can’t resist.

And besides, almost all staff at all cruise web sites travel for free. We’re invited on press trips and inaugurals, all expenses paid. Otherwise, we couldn’t afford to travel the way we do. Can you trust our reporting? That’s something only you can judge.

Feel free to join the discussion by leaving comments, and stay updated by subscribing to the RSS feed or the daily, weekly or monthly edition of the Avid Cruiser e-mail newsletter.

And visit the Avid Cruiser’s sister sites, Family Cruise Advisor and River Cruise Advisor.

Thank you for dropping by. I hope to see you here more often.

Best regards, Ralph Grizzle

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