About Ellie Simons

Why a whole site about ships

I already run CruisePorts.co, which covers what happens after you walk down the gangway: terminals, transportation, what’s walkable, what’s worth your time ashore. Building it taught me something I did not expect. Readers kept asking about the ship, not the port. Which deck is quiet. Whether the cabin above the theater is a mistake. Whether a guarantee cabin is worth the gamble.

So I went looking for good answers. Most of what I found was the same handful of recycled rules: avoid the deck under the pool, avoid the deck above the nightclub, avoid the aft. Sometimes that advice is right. Often it’s a decade old, copied from a ship that has since been refurbished, or applied to a class of ship where the layout doesn’t work that way at all.

Cruise Ship Insights is my attempt to do it properly, one ship at a time.

Why cabin choice deserves the extra work

A cabin is the one thing on a cruise you can’t swap out mid-week. You can skip a restaurant you don’t like and find a different bar. You’re stuck with the room. On a seven night sailing you’ll spend somewhere around a third of your trip inside it, and most of that asleep.

The frustrating part is that the difference between a great cabin and a bad one is usually a handful of numbers on a deck plan. Same category, same price, same view. One is above a lounge with a live band until midnight, and one isn’t. Nothing in the booking process tells you which is which, and that’s a solvable problem.

How I research a ship

Every cabin guide here starts the same way. I pull the cruise line’s current deck plans and work out the physical relationships: what sits above a cabin, below it, beside it, and across the corridor. Then I go looking for whether real passengers noticed.

• Official sources establish the facts: deck location, category, dimensions, obstructed-view designations, accessible layouts, connecting configurations.
• Passenger reports establish the experience: forum threads, reviews, cabin tours, firsthand write-ups from people who actually slept there.
• Corroboration decides what gets published. One complaint is a lead. Two genuinely independent reports plus a physical explanation on the deck plan is a finding.
• Configuration checks keep it current. Ships get refurbished, venues move, cabins get renumbered. A 2018 complaint about a cabin above a nightclub means nothing if that space is now a card room.

The full version of that process, including how corrections work, is on the Editorial Standards and Corrections Policy page.

What I’ve done myself, and what I haven’t

I cruise. I’m an itinerary-first traveler, so I move between lines depending on where a ship is going, though Norwegian is probably where I end up most often. Patagonia and Alaska are the two regions that reset my standards for scenery.

What I have not done is sleep in most of the cabins I write about, and I’m not going to imply otherwise. Nobody has. There are hundreds of thousands of cabins across the fleets this site covers.

So I keep the line clear. If I sailed a ship, I say so. If a recommendation comes from deck plans and passenger reports, I say that instead. “I’d avoid this cabin” is my editorial judgment and I’ll defend it. “I stayed in this cabin” is a factual claim I’ll only make when it’s true.

How this site relates to Cruise Ports

They’re two halves of the same trip. Cruise Ports is for the days you spend ashore. Cruise Ship Insights is for the ship you sleep on, eat on, and spend most of the week aboard.

Same person writing both, same research standards, no team behind the byline. I run everything from Madison, Wisconsin.

Found something wrong? Tell me

Corrections are the most valuable message you can send. Ships change constantly, and a reader who just got off a sailing knows things I can’t get from a deck plan. If a venue moved, a cabin got renumbered, or something I wrote doesn’t match what you found onboard, use the contact page and I’ll look into it.

New here? Start Here is the fastest way to find what you need.